Charles Bradley Interview

(Prev printed in Inpress)

“My Mamma always told me, ‘You’ve got a sweetness in you, you’re a very gentle human being. Of all my kids, you’re the gentlest and the kindest, but be careful ‘cause they’re gonna eat you up out there, ‘cause you’re just like a lamb,” says Charles ‘The Screaming Eagle Of Soul’ Bradley down the phone line from a freezing New York City. “And she always told me that ‘cause I could never try to hurt nobody... It’s like if I had a piece of my bread and I see you’re hungry, I give you a piece of my bread.” And to an extent, Bradley’s mother was right – his life has not been easy.

Bradley grew up on the tough streets of Brooklyn in the 1960s. Around 1962, his sister took him to see James Brown and, he says, he instantly knew he wanted to be an entertainer. He got off the streets by entering Job Corps (an initiative helping underprivileged youths into employment) and landed in Maine where he learned to cook. It was here that he initially got a band together but his bandmates were drafted into the Vietnam War and Bradley was forced to move to Wassaic, New York to cook for 3500 people a day in a hospital for the mentally ill. He stayed in this role for nine years before making his way, gradually, to California, where he lived and worked as a chef for 20 years.

“Job Corps was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “I was livin’ in the ghettos; I was livin’ in the streets from the age of 14 until I went to Job Corps. If I hadn’t gone to Job Corps, I’d be pushin’ up daisies or in somebody’s jail ‘cause I didn’t have nowhere to go, no one to look up to. They give you a job, they give you training, they give you education and they give you self respect and that’s why it helped me.”

Though Bradley sang and performed in various neighbourhood bands and picked up small gigs throughout his time in California, his ‘break’ wouldn’t come until much later. Laid-off from his job of 17 years, he decided to move back to NYC and took up handyman work to free himself up in the evenings so he could perform.

Here, he met with mild success performing a James Brown routine under the moniker ‘Black Velvet’, and it was at one of these shows that Bradley, in his 50s, was discovered by Gabriel Roth of soul label Daptone Records. “Now at my age, I was completely shocked,” Bradley says. “It was at my giving up point and things just... I just can’t believe I got to this point, it just kinda happened over night. I travelled all around the United States searchin’ for my dreams.” But when I offer that maybe he’s finally found that pot of gold, he’s not so sure. “Everybody says that, I’m not really that sure yet see. I just found my open door and I’m just pushin’ in and tryin’ to show them all the love that I am and the person that I am and keep beggin’ for this opportunity and reachin’ out to the world and let them know that hey I’m for real. I ain’t playing y’all, ladies and gentlemen, I’m just tryin’ to give the love of me... I got this opportunity to show love and give love.”

In some respects, for Bradley to find success later in his career after working hard all his life, the recognition of his talent must have been all the sweeter. “It’s bittersweet sometimes,” he says. “I’ve been lookin’ for this opportunity my whole life. I been on my own since I was 14 years old. I’ve been searching for my music a long time. It’s just one thing I’m really holdin’ on to it and keepin’ on doin’ the best I know... I just kept my mind and heart and soul clean y’know. I want this chance and I want to be able to give it with the honesty of myself.”

His impending visit to Australia with band The Extraordinaires, will see him take the stage at Golden Plains Festival. When I relate that fellow Daptone Records soul sister Sharon Jones has been responsible for one particular festival defining performance at the same venue for (Golden Plains’ sister festival) Meredith in 2010, his excitement levels double. “I was shocked by attracting so many young people,” he says of his wide audience. “I thought I was doin’ it for a much older audience. I got young peoples, old peoples, middle-aged peoples comin’ to watch me... Anybody who really love music and listen to the music and listen to the lyrics and that’s what they’re comin’ to me for.”

He goes on to say that he’s doesn’t necessarily adhere to the thinking that it’s soul music as a ‘genre’ that allows this broad appeal. For Bradley, if the music comes from the soul and is of the soul then that’s all that matters. “When, you know, you got it goin’ down and you go out there and reach people’s soul, they feel it in the love in their heart and they know it and they relate to it. It’s not about any label you can give it – soul music, rock music, country and western music – but if you’re givin’ somethin’ that human souls can share and know it’s for real, it don’t have to have a label. You have to open up to the audience and let the audience know who you are. You’re not talkin’ to a machine on stage, you’re talkin’ to a human being. And the human being is lettin’ you feel the way you feel in your heart and sharing his heart or her heart with everybody. You look inside their heart and say ‘wow, that person’s not a bad person’.

“I have nothin’ to hide,” he says when asked if he ever feels exposed through the honesty of his music. “It’s nothin’ but the spirit that you feel inside, to tell you the truth.” And how he got labelled The Screaming Eagle of Soul? “Sometimes when I get on stage and the spirit hit me and I can’t find no words to say and it hurts so bad, so sweet and sad, I don’t know what to say so I just scream it. That’s the truth there man. When things hit me and it’s so good and it’s so sweet and you just can’t say the words, there’s just no words in my vocabulary that’s strong enough to taste that sweet as what I’m feelin’ in my heart right there, I just scream it.”

Total Control -- Interview with Dan Stewart

Everybody was talking about Total Control from the moment they appeared a couple of years back. It’s impossible to talk about the group without mentioning their musical lineages, and in mentioning their pedigrees it becomes obvious why the buzz surrounding them resonated and morphed into a storm. With their debut Henge Beat out last year and recently back from a national tour of the US with San Francisco firebrands Thee Oh Sees (and an ATP appearance at the invitation of Les Savy Fav), the band have paddled into this wave of interest and are well and truly up and riding.

Now comprising members of almost every corner of Melbourne’s guitar music royalty, Total Control began as a collaboration between Mikey Young (Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Ooga Boogas, Brain Children) on guitars/keys and Dan Stewart (Straightjacket Nation, UV Race) on vocals, but expanded into a five-piece with Alistair Montfort (UV Race, Lower Plenty, Dick Diver) playing additional guitars, noted photographer Zephyr Pavey on bass and James Vinciguerra (The Collapse, AIDS) rounding out on drums. Listening to Henge Beat, there’s far more driving kosmische-inspired space jams than jabbing punk or garage, and you quickly realise you’re not going down any path well trodden by any of the conspirators’ groupings thus far. Still, elements of all of the band member’s musical histories shine through – you couldn’t get a more recognisable bunch of players (at least the front three) together in this town if you tried – but Henge Beat is entering into bold new territory and the record rendered any hype surrounding the band well-informed and justified.

Being who they are, there is always the risk that a step away from a more signature sound may equate to a step away from audience. Stewart doesn’t see it that way, however, and seems slightly irritated by the suggestion that they bring an air of expectation, and even a ready-made audience, through the chops of the members. “I guess in a lot of ways we try to... we personally try to avoid the ex-member thing in regards to pushing the band to play shows and stuff,” he offers apprehensively. “Generally a lot of people that like the other bands, especially Eddy Current, will come watch and that’s kind of unavoidable.

“I haven’t really thought about it that much, would be the most polite way to answer. If I had to guess, I’d probably say that we’re playing to a similar audience. We approach music – with all our bands, and the bands that are kind of peripheral to us but are trying to do the same thing – with the same kind of ideal, which is kinda trying to avoid the trappings of just the way music is in 2012. We’re trying to avoid giving people something that’s insulting I guess. I feel like a lot of music and the way it’s presented to people is a bit insulting to their basic intelligence. I think a lot of the bands that come around, even bands that base themselves on delivering real primal idiotic music like UV Race, I think there’s something very honest and direct about it.”

