Legless Records, Stiff Richards and Split System’s Arron Mawson: “Getting bunkered down with negativity and anger can stop you from actually achieving things”

26th Jul 202326th Jul 2023 | gimmiezine

Original photo Ben Hudson – @distorted.youth. Handmade collage by B.

Meet Arron Mawson, a powerhouse behind some of Australia’s most dynamic bands – Stiff Richards, Doe St, Split System, and Polute. But his journey transcends the realm of music; it’s a story of authenticity, passion, and a pursuit of doing things for the right reasons.

For Mawson, making music is a visceral calling he shares with his friends. It’s about connecting through art, driven by an unwavering compulsion that pushes him to create from the heart.

Disenchanted with the traditional music industry, Arron took matters into his own hands, birthing Legless Records – a testament to DIY spirit.

In the whirlwind of the modern underground music community, where countless people, music, events, and distractions clamour for attention, Arron Mawson stands out as a beacon of authenticity and passion. It’s not just the fast-paced punk rock ‘n’ roll anthems or the inspiring DIY achievements that set him apart; it’s the very essence of his character.

Gimmie recently had the privilege of sitting down with Mawson before Split System embarked on their first European tour. In this candid conversation, we explore his bands, creative process, the art of songwriting, his inspirations, and the upcoming label releases. But beyond the music, we venture into the depths of his experiences – trekking in Nepal, confronting mortality, challenging the “too cool” attitudes, and embracing the art of “getting on with it.” Prepare to be inspired and enlightened by someone who embodies dedication, goodness, and the true spirit of the underground.

How’s life been lately?

ARRON MAWSON: Good. Moving house before we go to Europe, me and my partner moved into her mum’s place. That’s been nice. It’s been a really busy year, to be honest. It was sort of like a treadmill, I guess. It felt like it was nonstop, and then it’s finally settled down now right before going away.

I feel like after COVID, there was that massive rush. Everybody was saying “yes” to everything. And it kind of got to mid this year, like maybe a month ago, and I was like, ‘Oh, jeez, I really need to slow down.’ It’s been the craziest twelve months.

There’s so many good things that have been happening for you.

AM: Yeah, I’m kind of ready to go camping or something, though.

I feel like that as well. I work two jobs, freelance, and do all the Gimme stuff on top of that. It’s all fun stuff, but I just don’t have enough hours in the day to do all the things I want to do or that people want me to do. I always feel like I’m letting someone down.

AM: Yeah, exactly. You feel bad because you want to help your friends and you want to help everyone, but just you don’t have that capacity because it takes a lot. It’s been so nice seeing everybody back out after the couple of years that we had. There’s been so many good releases, so much positive energy. I feel like people are a lot more patient now and appreciative. It’s been a really fun year, but I think I can sort of feel it petering out, where it’s like everyone’s sort of chilling out now a little bit.

Definitely. I’ve noticed that as well. Everyone was so excited to get back into it and then we threw ourselves in so much that, like you were saying, you burn out and just want to go camping. I noticed on your Instagram there’s lots of music stuff, but then there’s also lots of nature stuff.

AM: Yeah, well, I guess that’s sort of my other hobby. I love hiking and I love being in nature. I live in Rye, which is about an hour and a half southeast of Melbourne on the coast. So I’ve always been drawn to the country and the coast. When I’m not doing music stuff or working, I’m usually doing something in nature.

I noticed that you trekked in Nepal!

AM:Yeah, I did that a couple of times.

What drew you to going to Nepal?

AM: Don’t really know. I’ve always had a fascination with mountains. When I was younger, I really loved snowboarding. It was less of the sport that actually drew me in. It was more the being in the mountains thing.

Why the mountains?

AM:I don’t know. A form of solitude. It’s cool. Doing a trek in Nepal, I wanted to be on my feet for over a month, and just be me and backpack. That was a place that I could do it.

I don’t know anyone who’s gone off trekking in Nepal for a month; what was the experience like?

