Way before Nirvana, there was Australia’s Kim Salmon and now our very own “godfather of grunge” is plugging his distorted guitars in at Smith’s Alternative on Saturday 15 August.

Kim was using dirty, swampy and bass-heavy sounds in the early ‘80s, long before Kurt Cobain found fame but for Kim, “grunge” was an adjective, not a genre.

He’s a little uncomfortable with being dubbed the “inventor” of grunge.

“Sometimes I claim it and own it but I was just doing music the way I felt it should be done,” Kim said.

“I used to say to recording engineers ‘can you keep that grunge in the sound please? I want more of that’. It was an adjective but maybe I co-opted it for sound. Over the years I’ve disowned it, owned it, but it’s going to follow me around to my grave. It’s just a word.”

Kim may not be comfortable with the “godfather” title but he’s without a doubt the “pioneer of punk” because – after dropping out of fine arts studies – he formed Perth’s first punk band in the ‘70s: the Cheap Nasties.

Probably the most remote punk act in the world.

“We came from such a middle-class culture, an easy beach culture and it wasn’t conducive to punk so it was in the realms of the imagination,” Kim said.

“The assumption is that we were all looking to the east coast but it was really, ‘no f**k the east coast we don’t need them to tell us how to do it’. That was our attitude. In those days, we got things quicker from the UK anyway.”

These days, Kim’s based in Melbourne and his local watering hole is The Merry Creek Tavern, run by Mick Thomas from Weddings Parties Anything.

“All these muses sort of work in similar circles,” Kim said.

He swears he’s “not a guitar nerd” but when he counts his collection he says, “I’m probably a guitar nerd”.

His pride and joy is a 1955 Gibson Les Paul special in TV yellow, which used to belong to Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen.

It’s a slight improve on his first guitar, a $14 steel-string acoustic that he bought when he was 13 (back then he actually wanted to be a nuclear physicist).

“A fan gave the 1955 Gibson Les Paul special to me,” he said. “At first I couldn’t accept it, but she wore me down and when it came in the mail, it pretty much leapt out, I didn’t even know how to play it but it played itself out of the guitar case.”

As we chat, Kim flicks through his record collection and finds some T-Rex (“there’s lots of T-Rex in my sound”).

His latest album, Totally Sick!, is out now and the second track’s a ratings winner – “Fully Sick and Tired”(about that great Aussie tradition of chucking a sickie).

Another track, “There’s a Virus Going Around”, needs no further explanation. There seems to be a pattern here, with songs like “Fix Me Up” and “Pathologise Me.”

Are you okay Kim?

“It just depends on which existence you want to talk about, whether it’s me reading the paper,” the 70-year-old said. “You could say on a few levels [I’m Sick] but on other levels I’m feeling not too bad, self-wise.”

Kim wasn’t sure if he had enough material for a new album, “and then I looked through my catalogue and it seems like I’m a pretty sick guy”.

“It was making me better,” he said. “All these songs had had a life but a lot of them slipped through the cracks. It’s like a K-tel album of greatest hits that never were – pretty much most of them nobody knows about them.”

Kim’s had many incarnations over the years (The Scientists, The Surrealists, Beasts of Bourbon) but this time round, he’s touring as Smoked Salmon (a name he picked up after a bushfire benefit).

For the vinyl collectors, Fully Sick! even comes in a limited-edition spew green. Kim Salmon plays at Smith’s Alternative in Civic on Saturday 15 August, 9pm. Tickets: smithsalternative.com/events/kim-salmon-97208