In terms of sonic directives, Total Control, growing in numbers the way the band did, managed to incorporate the swelling size into the sound and deliver something larger and more challenging to their listeners. Stewart informs that while the parameters were far from laid out on the table, there were some specific pools of inspiration. “Before the LP it wasn’t really a band it was just songs that we were writing together,” he continues, “but the LP was definitely when the band came together. At that point we kinda knew what we were doing; we just took a lead from the songs we’d written around the early singles. We wanted to use synths and use electronics in the songs... We definitely talked about some other bands – we talked about The Screamers, Adolescents and Swell Maps – but apart from that, we just started playing and writing songs with the band. We didn’t really talk about what we were bringing to it. Some of the songs we’d been working on for a long time, so it was exciting to see it come together. Because it was such a gradual process – everything else that I’d done was like over one weekend, like it was direct and then it was done – this was over a month or something, it was weird.”

From there, the invitation to tour in the USA with Thee Oh Sees and a further opportunity at ATP opened up. The band pushed further to get a split eight-track out for the US tour and here they’ve managed to change it up again. The split opens with some moody guitar drudgery, more indicative of goth-centric ‘80s gloom pop than the pulsing kosmische of their album. The remaining three tracks draw similarities to some of the Henge Beat material, but you get the impression of a band pushing harder than most. “[The] split with Thee Oh Sees, that was songs that we put together at practice,” Stewart continues. “Mikey had demoed one of them, Al had demoed one and one of them we kind of put together on the spot from a song Al had written. This was far more a band-type thing. We were just kind of jamming at a rehearsal studio and playing them until they sounded right. They’re a lot more abrupt than the other ones because they were written more on the spot and to a time schedule, ‘cause we wanted to get them out in time for the tour. They definitely have a more raw kind of punk energy, whereas the LP songs had been planned for a while.”

Thee Oh Sees’ tour was a real opportunity for Total Control to expose themselves (now, now) to US audiences with an established name ensuring crowds will turn out. For Total Control, many of whom have travelled in the States with their lesser-known outfits and lived the grind of turning up to empty rooms in strange towns, this represented a chance to prove their worth on the ultimate touring stage. “As far as presenting music with total confidence and really making each song burst, [Thee Oh Sees] kill it every time I’ve seen them play,” Stewart continues. “When you play shows with a band like that, you’ve really gotta work a lot harder and that’s what I really love about touring is the work side of it. Like every night for five weeks or so, I just love that feeling that every night you’ve just gotta work a bit harder than the night before. Not only are you tired and the accumulated driving is getting to ya, but you’re with this other band that are pretty well seasoned and they know what they’re doing. They’re gonna be like that guy at work that will see ya every time you’re slowing down and you know you better get your shit together, you’d better work that extra bit harder. It’s good to have that person around.”

SLAM Day

On 23 February 2010 the Victorian public marched to the steps of Parliament House in a 20,000-strong show of support for a live music community under threat. Organised by grassroots group SLAM (Save Live Australian Music), it was the largest cultural protest in the nation’s history. The message was clear: we do not accept that live music is in any way associated with violence and we expect live venues to be treated as the cultural hubs that they are, not lumped in with seedy beer halls and gambling dens by association through alcohol alone. And, it seemed, the government listened. The Live Music Accord was drawn up and, accordingly, an exemption process was established whereby venues could apply to have their ‘high risk’ status lifted, thus relieving the financial burdens associated with security and insurance costs. Also, a peak body, Music Victoria, was set up to oversee and facilitate the implementation of change. Things were looking up... But that was an election year.

With a change of State Government came hope for further progress. In June last year Arts Victoria released a report: “The economic, social and cultural contribution of venue-based live music in Victoria”. For the first time, this report quantified, in economic terms, what live music is worth to Victoria – the contribution is staggering. Politicians jumped on the numbers; there were cringe worthy photo opportunities at the Tote Hotel and grand statements about the ongoing support of live music. The Government acted to change the Liquor Control Reforms Act to take into account the needs of live music in liquor licensing decisions. “It was an election promise and they were under a lot of pressure to do it,” says SLAM organiser Helen Marcou. “When Arts Victoria released their report into live music... we found out for the first time ever that it’s worth half a billion dollars to this state, which is substantial. So [the State Government] came out with a big statement that we want to nurture and grow live music, so they changed the law, but at the same time they slashed a lot of funding – for example to Freeza Central [and] they’ll be reducing funding to Music Victoria in the future.”

A major concern for SLAM in Victoria is that the regular ‘round table’ meetings outlined in the Accord have not been implemented. There has been much progress at a municipal level and there are concerns that the now Ballieu Government is stepping away from the then Brumby Government’s promises. “Ted Ballieu’s Government via [Minister for Consumer Affairs] Michael O’Brien have come out and said [the Live Music Accord] is a commitment from the last government, so they’re not going to go out and revisit that,” continues Marcou. “We think that’s contradictory to the statements made at the Tote on the day of the release of the [Arts Victoria] report into the contribution of live music when they stood up and publically stated ‘we support it, we’re gonna nurture it, we’re not gonna let unintended consequences from regulation affect it again’.”

In recognition of the significance of the sector, Melbourne City Council has written up a Live Music Strategy that has been worked on with various industry stakeholders. “Once you get the City Of Melbourne involved [it’s a] big statement [that] they support live music,” says Marcou. “They’ve put a motion forward to change zoning to protect live music venues... They’ve also started the Melbourne Music Week.” But these positive steps are in danger of being undermined by a State Government reluctant to talk at all.

One key discussion Marcou and her round table delegates are keen to have centres around the increased density of housing in the inner suburbs and how best to protect existing venues from noise complaints from new occupants. “Our major concern is always first amenity: that people can move in next to us, complain and get us shut down,” says Fitzroy’s Old Bar owner, and musician, Joel Morrison. Old Bar plays an integral role in the music community as one of the few venues that shows live music – largely smaller, emergent artists – seven nights a week. “There’s a certain decibel reading that you’re allowed and that’s measured from the closest residence. If somebody moves in right next door, then your closest residence, which may’ve been two bloody blocks away, is right next door.”

Marcou believes the implementation of order of occupancy legislation must be clearly defined in statutory law before venues will be protected at all. Without the planned round table discussions, it’s impossible to get the ball rolling on this and other areas of concern, including best practice codes for venues and preventing liquor licensing from impacting negatively on live music in the future. “Planning can be interpreted by different councils,” she says. “High density living is the way of the future but we can’t plan positive culture out of existence.”

SLAM are taking these initiatives to every state and territory in the country by way of a national ‘SLAM Day’ celebration this Thursday. Over 120 venues (including over 60 venues showing more than 130 acts in Victoria alone) have registered gigs in a show of solidarity for a cause. “Part of the reason we have gone national is that after the SLAM rally we’ve constantly received letters and emails from all around the country and other cities around the world asking for help with their own campaigns,” says Marcou. “There’s similar problems of gentrification, land values rising, artists being forced into the peripheries of society, and the same themes of no protection for these cultural clusters.”