AM: It was cool. When I started, I came straight off, I can’t remember what gig it was, but I think we had played a festival in Melbourne on the Saturday night and I left on the Monday, and I was trekking on the Tuesday. You basically basically start at sea level. The first few days it’s really hot and quite dusty and dirty. I was like, ‘Oh, jeez, what have I got myself into?’ But after five or six days I really got into it; I trekked for about five weeks. After a week, it was incredible realising your body’s made for that stuff. You get over the tired part of it and this primal thing kicks in and by the second week, you’re just like a walking beast [laughs]. It’s like, I can walk forever. It’s a pretty cool experience getting in touch with that side of your body a little bit more and switching off, not being on your phone and just being you and your feet.

I assume you’d have a lot of time to think while you trek?

AM: Yeah, it was really funny. I actually wrote more songs. I was humming songs, with the rhythm of my breath. I had walking poles and I ended up getting into a rhythm and writing songs in my head to the beat of my breath.

Wow. I love that.

AM: I’d hum these weird songs into my phone in my voice recorder on my phone. I got back and I had a ton of songs to go through. You get into that different creative headspace, but I didn’t really have an instrument or anything with me, so it was bizarre for me.

I find I get my best ideas when I go for a walk or I’m driving in the car or I’m just doing something else not creative. It’s like you kind of go on automatic pilot. It frees up your brain space to be able to let those good ideas come in.

AM: We’ve got so much noise around us. Walking undistracted with our own thoughts, a lot of people aren’t used to doing that, they don’t get the chance to do it. I think it’s a really important thing for us to do. You can go on hikes and just be alone with your thoughts, which can be quite intimidating sometimes, and then quite liberating as well. Because you’re just out there. You’ve got nothing to hide behind.

Totally. I found that you can never just run away from problems in your life, you can never outrun yourself. Wherever you go, you’ve still got you to deal with. Your problems go with you, until you sort them out.

AM: Totally.

Previously, someone asked you about your philosophy behind all the stuff you do and you said that you just get on with it.

AM: Yeah. I’ve got a pretty full on personality. I’ve met some challenges in my life. Doing this music stuff, especially at the start of COVID, that it really kicked into gear with my label, Legless Records. I used to have a lot of anger and frustration with the world. Sometimes approaching challenges and things with that, you don’t get anywhere. Sometimes you just got to pick yourself up and move forward. I guess the get-on-with-it-thing is, I don’t know how to put that to words, but you’re finding something positive to do. Sometimes getting bunkered down with negativity and anger can stop you from actually achieving things, results.

Yeah, totally. I think that you kind of realise that more as you get older. When I was younger, I was that punk rock kid with the spiky hair and the mohawk, and I was so angry at the world. But a friend told me that you can’t really fight fire with fire. Getting angry at someone when they’re angry is not going to achieve much.

AM: I guess that’s the thing. We have a right to have anger, but it’s your choice how you channel that. I used to get frustrated with the music industry, people around me, there’s so many things. I made that decision to make the positive change that I’m looking for rather than complaining about other people not doing it.

Absolutely. I’ve been doing my own thing for a long time, so I very much get that. That’s kind of why we started Gimmie, There were so many bands that we love all over Australia and no one was covering them.

AM: It’s nice when people do things for the right reasons. It’s out of passion. It’s not for profit or self-glorification or anything like that. It’s just because you’re genuinely interested in it. And I think it shows. Things immediately get grabbed by people because they actually respond well to that—the honesty, the passion.

People hit us up, wanting to give us hundreds of dollars to be on/in Gimmie and we’re just like, no, that’s not us. What were the particular aspects of the music industry that were annoying you?

