When
I was a kid, growing up in a house with Cat Stevens, Neil Diamond, and Simon
and Garfunkel, the first time I ever heard Kiss's "Detroit Rock
City," it was a moment of musical epiphany. It was just so vicious,
aggressive and mean. It changed the way I listened to music. I've had a few
minor epiphany's since then, when you come across a band that just brings
something new and revolutionary to your ears.
What
have been your musical epiphany moments?
My house as a kid was fairly full of music,
my Dad always had classical music on and my Mum listened to Cat Stevens, Paul
Simon, James Taylor, that kind of thing. One of my first records ever was The
Beatles Oldies But Goldies. My favourite song right away being Bad Boy, for
Lennon’s screams and the slightly distorted guitar. My Mum was into helping me
discover music, so she bought me a Buddy Holly cassette, which was pretty good,
but I was after the harder stuff already. So I started getting pulled into the
rock vortex, discovering tracks by Judas Priest and Thin Lizzy, who combined
ballsy music with great melodies. Pretty soon I arrived at my destination, the
Pistols first album, and – I had arrived. Life changed, forever. Big epiphanies
since included Husker Du, The Pixies, and more recently The Hold Steady, whose
debut Almost Killed Me kinda ruined all other music for me for about a year.
The hard hitters always tend to be bands who have mastered pop melodies but
play like their lives depended on it.
Talk
to us about the song-writing process for you. What comes first, the idea? A
riff? The lyrics? How does it all fall into place?
Sometimes a song title comes to me first
and the song almost writes itself around the title. Sometimes some words or an
idea start the ball rolling, other times a great chord progression happens and
the words and melodies are just the enablers to help bring that into full
realisation! Most times I just noodle, and see what comes out. Half the time I
get something good, half the time I don’t - it’s not a bad hit rate. So many
times I have heard an amazing song or band and then a couple months later I
realised where my new favourite song came from.. but thankfully by the time
they’re through the learning and rehearsing process within the band they have
been given enough new personality to not sound exactly like their direct
influence any more. Most times anyway.
Where
do you look for continuing inspiration? New ideas, new motivation?
Pretty much wherever I can find it. I steal
lines from people’s conversations, songs I accidentally hear, I’ll steal a
chord change from. Themes or feelings evoked in books are always good. And
sometimes I just stop and try to be quiet and zero in on the small details of a
situation, the dust in the corner, the dirty window, the way someone’s clothes
fit them, the cigarette smoke. Anything like that. It gets a little harder
having written so many songs. Sometimes I let myself get away with treading old
ground, if it’s done in a new way, sometimes I just have to focus on what my
senses deliver to me now, as an older guy, and how they differ from those as a
young man. I also like to invent new tunings and chords, this keeps the guitar
fresh for me, which is pretty vital. If I didn’t have any alternative tunings
and sets of chords I would have ditched the guitar years ago. Too boring..
there’s only so many times you can play E and A before every song sounds the
same.
We're
all a product of our environment. Tell us about the band's hometown and how
that reflects in the music?
We don’t tend to write about Brisbane as
such, but the moment we have a local landmark in a video clip for example
everyone assumes it’s a song about Brisbane. We made a clip outside a
now-non-existent 7-11 and it went crazy, everyone really latched onto the song
as a “Brisbane thing”. More realistically I’d say that the social climate in
Brisbane in the 90s allowed us to get the band off the ground and go touring.
Even though it is a city, Brisbane was really a big hot lazy country town. Rent
was really cheap, and there wasn’t a lot to do. So we could afford to not work,
and spend all our time rehearsing, touring, skateboarding and partying. It was
a pretty awesome time. I feel sad for kids today who want to leave home and
they’re immediately faced with very expensive rent and adult decisions. We had
it so good, we could pretty much be kids forever. Brisbane now is way more
city-like and has lost a lot of its innocence, and a lot of its great naiveté
along the way.
Where'd
the band name come from?
So this question is one we have steadfastly
refused to answer over the years, but – here you go: Back in 1991 we wanted to
change our name (from The Madmen) and we tried everything we could think of, we
went to the library and looked up old war slang, we went through tons of
foreign words.. nothing seemed to gel. We knew we definitely wanted a one word
name (it was the 90s). I grew up in England where I used to go fishing a lot,
in lakes and rivers. For bait we used maggots. You could buy them by the pint
in fishing shops! Anyway there’s this piece of tackle called a swimfeeder,
basically a small plastic tube with little holes in it. You ram it full of
maggots and it sits on the bottom of the lake, near your baited hook, and
attracts fish towards it. From there it was a short leap to Screamfeeder..
Kellie and I did a lot of screaming back in those days too.