As well as entertainment hubs, these cultural clusters form the centre of communities, provide jobs are crucial for the development of talent. Local musician Tom Lyngcoln is a figure synonymous with the local band scene. Not only has he played in bands in Melbourne for years, but he’s the guy lending and lugging gear at small gigs, he’s in the shadows at pretty-well every rock gig in town; he met his wife through music, his friends through music, he lives and breathes what it is to be part of the music community. “The most important part of this community is the live performance,” he says. “It’s the ritual: you get together and you meet; you meet new people, you get to see all your old friends. For me that is social interaction, it’s the foundation of my life.”

For Lyngcoln, the cutting of funding for youth development groups such as Freeza Central could have dire effects for the local scene. “If they said that you can’t drink any more in venues, I wouldn’t give a shit, I’m there for the music,” he continues. “Growing up, that was the thing that was most frustrating to me, I wanted to be in these rooms and see these bands and hear the music and they’d tell me I can’t because there’s alcohol there... My wife Alex and all her friends met through going to all-ages shows and all those people went on to form bands. It’s a no brainer, and something that I’ve realised as I’ve grown older is that constantly playing to your peers is nowhere near as beneficial as playing to younger people who may draw a bit of inspiration from it and get involved themselves.”

The SLAM rally, for Lyngcoln, will remain synonymous with his discovery of political cause and effect. In celebration, he and his band Harmony have signed on for the SLAM Day event, registering a gig at Smith Street venue Yah Yah’s. “As an adult and a voter I’ve never really had any other impact on a decision. I can’t recall any other time that there’s a direct correlation between an action taken and a result given. It’s an extremely powerful movement and it has to keep going.”

This Thursday, whether you make it down your favourite venue, write a letter or call up your Minister, pass some information on to a friend or buy a bit of locally produced music, SLAM Day is about engaging with your surroundings and being part of a community. Even a stroll around your neighbourhood will reinforce what you or potentially stand to lose, or perhaps have already lost. “They’re a soft target, live music venues,” concludes Marcou. “It’s much cheaper to just put on a big telly screen or run poker machines or sexually explicit [entertainment] or just straight drinking than to run live music. People tend to drink less in these venues, they have a cultural focus and it’s a little community that teeters on the edge. We can’t see our culture planned out of existence.” Or as Joel Morrison puts it: “What else are ya gonna do? It’s music, it’s fantastic!”

La Bastard Interview

La Bastard are this band that’ve seemingly sprung up from nowhere and started gigging their way into the collective consciousness of the live music-going public. They moosh together rockabilly, soul, spaghetti western and garagey sounds and create what could be described as dancey surf pop, but it’s about something more than the tunes alone. Each band member brings their own je ne se quois to the stage and through a swelling culture of one-up-man-ship, their shows are becoming known for the unhinged-ness of performance.

Turns out La Bastard as a concept had been germinating for a while before they found themselves playing their first show about a year ago. There’s every chance they may’ve found their feet a lot earlier, had it not been for a slight misunderstanding and an overserve of funk. “I was in a band when I was only 15 with one of my oldest friends in Bendigo,” says singer Anna Lienhop. “Funnily enough,” chimes in guitarist Ben Murphy in the first of many interruptions during the course of the interview, “when we were about 17 and Anna was playing in this band, Sugarfiend, with her friend – kind of like Bikini Kill meets L7.” Lienhop adds, “And Veruca Salt. It was an all girl band.”

Murphy continues: “There was this battle of the bands competition in Daylesford and my brother Josh had a band who were playing and these girls were as well. Anyway, they beat my brother’s band.” And the prize? “We got to support Bodyjar,” Lienhop says.

The two met at the Daylesford show but weren’t to meet again for about six years. Both working at JB Hi-Fi, Murphy recognised Lienhop from the Daylesford show and had an accusation to level. “What had happened at that gig,” he explains, “was that my brother had taken all his pedals and leads and stuff and kept it in the storage area on the back of the truck and they’d been stolen by another band. I think my brother always suspected that these girls had taken them.” Lienhop clarifies: “I think it was the really shitty pop-punk band.”

From there they got together and jammed out some funk tunes but something wasn’t working. Lienhop opines that it may’ve been a lack of horns. “I have to say,” says Murphy, picking up the conversation, “it was probably my fault because I was bringing too many funk standards. Too much funk.”

They gave it away but an epiphany, of sorts, was to occur soon after at a Six Foot Hick show. “We were watching this band,” says Murphy. “We won’t name them,” adds Lienhop. “They were a support band for Six Foot Hick,” Murphy continues, “and they kind of had this swampy, garage, psychobilly kind of thing. They looked really cool and had really cool clothes on and had the right gear and the right kind of amps but they just kinda sucked. I think I said to Anna ‘it annoys me that you can just try to be a southern rock or garage rock or rockabilly band and just because you have good aesthetic you can get good support’.”

“We were just standing at the back of the room bitching about how we could do this so much better,” Lienhop says. “When we were watching that band no one was dancing, everyone was just kind of standing there. When Six Foot Hick came on, it was amazing. They kind of barrelled through the crowd and it was very interactive, so that was one of the things we tried to take from that.” They will bring some crazy shit to the Retreat this Friday. So if playing on top of bars and tables, crowd on stage, pillow fights, crowd surfing, and witnessing bassist Jimi Edwards’ lying down circle-walk while playing bass sounds like your cup of tea... You really should try and catch the show.

Orbweavers interview with Marita Dyson

A STRANGE LIFE

Listening to Orbweavers is a mixed experience. Their tunes snatch light into darkness, turning what sometimes could, if treated differently, be rendered bright and light pop tunes into soft but quietly snarling beasts. Their mid-tempos create an urgency to the songs that defies the delicacy of instrumentation, yet complements the oftentimes bleak lyrical content, which explores our fragile human-ness and the inevitability of death. Listening to Orbweavers is indeed a mixed experience, but their investigation of darkness in light ensures their music is enriching.

Orbweavers’ second album Loom was released late last year. A concept album of sorts, the thing lingers around the factories and ex-industrial zones of Melbourne’s inner-suburbs. It’s a record that instils the feeling of Melbourne; it somehow captures the essence of what it is to stroll the bike paths and waterways on a cool winter’s eve. “I’m so glad that you have that feeling and a connection to the songs and places,” says singer/multi-instrumentalist Marita Dyson when I suggest many of the tracks on Loom create a minds-eye view of the Melbourne I know and love. “That’s not something that we consciously set out to do. We did want to write an album where the songs related to one another in some way. Maybe also with this album, we were writing songs that were about our lives and the environment around us because we were spending so much time in it.”

It’s the time spent in this city’s urban natural environments that lend Dyson and her Orbweavers’ songwriting partner Stuart Flanagan their thematic content, but equally it’s their method of exploration, on foot, that helps generate the rhythms. “I think a lot of songs, we write at a walking pace because we’re just walking through the streets,” Dyson continues. “When you’re walking, I imagine other people feel like this, you take in everything around you and there’s a certain pace and rhythm and so images and ideas fall into place. The Melbourne feeling of the songs maybe just comes from being in those environments, and the songs are just a response to those environments. They’re written in Melbourne thinking about Melbourne.”

