Forty years on from the accident that took the life of The Eastern Dark’s frontman James Darroch the band’s only single 1985’s ‘Julie Is A Junkie’/’Johnny And Dee Dee’ gets a reissue this weekend for Record Store Day.

The original multi-track tapes had long been missing but recently surviving members Bill Gibson and Geoff Milne turned them up. Originally produced by Radio Birdman’s Rob Younger they’ve been remixed and remastered by Michael Carpenter. It’s the first time the tracks have been available on vinyl since the original single went out of print back in the 80s.

The trio had come together in 1984. Guitarist James had played bass for The Celibate Rifles, sometime Lime Spiders backing vocalist Bill Gibson took on that role, and Geoff Milne got behind the drums. The band loved The Ramones and opened every set with one of their songs. The single followed in that spirit.

Finishing the succeeding mini-album Long Live the New Flesh on 4th March 1986 they set off for shows in Melbourne; on route the van left the road and James died. Bill recalls:

“Forty years ago this morning, I picked up cassettes of the mixes for The Eastern Dark’s new EP which we’d completed in gruelling midnight-to-dawn sessions on the weekend, and we set off in a rented van for what was to be our third tour of Melbourne in eight months. We’d had our last rehearsal the night before, and all sorts of fun was planned for these dates, with new songs to be debuted. This was to be our most intensive run of dates yet, with nine shows booked over seven days, including a daytime open-air performance for the Moomba festival and a support to Nico at the Prince of Wales Hotel.

“There was no tape player in the van, so we hadn’t listened to the mixes yet. We stopped in Goulburn for food around 11am, and while Geoff and I ate our hamburgers from the Paragon Cafe on the Post Office steps, James went into Homecrafts Electricals and, on the pretext of being interested in buying a tape deck, got them to play some of the tape for him. Don’t know how much of it he got to hear, but apparently he was happy enough with what he’d heard.

“Hunger sated, we resumed our journey…and the rest is history.

“We’ll never know what might have been, but I know the world lost one determined son of a bitch that day, and I would gladly have ridden his coattails all the way to wherever it took us.“

Released for Record Store Day 2026 on Grown Up Wrong ! Records