Brett Myers, the former guitarist of one of Australia’s greatest bands, Died Pretty, admits he’s a terrible judge of his own work. Back in 1991 – after spending a few weeks mixing the band’s classic fourth album, Doughboy Hollow, in London – he nervously played a tape of the finished work in the New York offices of the band’s overseas label, Beggars Banquet.

Myers was aware it was different from anything the band had done before but that didn’t mean he knew whether it was any good. Until the first song, Doused, lit up the room. By the end of the second, DC – the late Ron Peno’s elegy for a departed friend – Beggars’ staff were out of their seats, dancing and cheering.

“And I thought, ‘Oh, maybe this is pretty good,’” Myers says, laughing at himself as much as at the memory.

Later, back in Sydney, the band was driving to a gig in Parramatta when DC’s opening piano riff pounded through the Tarago radio. Averse to hearing the band’s own songs on-air, Myers instantly flipped the dial from Triple J to Triple M, only to be stunned to hear the self-proclaimed “Ozzest” rock station playing the same song.

Thirty-five years later, Doughboy Hollow is finally getting a vinyl reissue – so limited that it sold out on pre-orders. The label, Eminent, assures that more are being pressed, but that is itself a sad echo of how an album that is now routinely cited as a cultural touchstone didn’t make bigger stars of Died Pretty at the time.

Earlier in their career, the Sydney-via-Brisbane band had a well-earned reputation for volatility. On stage, they could be a mess or transcendent, sometimes in the same show. Their records, which drew on the legacies of the Doors and the Velvet Underground, were rich, expansive and sometimes baffling.

But once you got past Doughboy Hollow’s inscrutable title (named after a swampy depression on the New England Highway in northern New South Wales), there was nothing baffling about it. The songs were immediately appealing without forsaking the band’s musical identity and Peno’s vocals were majestic, with clear and concise lyrics.

Head Hoodoo Guru Dave Faulkner, who has repeatedly cited Doughboy Hollow among his favourite Australian recordings, describes the album as the one on which the band fulfilled its promise. “They never felt as fully realised as they did on that album,” he says. “It just seemed to be effortless, like they could do anything they wanted.”

Myers gives much of the credit to English producer Hugh Jones, whom he sought out for his work with Echo and the Bunnymen. Jones made Died Pretty sound sleek, without being slick, cutting up and rearranging the songs for maximum impact. “We called him Slasher Jones,” Myers remembers. “He had a lot of really interesting and good ideas.”

Previously, there was a tendency for everyone in Died Pretty to play hell for leather all at once, which could make their earlier albums hard going. Jones instead aimed for space and simplicity. Drummer Chris Welsh, who once thrashed around the kit like Keith Moon, was reined in without being neutered.

The band still had a heart of darkness. Dave Faulkner points out that Sweetheart – a song often played at weddings by the unsuspecting – is actually about Ed Gein, the serial killer whose gruesome crimes inspired both Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs. “Everyone thinks it’s this gorgeous love song and it’s actually this horrible, depraved murderer singing,” he says.

And yet, despite excellent radio play at home, Doughboy Hollow’s momentum stalled shortly after its release in mid-1991. Manager John Needham says it sold about 18,000 copies – more than double any of Died Pretty’s previous releases but far from what was required to take them to the next level.

In a conversation years before his death in 2023, Peno told me that Doughboy Hollow simply stopped selling due to issues with Festival, which manufactured and distributed the album on behalf of the band’s label, Blue Mosque. Peno alleged that Festival had refused to print more copies after stock was exhausted, assuming the band had hit its ceiling.

Which doesn’t really make sense. Needham, who founded Blue Mosque, now says that the real problem with Festival was poor distribution. But he also remembers that the album was released just as vinyl pressings of local product were being phased out in favour of CDs: “The vinyl sold better than the CDs and Festival didn’t really have a plan for CDs.”

In the end, the album peaked at No 19 in the Australian charts. It was the highest placing Died Pretty had ever achieved but quickly fell away. Overseas, where the band had a solid following, the album stiffed completely. “That was my one surprise, that it didn’t do better overseas,” Myers says.

Still, the album was a creative high-water mark for Died Pretty, and for Ron Peno. “It’s a much more mature set of songs,” Myers says. “I give a lot of the credit to Hugh Jones because he worked really hard to get Ron to be the presence he could be, and he got a great performance out of him.”

Faulkner, one of Peno’s closest friends, still has regrets for what might have been. “It’s hard to know what could or should have happened to the band,” he says. “But I was never not entertained by them, and Ron was never anything less than a completely compelling performer … It still stings, because they don’t make them like him any more.”