An area of Melbourne that features on the record is the Merri Creek. The stretch of waterway runs from Wallan in the north and covers 70-odd kilometres to Dights Falls. The creek shares this conflict of darkness and light. Culturally significant for the Wurundjeri People, the creek was wrecked by the industrialisation of the city’s inner-north and to this day remains one of, if not the most polluted waterways in Victoria. Yet walking the banks there are many beautiful stretches of regenerating bush – there have even been platypus sightings in the northern reaches of the creek – it is, in a way, a symbol of healing. “Merri Creek is a very special place that I didn’t know about until we moved into that area,” says Dyson. “I didn’t know there were so many creeks in Melbourne until I read a book about waterways in Melbourne... So much is hidden by buildings and development and the only way to find some things is by stumbling upon them and even walking into them. Even the first few times I went to the creek, I wasn’t really sure what I felt about it. But then the more time I spent there I became really obsessed about finding new things. Whenever I’d go down there and find a new area I’d go ‘cool, I’ll have to come back to this bend or up a random path for a look’.”

Given the Melbourne-ness of the Loom material, it’s unsurprising community radio were quick to latch on to the recording – Triple R even granting the release Album Of The Week honours in October last year. “I felt like I was walking on a cloud to find out it was album of the week,” Dyson continues. “The making of the record is so internal and we spent a lot of time listening to it before it was released and... you bring it out into the world, there’s this feeling of not knowing how people will react to it. All the emotions that I felt during the making of the record can kind of make you, at the end of it, unsure what people will make of the recording. So it’s very heartening and very humbling when people react well to what’s been made. It makes me feel like I’m a child again, the happiness.”

The band also played a show in the station’s performance space. Part of the Cry Baby Sessions, they played a matinee show where parents and children were encouraged to attend. It could seem an odd combination due to the heavy content of many of Orbweavers’ songs. Dyson contests that the open-mindedness of children allows them to transcend any one element of a song or a performance and uncritically respond in an open and honest way. “Some of my friends who have children have told me that they sometimes find the record relaxing for getting their children ready for bed,” she continues. “It’s not that the content’s very soothing either, or the imagery.

“It was amazing to see children tapping along with pencils. Some of them were sitting really attentively and others were kind of climbing around and others were colouring in pictures. I really love children, I don’t have any of my own, but when I see them I’m inspired because they just don’t have any, not agenda, but they’re just very open and responsive to the world around them – I always find them very cheering.”

When asked how she now feels about Loom, having been granted a few months to breathe on the release, Dyson, in typically considered style, again draws comparison to the natural world. “When I hear it now I keep returning to that time,” she says, “which was last year during winter. Some of the songs aren’t that dark, but maybe have this undercurrent of, not sadness but... I just feel in my daily life this transience of life and I will die at some point and every day is just a strange experience and a strange moment to be alive and to know that I’ll die. Maybe that feeling might be a layer underneath everything. It’s not that I feel scared or worried about dying, it’s just something that’s there, in the environment as well in plants and animals and just the experience of life. It’s always there, this feeling that time’s passing and it’s not going backwards, it’s just going forwards and on. I don’t mean it in a heavy way. I’m looking at some pine needles that have fallen from a tree and they’ve dried out and reminding me of time passing.”

Harmony interview with Tom Lyngcoln

“You have all these worries when it comes to playing in a band,” says Harmony “slave master” and singer/guitarist Tom Lyngcoln, “particularly when you’re organising things. The one thing I never have to worry about is just how fuckin’ good Jon [Chapple] the bass player is.” Looking around the rest of the cast, you’d imagine he doesn’t lose a lot of sleep. Born out of a (very cute) newlywed agreement between Tom and wife and drummer Alex to set aside some time every weekend for songwriting, Harmony quickly morphed into a six-piece aural explosion. Along with Chapple on bass, the couple brought in the nothing short of exquisite vocal triplicate of Quinn Veldhuis, Amanda Roff and Alex’s sister Maria Kastaniotis.

Those who caught Harmony’s Melbourne Music Week performance at Pony a few weeks back will attest to the band’s near-flawless execution of their innovative and matchless songs. Key to their sound is that the treble of the vocal harmonies be cut by Chapple’s bass. Mr Lyngcoln enthuses that it’s not only bass playing that Chapple brings to the band. “The guy’s a machine,” he says. “[Harmony]’s the first time he’s played bass since Mclusky and I reckon that’s a crime. He brings an energy, this unpredictable tension to things. At first I was like ‘Jon, can you please not leave the stage to take a piss halfway through the set, can you not go to the bar halfway through the set’. Then I got bored and thought ‘You know what, just let him do what he fuckin’ wants’... We accept that if you give him slack he’ll produce genius.”

Armed with the songs carved out of Mr and Mrs Lyngcoln’s matrimonial lounge room, the band came together in waves. “We didn’t take it for granted,” he continues. “Every single person who we discussed and thought about said yes so that really helped. It’s just worked really well. Everyone has completely different personalities and for some reason everyone just tolerates each other really well.” But, regardless of musical pedigrees, the misshapen songs were difficult to nail. According to Lyngcoln, it was hard work and touring that bent the music into shape – though the moulds may have been lost along the way. “It’s like this slave master who’s holding people captive and making them perform things they don’t wanna do, like some kind of war experiment,” he laughs. But of creating the material, he reckons they had to loosen the reins and let the music take its own form. “It comes from wide and varied listening. You take all the things you’ve been listening to and you have a theory and you try to punch out that theory and no matter what it’s going to come out as skewed as your perspective of things. I guess my perspective’s a little white, creepy soul type of thing – it’s pretty horrid. On paper it looks like a hate crime which we perpetrate on music.”

Testament to the quality of the songs (and quite possibly one of the local music coups of the decade), Lyngcoln managed to land bona-fide living legend and Tom Waits collaborator Marc Ribot for guitar duties on Heartache. “I’ve got this mate in the UK who’s played [sax] with Tom Waits,” Lyngcoln continues, “and I thought I’d get him to do something, but he was kinda lukewarm about it. Out of frustration I turned around thought ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna track down whoever represents Ribot and have a crack’, fully expecting the standard response that is: ‘Mr Ribot is really busy’ and ‘you write shit songs’. He came back to me and said he really wanted to play on this and this, and I said ‘Well, that’s not what I asked’.” The resulting number is the next single to be released from their outstanding self-titled debut album. Lyngcoln doubts Mr Ribot will make it out for the launch.

Samson McDougall

Future Of The Left

'Polymers Are Forever' (Remote Control)

(previously published on ArtsHub)

Fucked Up interview with Damian 'Pink Eyes' Abraham

Never to be labelled as anything near conventional, it’s a strange concept to see Toronto punk kings and queens Fucked Up touring the world with Foo Fighters. It’s not an irony that lost on ferocious vocalist and basically most-punk-man-on-the-planet-right-now Damian ‘Pink Eyes’ Abraham – yet he maintains there are strong links between each member of the now stadium rockers and his punk rock upbringing. “When we first met the Foo’s on Toronto, we’d heard from our friends The Bronx who’d opened up for them, that they are the coolest people you will ever meet, prepare to be shocked,” he says. “And so I was like, yeah, how cool can they be? Let’s be honest, I’ve met some cool people.

“Nate [Mendel] from the band was in Brotherhood, one of the greatest hardcore bands of all time. They were one of the bands that got me through high school, I loved that band to death... Basically all of the band – with [members of] Sunny Day Real Estate and The Germs – played in a band that was so pivotal for my musical awareness.”