You
have one chance, what movie are you going to write the soundtrack for?
What a great question. My girlfriend and I
were having the following discussion recently: “What’s with movies these days,
do they all suck or is it just us?” “Movies were way better in the 90s” – that
kind of thing. We decided we had to check and we downloaded a bunch of 90s
classics. Reservoir Dogs, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, My Own Private Idaho,
Buffalo 66, all those arthouse films. And guess what, they totally kicked
fuckin arse! They were so beautifully crafted, without pandering to audience
demographics, PC-ness, or any kind of social trends. They were simply
stand-alone art pieces. Concerned with being great art, first and foremost,
full stop. Beautifully written and directed and acted. It was so refreshing and
affirming! With this in mind I would definitely go for My Own Private Idaho,
this one has special resonance for me, it’s slow without being dull, it’s gentle
yet kinda brutal, it’s fanciful and dreamlike and a bit unreal, and the story
meanders a lot, but the characters are super compelling. For a film of its kind
it’s pretty much perfect. Writing the soundtrack for this would be challenging
but incredible.
You
now write for a music publication (The Ripple Effect?). You're going to write a 1,000 word essay on
one song. Which would it be and why?
Perhaps I’d choose The Drive-By Truckers
“Let There Be Rock”. For me it’s just the most awesome fist-pump-in-traffic
track. It’s about Patterson Hood’s experiences as a young teenager, with booze,
drugs, drink driving, friends, discovering his favourite bands; Lynyrd Skynyrd,
Thin Lizzy, ACDC, and his experiences seeing them play live, or even missing
their gigs due to his drunken-ness, or their misfortune. It is really the most
perfect depiction of the feeling of being a young male and seeing the world
open up before you with a myriad of new experiences, ways to be naughty and to
express the crazy energy welling up inside you. The song’s concluding message
is that he doesn’t regret a single second of any of it, despite there having
been multiple times where he could have been incarcerated, injured or killed.
It’s the most perfect tribute to the young male human condition.
Come
on, share with us a couple of your great, Spinal Tap, rock and roll moments?
We went through a big WHO craze for a
couple of years. This included smashing gear at the end of the set. Always
great fun. We got pretty caught up in it, to the extent that we’d completely trash the stage even if we were
the support band. Quite a few times we’d spend 10 minutes knocking gear over
and throwing drums around the stage, earning the wrath of the crew and headline
band, oops. There were also a few times we’d set guitars on fire. Once at the
Big Day Out (festival) we got to the end of the set and out came the lighter
fuel and I got the guitar really flaming, then grabbed it by the neck and
started smashing it up. Lumps of burning wood went flying off in all
directions. We heard the following week that someone in the audience had been
hit by one and they were considering suing the festival. The organisers were
super kind and cool with us about it, and luckily we found video footage that
proved none of the burning bits of debris had actually flown into the audience
after all. That was lucky.
Tell
us about playing live and the live experience for you and for your fans?
We like to rehearse, but only ever JUST
enough. Fans have come to expect a little looseness from us, which is cool.
Luckily we have three things going for us though: 1, Our drummer is a total
machine and never misses a beat. This makes all of us in the band sound tight.
2, We are pretty good at funny banter and giving each other shit on stage and
getting a few laughs out of the audience. 3, we’re long-timers, so the fans
know our songs and like to sing along with them and if we fuck them up
literally no-one even cares. Myself I get kinda bored watching a band who never
screw up. I saw Lucinda Williams have to start a song again once, it was going
so wrong. That was cool.
And for us, playing live is almost always
great fun. We all have an unspoken language between us, we give each other
looks and we know what they mean. We share small points in every song were we
do something really small; it’s not on the record and we never even speak of
it, but we all know it’s there. It’s a great thing about being comfortable with
your band mates and trusting them, you can really play with the songs and get a
bit loose and everyone can just run with it.
What
makes a great song?
It could be many things. It might just have
killer hooks like an Elliot Smith or Beatles song for eg. But it might have no
hooks and no chorus but summon up such a feeling, that it’s super powerful,
like something by Soundgarden or Codeine or Bitch Magnet. Or it might just
totally fucking ROCK and make you want to jump out of your seat, like a song by
The Hold Steady, or The Sex Pistols or The Who, where the energy is more than
infectious, it’s addictive. It might even be something cruisy and understated
by Liz Phair or Urge Overkill or The Velvet Underground where barely anything
happens but the band succeed in making you feel like you’re in their world, or
in a movie.. you get transported somewhere. So many things.
Tell
us about the first song you ever wrote?