AM: Well, I guess it can be an element of your own perception of what people are like and the reality. But it felt like a lot of the music scene was really too cool, hard to break, it was hard to get through to radio or record stores would be kind of dismissive. After that experience, I wanted to create an umbrella, sort of make this bubble, that me and my friends can sit under and use each other’s momentum to help each other skip that exclusivity. It does feel like that when you’re at the bottom and it feels like no one cares. And then if we work together, with the momentum of each band, we can give a bit of a spotlight to the next band that comes up. With a lot of people being too cool, I guess, I just wanted to drop that and just let people be a bit daggy and just play music for the sake of playing music. I don’t really know how to put words to it, to be honest. It just felt like unless you knew the right person… if you want to try to get on a festival and you want to try to get on a gig, it’s like, who are you? I was like, well, I’ll just do it myself. Does that make sense?

Yeah, totally. I’ve had that feeling before, that’s why you make your own things!

AM: Yeah. I feel better for it. I don’t really want to throw anyone under the bus, of course. It was actually good that happened, because it stimulated me to do something that I’m now really proud of. With that kind of pushback, it inspired me to do something. Now I’ve got all these incredible people around me. I wouldn’t take it back.

Totally! You’ve been releasing so much amazing stuff on Legless.

AM: Thank you.

I’m really excited that I finally get to talk to you about it all at length. Our favourite people are people that work hard and they just make stuff because they love making it. You’ve told me previously that your dad played in bands and you’ve been surrounded by music your whole life. What kind of bands did he play in?

AM: Dad grew up in Cornwall, in England. He was playing rockabilly, rock and roll bands for most of my life. He was a frontman-guitarist and he sort of switched between a few different bands. And then I lost him, when I was about 21. I had music around me most of my life but I think after losing him, I definitely got more drive having a loss like that at that age. It kicked me into gear. I’d always played music, but where I grew up in Frankston, there was not really many people that I aligned with. It’s a lot of fights, a lot of shit music, shitty clubs and as soon as I got my license, I moved to the beach. Half my mates either moved to the city or to the beach.

That’s where I started jamming with people more, sort of between that 18 to 21-year-old time in my life. Music has always been there, but it wasn’t until then, I sort of started surrounding myself with a few mates, who introduced me to Eddy Current Suppression Ring and stuff like that. For most of my life it was just rockabilly and rock and roll. I listen to Brian Setzer, stuff like that.

A lot of my buddies went to all ages hardcore gigs, but back then, I looked at it as very blokey and people punching each other in the head. I didn’t really find anywhere that I enjoyed until older age, and liking Eddy Current. That put me on to other things like Thee Oh Sees. I was like, what is this world? I haven’t ever experienced it.

I’m so sorry that you lost your dad so young. I’ve lost both my parents as well, so I very much understand what it’s like. Especially when you lose your parent/s when you’re younger. Friends don’t necessarily get it because they still have their parents. It’s just such a massive thing.

AM: Yeah. It’s a bizarre thing, death. I feel like our modern society is really not prepared for it. The loss wasn’t actually the hardest thing. It’s like that’s the only guaranteed thing in this life, is that we’re all going to die. It’s just the inability to process it. We don’t have the sort of community… the word that I’m looking for, like, rituals and stuff to process death properly; I feel like it’s something that we’re missing these days. That was probably the hardest thing, but it’s something that I’m really okay with because I started realising how much people are unprepared for death. It’s really weird. Yeah. Sorry, I’m thinking and talking at the same time.

No, that’s fine. I totally get you. Thank you for sharing that with me. Changing the subject then, I know you play guitar and bass. Which one was first?

AM: Probably guitar. I never really ever played bass. Bass just came with guitar. Guitars were always in the house. I think dad taught me, ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Smoke on the Water’ when I was real young, and then it was just like through listening to songs. I never really had lessons. Me and my sister would usually just be sitting around, and occasionally jam with dad.

Your sister plays in a band?

AM: She plays in The Miffs. They’re killing it at the moment. They’ve been playing around Melbourne and Australia. I’m really stoked for them!

That must be cool to see your sister ruling it. Is it your little sister or big sister?

AM: Little sister, three years younger. It’s great. The fact that we grew up with dad playing music and now we’re both playing in bands and stuff, it’s really nice. After dad passed away, it was probably about six, seven years there where we were kind of pretty separated, and it’s really heartwarming to be close again.