To backtrack, Fucked Up are now ten-year veterans of the punk rock scene. In that time they’ve delivered over sixty releases (mostly singles and odd-length 7”s and 12”s) including three studio albums. Their second full-length, The Chemistry Of Common Life, scored much critical acclaim and won them the Polaris Music Prize. Their live shows are notoriously brutal and their onstage antics have garnered respect and disdain in equal measures (MTV won’t be calling them back in a hurry). They famously played a 12 hour set at the Bowery in New York City in 2008 to celebrate the Chemistry... release and were joined by members of Vampire Weekend, Dinosaur Jr, Les Savy Fav and others on stage. They’ve (unsuccessfully) sued Rolling Stone Magazine and Camel Cigarettes, they’ve played ATPs and pretty well every other major festival in the world, they’ve just released their third album – an 18-track rock opera set in Thatcher’s England called David Comes To Life, for which they’re apparently penning a prequel – and they’ve even covered Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas for a fund raiser with members of Yo La Tengo and Broken Social Scene, along with Tegan & Sara, Bob Mould, Kyp Malone, GZA and more.

There’s no doubt they are a big fucking deal, yet Abraham’s warmth and modesty is disarming down the phone line. When I suggest the new record had me reaching for the liner notes like I was 14 again, he recalls a similar youth. “The best thing you can hope for in a band or for anyone who’s trying to do anything creative is that something you make is engaged with by other people... We live in a world now where you don’t necessarily have to engage with music, there’s not necessarily any cost to it so you can go and listen to it and process it and then move on. There was a time where I would pore over the liner notes and where I knew the lyrics to every single song.”

Though their roots run deep into the American hardcore of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Fucked Up express a variance in song constructs that suggest wider influences. Abraham confirms that his musical upbringing was as much Sonic Youth as it was Black Flag, and elaborates that it was more the idea of punk that moved him more than any particular sound. “A lot of the stuff that’s perceived as punk these days runs against what I perceive punk to be,” he continues. “But there’s always been a legitimate beating heart to the scene and y’know, you can’t stop an idea. The idea of DIY punk is a very powerful one if you’re a kid and a fan of music. You don’t really wanna be a cast from the heavens rock star, you just wanna be someone that plays music because you love it. DIY punk is a great way to make music and be involved in music because you just do it yourself and you literally take complete control of a situation. As a kid you have very little power in your life and here you’re given power. You don’t like the music you’re hearing then start your own band; you don’t like the bands that are coming to your town then book another band; you don’t like the records that are coming out then put out a record. It’s just so awesome that this idea never really died. And I don’t think it ever will die. It will continue getting co-opted and bands will keep ‘selling out’ and moving on but it’s gonna stay pure because there’s always a kid who’s gonna say ‘fuck that band in the mainstream, I want a band like this’.”

The early stages of Fucked Up saw distributors refusing to carry their material as it did not adhere to the usual confines of what a ‘release’ should be. They found like minds in Deranged Records who were happy to carry whatever they produced. The albums came slowly as the band grappled with the gravity of stringing a group of songs together in some sort of continuum. But after the success of Chemistry... they were confronted with an entirely new pressure. “After the last record we felt that we had an insurmountable amount of hype on us y’know. I really felt like we had hit a point where we were like ‘where the hell are we gonna go with this record?’ Chemistry... really felt like, it was really flattering, but it felt like they’d painted us into a corner in a way.”

Thankfully this external pressure played a large part in the development of the concept of David Comes To Life. “We thought we’d do this record that we wanted to do anyway and we were kinda like if people don’t like it, they don’t like it. So we made it a concept record with this idea we’d been playing around with for a long time.”

There has been much conjecture in recent weeks over the band’s future after Abraham was quoted as saying that he is sick of touring and needed a break. At least during this interview there is little indication of the band’s imminent demise, though he talks of an altered course. “I have a feeling this will be the last full LP with me as the sole vocalist of the band,” he says. “I’m pretty sure that’s the direction we’ll end up going in and that’s for a variety of reasons. Number one, I don’t wanna get the band to a point where it gets stale and you can’t really dial it back from a concept record. Where do you go? I guess a quadruple live record’s the logical progression [laughs]. We’re at that stage now where there’s gonna have to be some changes. And that’s not gonna happen tomorrow, but definitely down the line.” He adds that they’ve just completed The Year Of The Tiger and that they’re planning a prequel EP to the new record surrounding Veronica – the album’s leading lady. Diehard fans fear not... It doesn’t seem likely they’ll be tossing it away just yet.

Samson McDougall

Royal Headache interview with Joe Sukit by Samson McDougall

“It’s hard to explain the way that it’s just changed over the last three or four years,” says Royal Headache bassist Joe Sukit of his base of Sydney and the resurgence of live music. “It started out as a very, at least when I moved to Sydney, as a really DIY warehouse kind of space thing. Bands couldn’t play at pubs, that was pretty much it, there were no pubs to play. But over the years, there’s all these bands and kids that couldn’t really play their instruments being forced into this situation where you make it happen however you can. But it feels like in the last couple of years at least they’ve just evolved into these really great bands and everyone’s writing really great songs and making really great records. It’s really an inspirational place to be and it’s exciting because everyone’s behind each other – and y’know, if you don’t support each other what have you got? We’re on our own, so we make do.”

As a definition of the punk ethos, the above statement reads about as conclusively as I’ve ever heard it put. Through venue closures and the might and power of the Australian Hotels Association that reigns supreme in New South Wales, emerging musicians were forced into a situation of creating their own realm, completely independent of any existing structures, which had become more suffocating than supportive. And waddaya know, the music is coming out on top.

A sweet product of this transition are Royal Headache. A mish mash of members of established Sydney bands, they converged in the garages and warehouses of the city to produce something unique, untried and ultimately satisfying. “Every person in the band is obsessed with music and not just one type of music either, but everything,” continues Sukit of the sonic thrust of the band, which sits somewhere between the realms of punk rock and soul. “Essentially, at the core of every single kind of music that we like, there’s a rawness and a realness to it. Whether it’s hip hop or whether it’s punk rock, you’ve gotta believe what they’re saying. And also you’ve gotta sound authentic and real otherwise what’s the point? That’s the main thing that we try and get across; definitely that’s the main thing that inspires us to do real shit.”

They dropped a self titled debut album earlier this year and it was jumped on by independent radio. Though they haven’t been regular visitors to Victoria thus far, their few shows will remain etched in the minds of anybody lucky enough to have caught them. The quality of the shows they’ve played here speak for themselves – Flip Out and Golden Plains before they even released an album – but their first full-length release and subsequent release party visit this weekend, have been a hell of a long time coming. “We actually recorded it about a year and a half ago,” Sukit continues. “We recorded it in one day and then it was just a process of... Shogun wasn’t happy with a couple of vocal tracks so he was back in for another couple of gos, going back and recording with a couple of different people and then... Ultimately it was about us going to America and our trip over there for Goner Fest that sort of kicked our arses and we thought all right, we’ve gotta get this thing mixed and ready and out. If it wasn’t for that, we probably still wouldn’t have the record out. It was just a matter of getting the record to sound the way that we’d sort of envisioned and do the songs justice really.

It has been worth the wait. The album is dripping in this old world soul built out of solid straight-up garage jams. “It worked out for the best in the end. It was a bit dumb that we laboured over it for so long in the end, but to tell the truth we spent a lot more time just not talking or thinking about the record, so it just sat there doing nothing. To eventually get it out was just a huge relief. It was taking a huge toll on us, y’know, we weren’t able to just get out and do what we wanted to until we had that gone. We just had to get past it I guess. The aim is by next year to have a completely new set and never have to play these songs again until the reunion tour in 2020 or something.”