I can’t even remember what it was. I used
to have a job in a hospital in London, where I got to sit around doing nothing
a lot of the time, and I wrote lyrics. They were very Cure-inspired, kinda
poetic and conceptual, but I never set any of them to music. When I formed my
first band The Lethal Injections a year later (1986) I became the songwriter by
default, and started pumping out short fast 3 chord punk songs. Really basic
punk.101 type stuff. “Can’t get to sleep, lying in bed, headache banging in my
head”. Hilarious. My singing was bloody terrible back then too. Also some more
political songs, I’d been listening to Crass, Discharge and Dead Kennedys after
all. It felt good writing songs though, the band couldn’t keep up with me.
Lucky they were all super easy and they all had the same rhythm:
boom-chk-boom-chk-boom-chk…
What
piece of your music are particularly proud of?
I pretty much like most of it ok, there are
very few songs I really dislike. But one that stands out is an EP by my band
THE WHATS. We started out as a typical garage 2 piece (myself and Screamfeeder
drummer Dean) and soon started getting into extended jams where we’d both play
drums for eg. We released an EP called “A bit of everything with THE WHATS” and
the songs on there are really different, mostly long, musically extremely
simple – almost chord-less - and very repetitive, very beat-based, with
electronic elements, and long sets of dense lyrics. It was fun and easy from
beginning to end, writing the material, recording it and playing it live. It
was a real sidestep from the style I’m more at home with and I feel proud of it
because I reckon we nailed it. Every person who heard it loved it too; all
three of them in fact.
Who
today, writes great songs? Who just kicks your ass? Why?
I‘m so shit at keeping up with current
music it’s a bit embarrassing. The big guys I can rely on - Patterson Hood is a
fucking monster of a songwriter. I know Spiritualized will never fail me. I
know the Smoke Ring for a Halo guy is pretty shit hot. J Mascis is running
pretty hot at the moment too, some of the later day Dinosaur moments are close
to his best. The Pixies newer material is actually really great, as were the
last two Bowie albums. As for younger bands, Pity Sex are close to the top of
the heap (yep, even better than Beach Slang) – their colossal fuzz attack
combined with beautiful bittersweet pop tunes is staggering. I kinda wish The Hold Steady would get back
on track, they’re really meandering in the shallows – they could return to
being rock giants so easily. I’m gonna keep this answer short to try and not emphasize how little music I actually know.
Vinyl,
CD, or digital? What's your format of choice?
I sold all my CDs, bulk lot, every single
one. Thank god for that. Dead format! I love vinyl because it’s awesome and
everyone knows why. I love digital because I’m lazy and it’s so easy and you
can’t have a record player in your damn car. Also having thousands of songs
playing on random is amazing, you hear songs (that you own) that you would
never think to put on in a million years, and you’re reminded how great they
are! The downsides of digital is there’s too much choice. I’m shit with choice:
I can never decide. Don’t send me out to the Video Store, you won’t see me
again all night. Spotify is like a nightmare to me. How can I decide what to
listen to?! I need some help with that.
Whiskey
or beer? And defend your choice
They both have their place, but for me it’s
beer, hands down. I’m a quantity guy. I’m also a quick drinker. How can people
just sip a drink? I don’t get it. Plus, beer is super delicious. I’m an
out-and-proud craft beer fan, it’s like I’ve died and gone to heaven. I could
cry sometimes, I tell ya. A pint or three of something special, a bowl of
peanuts in their shells, someone with half a brain in charge of the stereo in
the bar. Heaven.
We,
at the Ripple Effect, are constantly looking for new music. What's your home
town, and when we get there, what's the best record store to lose ourselves in?
Brisbane is well serviced with record
shops! There’s a great new place called Sonic Sherpa. The guys are
veterans/casualties of the scene for years and really know their stuff. Vinyl
is their focus too, which is nice. They also don’t mind hosting small gigs and
passing you a cold beer on a hot afternoon. There’s a sweet little
hole-in-the-wall record shop called Jet Black Cat Records too, it’s really
small, but excellently stocked! They also host acoustic performances. There’s
also a large sprawling cave of a place called The Record Exchange. It’s been
there since the dawn of time and they have thousands and thousands of second
hand records. There are tons of rare gems, it’s well worth an afternoon getting
lost trawling. They also sell super old Doc Marten boots, ancient leather
jackets and various other punk / goth paraphernalia that your teenage self would
have been drooling over.
What's
next for the band?
Well, we’re “back” after a few years off,
so we’ve gotten all ambitious and put the wheels in motion to record a new
album. We hit the studio in December to record a whole new set of tunes we’re really
excited by. It’s pretty crazy, but maybe we really are the band that will never
die. After recording of course there’ll be touring, festivals all that fun
stuff.
Comments