Lovely. You mentioned, Eddy Current Suppression Ring was such a big band for you..

AM: Where I was getting a bit stuck before, is rock and roll and that environment, it’s very blokey and it just felt really “too cool”. Eddy Current had this daggy, raw energy where everybody felt honest. I wasn’t this big, masculine guy. Eddy Current was such an unorthodox approach to music that I hadn’t heard before. I know there’s so much of that in history, but it was the first thing that I put on and it just blew me away. It was just like, what is going on here? The awesomeness of what Mikey does! This is the first thing that really grabbed me and started an introducing me to bands like UV Race and the Thee Oh Sees, and the plethora of other bands that came from there.

How great are all those bands you just mentioned? I love them all too, especially UV Race. I super love Mikey’s band Total Control too.

AM: Yeah. Eddy Current especially for me. I grew up in Frankston and they’re all Frankston boys as well. So it was like, ‘Oh, there’s someone from here that is actually doing something interesting!’ Growing up it was a lot of fighting and just people that weren’t aligned with anything. I wanted to build bike jumps and cubbies, just hang out, go skateboarding and stuff. But everyone else just wanted to fight. It was just odd.

Yeah. I’ve talked to Jim from Civic about growing up in Frankston a bit.

AM: It’s like this love/hate thing. Split System are playing at Singing Bird tomorrow night. Got our going away fundraiser thing. What Stu’s done there, all ages gigs, he’s got the studios and jam rooms, kind of made this institution for Frankston. It’s nice seeing the next generation of kids, actually having something to do. I don’t hear much of all ages gigs at all anymore. It’s all licensed venues that are based around selling booze. That’s how they profit. What’s for the kids?

Totally. Growing up in the 90s in Brisbane, I used to go to all ages shows most weekends. In my Senior year of high school I went to over 100 shows. It made such a difference in my life. I do all the things I do today because I went to those shows early on, and there was a lot of younger bands, even my age (15-16) at the time, that played, and I was like, wow, I could do that!

AM: Yeah. I was talking to the C.O.F.F.I.N fellas because they played in Frankston just before tour before they went off to the UK. That’s where they started, they all met when they were like 14. One of my favourite live bands now, wouldn’t have existed without that environment for them.

What was your first band that you had?

AM: Stiff Richards was the first band that actually did anything. I had like a couple of jam bands with mates. I had a band called Green Waste, which was my buddy, he had a property maintenance company and we all worked mowing lawns for him. Then we’d rock up at his joint, he had a jam room at the bottom of his house. There was a big pile of green waste out the front, every night when we finished. We did a couple of gigs, and that actually kind of led into us making Stiff Richards. Me and Tim, the other guitarist, were in Green Waste. That was pretty funny. That was probably ten random mates that switched in and out on different instruments. Probably seven guitarists trying to bash the drums [laughs].

The next band for you was Split System?

AM: Probably Doe St. Doe St and Split System were roughly a similar time. Polute, a little fun recording project with me, Benny and Stringer, came after that.

Is there much difference for you between the different bands? Do you get different things from being in each of them?

AM: Well, Stiffs, they’ll always be my brothers. We’ve had this journey from playing in sheds to being able to go over to Europe, and just everything that we’ve experienced musically together, is like such a family. I’ll hold that close to my heart forever. It’s a really special friendship. Wolfie, our singer, his sister has kids with Gazzo, the guitarist.

Split System, definitely feels like there’s a member from a bunch of different bands, and that seems to be really productive. They’ve become best friends as well. It feels really good writing-wise. That’s one of my main focuses at the moment, just because it feels really creatively stimulating and everyone’s getting along really well and having a great time.

Doe St, are all friends from the Peninsula that just sort of organically came together. My old house was on Doe St. Everyone was living on the same street or in the same neighbourhood. We wrote all the songs and recorded it there, just friends hanging out.

It’s funny, I’m literally thinking out loud right now. There’s not much thought been put into any of them. It’s just things have aligned at the right time and feels good.