On the band’s recent US tour, they drove the interstates on a steady diet of fuck all – sleeping on floors and hangin’ in bars until gig time. Sukit was not overly convinced of many of the bands they caught on the tour, and he tells me that apart from Goner Fest, a lot of the music they experienced while there was less than inspiring. But if there’s a positive to be drawn from the experience, it’s the reinforcement that Royal Headache are on the good path. “We went over there with no expectations and just figured that we’d go over and have a holiday and take the band so we could make enough money to make it to the next city on the map,” he continues. “We didn’t really expect to go over there and do anything or for people to come to shows, so every single night was a different thing and a surprise. It was fun; we spent a lot of time in the van just looking at highways and stuff. Then you get to the city and sit in the bar for four hours before you play. That side of things, after a month of doing that, and going back to stay with the two people in the club that want to put you up for the night – so you’d go back to their ghetto apartment and sleep on the kitchen floor – after a month it can get draining, but we had fun. America’s a weird place.

“You’re going around and most of the bands that we played with each night, it’s like they’re afraid to show themselves or be themselves within their music or as a band. It’s like a show. They’ve gotta come up with a character or have a gimmick and this is what they are, but it’s not actually who they are as people. There’s something really confronting or ugly about Royal Headache when they see that. To go and watch a bunch of people pretend to be someone else is not exciting to me, I don’t find that interesting. We’d rather just get up there and do our thing. It was a strange thing, the type of thing they’re used to... Like even the punk bands, it’s like they’re this kind of band and they sound like this band and they’re influenced by this sort of band. I don’t think Royal Headache are really like that at all. I think that was a little confusing and confronting for them.”

Dick Diver Interview With Alistair & Rupert

Dick Diver didn’t so much burst onto the scene so much as sneakily weasel their way under the music radar. They’re the kind of band that you hear once and they’re instantly recognisable. The only way to describe their sound is that it leans in obscure angles. There’s a familiarity in their poppy rock tunes, but their guitar tones feel like they’re sloping off to the bar and their vocal harmonies feel like happy accidents. They are a four-piece band made up of tonally identifiable individuals – they mix and match these unique voices in playful and interesting ways.

They arrived a couple of years back and have played a few shows. They managed to get an EP, Arks Up, out at some stage and it was a cracker. Then we waited and we waited and they seemed like they’d all but disappeared. In fact, if it weren’t for the odd live performance and the fact that a couple of them play in other bands around the traps, you could’ve sworn they’d dropped off the planet all together.

Then, as if from nowhere, they finally drop an album. The thing is better than good. It captures all of their tonal slackness and packs a real sense of humour outside of the, often narrative-ly straight up, Australian stories it tells. Founding member Alistair McKay explains it was the writing of these songs that caused the hold up. “Both Rupe [Edwards] and I write pretty slowly,” he says “We write a lot of songs but we’re not happy with most of them. This is the first record that we’ve done with Steph [Hughes] and Al [Montfort] doing stuff as well. We recorded a bunch more that we had but we settled on ten that we wanted.

“I reckon Rupe probably throws out about 90 percent of the stuff that he writes, I write fewer songs. Al writes heaps of songs but he’s in six bands; Steph’s in three at the moment and it was just a matter of going up, recording a bunch of things and having the time to sit back and think relatively critically about it and pick out which songs we thought fit together.”

Of the large amount of material that Rupert Edwards discards, he puts much of it down to his own belief in the songs more than the stock of audience or those around him. “I don’t really worry about or care about whether people can relate to it or not – if that happens, that’s great,” he says. “I’ve gotta be happy with being able to sing something. I’ve gotta be happy and feel good about singing it. Not because it’s all autobiographical, it’s all pretty made up, but some stuff just feels OK to sing and other stuff just doesn’t.”

The songs paint a picture of inner-suburban life. Numbers like New Start Again paint a pretty grim portrait, whereas Flying Teatowel Blues or Seagulls offer snippets of daily life and Head Back slaps a cheeky grin across the arse end of the record. It’s accomplished, without being self conscious or arrogant. The songs string together like a wee narrative all of their own – albeit a brief one. “Pretty good,” answers Edwards when questioned how he feels about the record now that it’s finally on the shelves. “I guess it’s been so long in the making and it feels like it’s been so long since we recorded it to now. This is a pretty common thing with bands I guess, but I feel pretty over it in terms of waiting to have it out. I’ve listened to everything so much now that it’s just weird that everybody’s just hearing it for the first time. So I’m feeling good about it but it’s just a weird thing that there’s been such a delay I guess.” He still reckons he’ll be able to bring some enthusiasm to their launch, “Playing them live is still heaps of fun, I’m not at all over that.”

New Start Again marks the group’s first attempt at shared writing duties and the rewards are plain. The calibre of songwriting is bolstered by the use of vocal pairings that alternate through the listen – it’s never a bombardment or four-way vocal harmony, but the changing selections of vocals to songs right through lends the thing freshness and light. “Maybe the way the band formed, Rupert and I had played together for a long time with just us two,” continues McKay of the band’s incorporation of shared writing and singing duties. “So when we formed for the first bunch of shows that we did and for the EP, we had a bunch of songs that we’d written and so naturally it sort of came as a top down kind of thing. But now that we’ve played together more and spent more time together as a band, it’s just developed organically into a more collaborative thing, which is great. It’s much more enjoyable for everyone; I think you get the four different voices a lot more, I enjoy it a lot more personally.

“It’s never been a very laboured process. Put it this way: I don’t think many of the song pairings that we’ve done on the record have been done other ways. They either started with someone singing and then someone joining in at practice and the rest saying yeah that sounds cool. Or when we’ve recorded, someone will jump in at the last minute and try things. Actually we tried a couple of extra over dubs and that kind of stuff in terms of vocals. Generally we tried to sort of cut back. We didn’t want to end up sounding like the Beach Boys or something. Even though we all like the Beach Boys.”

The recording took place in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and the thing was captured by producer/musician about town Mikey Young. There is warmth to the album that smacks of a bunch of people having fun and not taking the process too seriously. They recorded the album in a couple of days, largely live in the living room of a house in The Dandenong’s. Sound kind of intense? Not at all says McKay.

“I wouldn’t use intensive,” he laughs. “It was really great. It was really relaxed and just a lot of fun.” The set up was pretty simple; their gear, Young’s “very impressive preamps”, some mics and a laptop. McKay agrees the vibes achieved are a lot about the chemistry of all recording in the same room. “We’ve never tried it that way with Dick Diver,” he says of attempting to capture their sound in separate booths. “Rupe and I have done recording in a studio separate, and it was just awful, I didn’t enjoy it at all. Especially with Dick Diver being a vibes band, for want of a better word, we just kind of, y’know feed off each other and I guess we’re a bit loose and sloppy as well and you lose that if you’re playing by yourself or playing to a click track or if you’re even in different rooms.”

Royal Headache (gig review)

Curtin Bandroom

There’s a bloody line out the door when we rock up outside Melbourne’s most underused venue, the John Curtin Bandroom. It’s surprising that a not-often-seen-in-Melbourne Sydney band, Royal Headache, can pull such a crowd for their belated album launch, yet we’re informed that the room is near sell-out despite the doors having just opened. And this has happened regardless of the fact that Useless Children – you’d expect for many, an enormous drawcard – have (apparently due to a health emergency) vanished from the bill.

