Where are you currently based?
All four of us are based a stone’s throw from each other in Coburg, Melbourne. Me (Jack), Dan and Jayden live together and Bartos lives a block or so away.
How did you first start playing music?
Dan, Jayden and I all started fucking about with music in Grafton, which is a small country town in northern NSW. We had a few jams, wrote a few tunes, picked up Aidan, our drummer in Bega, and moved to the big smoke.
What’s been happening recently?
During the back end of last year, post lockdown, we did a few really good gigs performing our last release – ‘Jazz Club.’ We launched Jazz Club at Bar Open in Fitzroy which was potentially our best gig yet. We also supported Dr Sures Unusual Practice and Barefoot Bowls Club, a couple of great local bands, to round out 2021. We were then prepped to play River Sounds, a festival in Bellingen with some great acts involved including Regurgitator and Baker Boy, however, Omicron had other plans. We also had a big tour booked, to launch this upcoming EP – ‘Give It To Em,’ but alas, that has also been pushed back. Ah well.
Your latest single ‘Individuality (Is Fine As Long As We Do It Together’) is out now, what influenced the sound and songwriting?
I was reading a heap of stuff during all the Covid lockdowns down here in Melbourne and I stumbled upon some stuff that intrigued me about group identities, the individual, duality and that sort of stuff. I still don’t know if I properly understand it all but I found it all intriguing nonetheless. So that partially influenced my lyrical approach to the tune. I also stole the title of the song from a M*A*S*H episode, where Frank Burns replies to Hawkeye – “Nothing’s wrong with individuality, as long as we all do it together.” I thought it was clever and so I pinched it and slightly reworked it into the tune and mashed (pardon the pun) it up with some of the other ideas that were floating about in my brain. Dr Sures Unusuals Practice also influenced me in lending my hand at some more punky vibed tunes.
How did you go about writing the single?
I woke up, had the chorus in my head straight away and then just went down into our home studio thing in Coburg and got our little track recorder out and recorded it all. It was just a rough demo but I wrote and recorded it in about two hours. It was one of those ones that sort of just fell out of me with very little effort. I then got Dan to sing a few different lines in the song for dynamics and Jayden put some harmonies on it and Roberts your mum’s brother.
Where and when did you record/produce/master and who with?
After I’d recorded the demo and that, we decided it’d potentially be a cool single so we decided to make it some sort of a release. We had a couple of other tracks that had a similar punky, political vibe so we pieced them all together and went and recorded with Maxy from Cellar Sessions Studios in Coburg North. Absolute legend of a human. Aidan, aka Frank Falcon, aka Tiny Barbutos Bartman, our drummer, is also a hell of a mixer, masterer, producer person so he did all the behind the scenes mixing and mastering.
How did you approach the recording process?
We took a fairly stripped back approach to this one. All four of us just got into a room, recorded the instrumentation after a few takes, and then overdubbed the vocals, harmonies and a few of Jaydens guitar parts.
Your forthcoming EP ‘Give It To Em’ is on the way, what can we expect?
Yep. So it’s a four-track EP with one song written and sung by me and three songs written as a band with Dan taking lead vocals. You can expect some fairly in your face, punky sort of tunes sprinkled with a bit of groove. It is a fairly politically driven EP, particularly some of Dan’s songs where he touches on ScoMo (godboy), the Murray Darling basin fiasco, Indigenous issues and the like. I won’t go into too much depth about his lyrics because I don’t wanna speak for him. I will say this though; give it to em.
Who are you listening to at the moment?
I’ve been absolutely thrashing 90’s hip-hop at the moment which doesn’t really add up to the sort of vibe of what we’ve just recorded but there ya go. Heaps of Biggie, Raekwon, Cypress Hill, Dre. I’ve also been digging Kanye’s new one – Donda. We have also been giving Dr Sures most recent album a fairly good go. Hmmm, what else? We all loved the Get Back doco so that got us back into a bit of a Beatles phase. Blaze Foley, James Taylor, And Townes Van Zandt have also featured over the past month or so.
What do you like to do away from music?
Read, surf, and hang with mates. To be fair, a large chunk of all our lives is dominated by music whether that is writing, gigging, mixing, jamming or going to other peoples gigs.
What’s planned for 2022?
It’s hard to plan much with the whole spicy cough situation but we are going to try and re-organise our Give It To Em tour for later in the year. We are also looking to record our second full-length album which I think is going to be a bit slower, and more ‘acousticy’ driven stuff. Who knows though. We are also going to drop a couple of singles not long after the release of ‘Give It To Em’ I think, so keep a lookout for those.
Favourite food and place to hang out?
A lot of my mates work in this little section of Johnston street in Abbotsford in a couple of breweries and restaurants – Bodriggy Brewing and Rita’s Pizzeria. So those two places are pretty hard to beat. We also have a couple of really nice local restaurants right at our doorstep – McDonald’s and Hungry Jacks. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of them but yeah, they’re pretty good. Tasty, cheap, healthy. Ticks all the boxes.