With the reshuffle, Woollen Kits start a little late and move us through a crash course in pretty straight-up garage rock. Their stuff is toe-tapping good, catchy as all hell and they hold a large majority of the room in their hands despite a shitty mix. We jostle for a decent spot and explore each sonic corner of the room and find that front of stage is the only area that sounds any good. With a rapidly filling space, this does not bode well for the headliner.

Royal Headache burst onto the stage and thrash out songs – one, two, three, four – without even breaking a sweat. Their live tunes feel faster and the instrumentation is gloriously sloppy. Said mix is as poor as the opening act so we again flank the crowd and power for front centre. There’s a decent contingent of moshers in close and we’re forced to play along.

Vocalist Shogun pleases the audience on removal of shirt revealing the physique of a whippet and too-high pants. Such is the nature of Royal Headache; there is purity of spirit, truthfulness to (collective) self that transcends the hip-ness of their soul/garage appeal. They plough through most the album and further – Really In Love, Eloise etc; though sadly no Honey Joy – oblivious that a large proportion of the audience are experiencing their sound through a kind of muffled vacuum afforded by the room. There was a risk of sameness creeping in to this bill once the dynamic Useless Children were removed, but Royal Headache stand and deliver proof that they’re worthy of any hype that’s preceding them.

Samson McDougall

Dick Diver

‘New Start Again’ Chapter Music (A

(Album review previously published on ArtsHub)

There’s something instantly recognisable about the music of Dick Diver and it’s not just carried through the vocals. It’s a tonal thing – a sort of lilt in the guitars and fluidity of sound – and it somehow reacts with my brain chemistry in a pleasant way, making each song likeable and memorable. They’re the kind of band that you see once and their tunes remain with you. The great thing about this is that whenever you see Dick Diver again, you recognise your little song buddies and you actually feel part of it somehow – you connect.

Dick Diver have an amazing tune called ‘Tender Years’ which they released on their EP ‘Arks Up’ in 2009. The song was a regular show closer for the band from the early days and I felt slighted that they omitted it from an all-too-brief ten-track album. Initial reservations aside, ‘New Start Again’ ambles ever so slightly through the first number ‘Through The D’ and I’m wondering whether the wait for a debut has been worth it. It has all the trademark slack tones and tangled guitars, but as an opener it fails to grab. Second song, ‘Hammock Days’ however, rights the ship and from here on in the album takes shape as a collection of Melbourne stories structured around fab lyrical passages and fine guitar work.

The exploration of vocal harmonies pays off here. A double-fronted unit (Alistair McKay and Rupert Edwards), they have the luxury of leaning on the vocal support of bass player Al Montfort (also of Straightjacket Nation, UV Race and, more recently, Total Control) and drummer Steph Hughes (Boomgates, Children Collide) – no slouches in their own rights. Rather than saturating the album in four-part vocals though, they subtly dot pairings through the recording to fantastic effect.

The album’s nexus comes in the form of sixth track ‘Flying Teatowel Blues’. The almost talked vocal is cut by the most unforgettable and simple chord progression and ripping solos, the thing is so understated and perfect it feels like they’re not even trying. Coupled with Twerp’ self-titled debut (also out this month), ‘New Start Again’ has summer barbecue written all over it, yet both records convey this shadow of sadness that lingers in around the edges of their songs. It’s thinking people’s barbecue music, and is in every way well worth the wait.

Samson McDougall

Sand Pebbles (images from High Vibes Festival 2009)

Sand Pebbles are living proof of the healthy state of music in Victoria. They represent a strata of musicians who hold down career-type jobs and dedicate a portion of their free time to the band. That’s not unusual in itself; what is unusual is that they’ve been doing it for about 12 years now and have just released album number five. That’s healthy output by many career-bands’ standards, yet the Sand Pebbles have managed to keep it steadily rolling through the love of creating alone.

In their latest release Dark Magic, Sand Pebbles enter new songwriting territory. Known mainly for pulsing psychedelic jams, this album sees the band stride ably into more folk-inspired terrain. It’s nothing to freak out about if you are a fan of their mind benders, there’s enough of their ‘usual’ sound on the record to ease the transition. But Dark Magic shows experimentation with new sonic thrust, vocal dynamics, and relationships and complexities between guitars.

The band are one of the only around to have members’ ages spanning four decades. It’s a strange dynamic, and odd that they found one another at all, yet it grants the five-piece authority over the entire history of rock’n’roll as direct inspiration. With all five active as songwriters, I was curious as to how they can manage to bring it together at all. “The thing that ties us together is a sense of humour really,” says Bassist and self-professed ‘boss’ of the outfit Chris Hollow, “and the music but when we get together it’s always very funny.”

“Chris and I will be the loudest at expressing our opinions,” says guitarist Ben Michael X, “but someone like AT [Andrew Tanner, guitar/vocals] who’s the wise old silver fox, he just kinda hangs back and ends up getting his own way. Everyone only probably writes one or two decent songs a year. Seriously, all these singer/songwriters who want you to buy ten songs about them breaking up with their girlfriend, fuck that! You end up with two great songs and eight shit ones. You’re better off with five songwriters and you get the best of what they’ve got... We’ll save all the crappy ones for our solo records.”

Putting me on the spot, Hollow asks which song I like best from the release. Scrambling, I tread the diplomatic route and suggest the folky elements as a point of difference from their previous works. I also, thankfully, point out album closer and exploratory dreamscape Blue Eyes In Black & White, for which Michael X and Hollow claim partial pen duties. “Tor [Larsen, guitar/high vocal parts] went to Scotland and did the Highland Way,” explains Michael X of the folkier elements, “which is a walk across Scotland and what 500-years-ago Scottish youth did to become men. While he was doing that he met lots of freaky people living in huts in the Scottish highlands and just got into folk roots. So a lot of his lyrics on this record are traditional folk songs. Long Long Ago, I’m pretty sure is a 17th century folk song.”

Larsen’s vocals find new legs on this release. As a one-in-a-million shot coupling for Tanner’s voice, Larsen steps out of the shadows on Dark Magic and up into shared lead duties. One of the results of this is single Occupied Europe (Take Me Across The Water), in which Larsen’s singing defies his age, experience and even gender. At a recent performance in which Tanner was unable to play, Larsen stepped into full-blown singing duties for the duration and did not miss a beat. After the show I asked whether he’d found it difficult and he said, “I could tell you that I struggled, but really it was just a lot of fun”. This takes nothing from Tanner’s chops, as follow up to the aforementioned single Another Way To Love reinforces – all dulcet harmonies and building guitars – but Larsen’s exploration of his talents is allowing the band a breadth of freedom to delve into new wells of sonic inspiration.

“The thing about Tor is that he’s just unafraid to be pure, he has that quality,” says Michael X. Hollow adds: “And it made those songs completely different. Most of those songs that night were absolute Andrew staples, so it was like being in a different band. It comes very naturally to him.”

Sand Pebbles had the honour to be asked to play the Stephen Walker benefit show earlier this year alongside Dirty Three, Dave Graney, Gareth Liddiard and more at the Forum. As long-time fans of Walker’s Triple R radio show Skull Cave, the event touched upon what it means to be part of the music community. “We were fans of Triple R before we were musicians, our goal was never to be on Triple M or Triple J,” says Hollow. “It’s a real thrill. When we’re being played [on the station] everyone still texts each other, it’s still a real buzz.”

“Being a music fan, I grew up listening to and loving the Skull Cave, it really informed me,” continues Michael X. “It was the first place I heard the Velvets when I was a teenager and the Stooges and all that kind of shit. When we put out Ghost Transmissions I remember being in a shitty mood at home... I got in the car to go out and get some takeaway and [Walker] played Black Sun Ensemble. It was just one of those great moments in music when you go ‘fuck I’ve listened to this station all my life and it’s turned me on to all these songs that inspired me to write these long jammy kinds of songs’ and then to hear it on that station, I was pumping the air.”

This aversion to the mainstream and passion for music has led the band into a running association with Galaxie 500 and Luna main-man Dean Wareham, which will culminate in Sand Pebbles supporting Wareham in his upcoming tour of Sydney and Melbourne. For Sand Pebbles, to be acknowledged by an artist they admire, be it Stephen Walker, Dave Graney (who offers a fitting passage on Sand Pebbles in his memoir 1001 Australian Nights) or Wareham, far outweighs the prospect of any commercial success.

“I look at 20-year-olds now in their Nirvana tops and think ‘fuck dudes, grunge fucked music! It fucking ruined it and you are a dead-shit bogan for liking that shit’,” says Michael X. “I’ll go on the record as saying that Nirvana are fuckin’ bogans. There was Luna and Galaxie 500 playing these wonderful, great rock’n’roll songs with so much more beauty and depth.”

“As an artist, he’s never let us down,” adds Hollow. “He didn’t let us down in the ‘90s and it was all grunge, he still played music that wasn’t fashionable at the time.”

“If he says ‘do you want me to play guitar on your record’ or ‘do you want me to help put your record out overseas’, that’s like wow,” continues Michael X. “Would you want some businessman liking you or would you want some musician who you’ve grown up respecting liking your records? Like rather than a commercial radio cowboy [hat] wearing cock face or a great musician that you love. It’s no fucking contest.”

IGGY POP: ROADKILL RISING

SHOUT FACTORY

Easily the sickest thing about this collection of bootlegs from 1977 to 2009 is the completeness of the package. The thing comprises four CDs, traverses 64 tracks (mostly live bootlegs) and covers a total of well over four hours of Iggy. So for somebody (myself included) who’s a fan but hasn’t necessarily tracked the career of this punk god blow by blow, this document brings together any and all of the shit that’s cemented Pop at the forefront of rock’n’roll for the last forty-odd years.

The discs outline tracks from each of the four decades Pop’s been doin’ his business. From the opening bars of Raw Power you’re taken there. It’s striking through the first disc (the ‘70s, der) the amount of soul and funk thrown into the mix. I Need Somebody scrapes the gutters of loneliness, while Search & Destroy plays out as vital as it’s ever been, in a recording from a Cleveland club in 1977. For bootlegs, the general sound quality ain’t too bad either. There’s jeering, and moments of crowd violence and abuse, but somehow it all adds to the ‘punk’ of it all.

The subsequent discs offer more than enough variation on thematic and sonic exploration to satiate something in every listener. Whether it’s the Nightclubbing and Shades ‘80s period of Pop/Bowie collaboration (and if you don’t know shit about that, read Paul Trynka’s bio Open Up & Bleed); the raw power of his ‘70s material that rocked the UK years before the Sex Pistols arrived on the scene while listeners at home scratched their heads and nodded along to America (the band); the heroin chic of his ‘90s shit, which incorporates the (also Bowie co-write) Lust For Life and this writer’s all time favourite Candy; or whatever he’s been up to in the last decade (not quite so hot, but you can’t deny his live shows); there is some motherfucking thing here for every motherfucker and that’s that.

Beyond the notables there are nestled gems to be discovered and the covers he pulls out across all four discs are glimmering insights into the inspiration of the man. Van Morrison’s Gloria gets a rework (replete with the chorus blasting ‘I.G.G.Y.P.O.P, Iggy Pop!’). Rock’n’roll (you know, the old-type stuff) classics You Really Got Me (Ray Davies), Hang On Sloopy (The McCoys), Real Wild Child (Johnny O’Keefe), and Louie Louie (Chuck Berry) all get a run through along with a bunch of curios including the Batman Theme. The lack of liner notes and limited selection of photographs detract from the thing, but only in the sense that you wanna know more, immerse yourself in this world, be at these shows.

In experiencing Roadkill Rising in a gluttonous fashion, what is really illuminated is that this one guy (and arguably through his various incarnations and collaborations) has pretty much shaped any punk rock variant you listen to today. Not only was he doin’ it first, but he’s still standing, doin’ it last. And his pop sensibilities and rare song writing genius have allowed him to transcend genre (incorporating soul, gospel, rock’n’roll, punk, post-punk, new wave, etc, etc), time period, fashion, social strata, gender, age and language barriers to deliver himself to the world, time and again. For this we should all be thankful. If you don’t love Iggy Pop, there is something seriously fuckin’ wrong with you; but if you do, you will love this release. Satisfaction guaranteed.

Samson McDougall

Sand Pebbles: Dark Magic

Entering into this, the Sand Pebbles’ fifth album, you find yourself in familiar territory. Distinctive guitar tones circle beneath Andrew Tanner’s strong vocal, which kicks off about ten seconds in and is joined by Tor Larsen’s twenty-odd seconds later. The guitars gather over one another, delays and echoes bounce around for a bit before gradually converging into rippling melody. Spring Time (Who Hasn’t Lost Their Head?) is classic Sand Pebbles. Melding elements of ’70s psych with ’60s folk and pop, it acts as perfect pallet cleanser – once wrapped-up some six minutes later, there’s no question where you are. Second up, Because I Could continues on the same trajectory (it could almost play as the second, albeit more thumping, part of the opening number) but from here Dark Magic veers into some new and exciting territory.

The alternation between Tanner and Larsen on this release broadens the canvas upon which the band can draw. On single Occupied Europe (Take Me Across The Water) Larsen holds complex lyrical patterns singlehandedly and delivers the vocal track of the record. Third number Long Long Ago sees Larsen steer us through the first of a series of straight-up folk songs. His voice emerges from a largely backing role and commands the Sand Pebbles machine onto bold new ground. On first listen you’d almost swear they’d brought in a female vocalist, such is the sweetness of his voice.

Still, the rare and beautiful combination of Tanner and Larsen’s voices has come to define the Sand Pebbles’ sound, as the title track along with the brooding Another Way To Love reinforce. That and the inimitable guitar signatures and irregular rhythms, which are given room to breathe in the more instrumental closing couplet. These signposts guide the listener through an otherwise complex voyage and ease the transition from genre to genre.

Regardless of contributions from Galaxie 500’s Dean Wareham, Luna’s Britta Phillips, Spiritualized’s Will Carruthers, et al., which are for the most part difficult to pinpoint, this record signifies an alternation in flight-path for Sand Pebbles and at the same time grounds them as one of the most innovative and important acts Melbourne has produced in recent times. This is a band willing to explore and diversify to their strengths and possibly to the detriment of their more psych-leaning audience. It’s a bold record with hidden jewels aplenty, and no great surprise in that.

Samson McDougall