Sometimes it’s that simple. Sometimes when you’ve got too much intention with something, you set yourself up to be disappointed.

AM: Totally.

So, Split System is going to Europe?

AM: Yes. Going over for Shock Fest. We’ve got one show at the start of July and then I got a holiday with my partner for a few weeks, and then Split System start with Binick Folk And Blues Festival, which is the 29th of July, I think. Then we’ve got a bit over four weeks. I don’t think we have a day off either. I think we’ve got one night off in a month!

Wow. Do you like touring?

AM: Well, I’ve only done it once with Stiff Richards. And that was last year. It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. I’m definitely keen to go back.

What were some of the best things from that tour that you enjoyed?

AM: Honestly, the people, the hospitality in Europe. We had no expectations. We thought we’d be playing for ten people some nights and we ended up selling out almost every show; I don’t mean that in a bragging way. It was just mind blowing that people actually came out, in another country. We haven’t even toured in Australia. We’ve been out of Melbourne once, we went to Sydney, played with Celibate Rifles once and Meanies once. To go over there and have such a good response and such friendly people, it was unreal.

Yeah. Many bands I know that have toured Europe say the same thing and talk about how they have cool squats and places to stay in.

AM: Yeah. You rock up, they’ll have bread and cheese and stuff for you. There’ll always be someone to meet you. A lot of people touring are cramming as much in as possible because it’s quite expensive to be there. You’ll get in, then you set up, and they’ll cook you dinner and sit you down with the other bands and the staff. Sharing a meal with a bunch of people is the best way to break the ice. By the time the gig starts, you’re friends with 30 people. It’s really beautiful.

Stiff Richards Dig LP, pic courtesy of Legless.

Nice! So, you started Legless to put out Stiff Richards’ Records?

AM: Yeah, basically. I guess that comes back to some of those frustrations. It was hard figuring out how to navigate the music industry. I was like, I reckon I could just do this myself. Well, with the help of my friends as well, I feel like we can do this together. Then as mates were asking me how we approached it, I was like, ‘Do you want me to just help you out with it?’

Is there anything that you wish someone would have told you when you started the label?

AM: Well, kind of as I said, those challenges, even though they can be frustrations in the start, they end up being the things that make you stronger. Keep pushing through. Do things for the right reasons. Don’t expect to make money. Do things that make you feel happy and then you’re never going to get bummed out. Do things how you want to. There can be a lot of pressure to get bookers and management and stuff like that. That can work for some people, but if you’re willing to work hard, you can make it work really well for yourself. Positive encouragement for bands and people that want to do stuff. It’s like back yourself and have a crack.

Definitely felt defeated sometimes, it’s hard navigating that world sometimes when you’re outside. If you don’t have any super cool friends or people in the know, you’re just in this big open world. People need to stick on their path and stay true to their art.

Totally! You’re speaking our language. Putting out records with your bands, do you feel like there’s any mistakes that you’ve made along the way that you’ve learned a lot from?

AM: Not really. All mistakes can become lessons if you are aware of them and you utilise them. I can definitely be quite opinionated and get grumpy about things. And that’s where as I get further into things, I know that I shouldn’t have given those things as much fuel as I did, but I wouldn’t have learnt that without going through it. I don’t really regret it. You know what I mean?

Yeah. This is like anything in life, you get frustrated and then you learn to deal with something and you channel it into something else.

AM: Totally. Yeah. I don’t really regret anything. I’m pretty happy.

You seem it! Did any of the songs that you mentioned that you’d wrote when trekking in Nepal end up on any albums that you’ve put out?

AM: They definitely would have. I can’t remember. I’ve got the most obscene voice memos folder saved on my computer and it’s like pretty funny. Sometimes when I’m drunk with mates, you go back through all your voice recordings and find early takes of songs that you’ve done. That’s like, basically how most of our bands do stuff, record things on the iPhone and then you get a better take of it and it just disappears into the ether. I reckon there’d be some funny recordings of me in Nepal somewhere, like humming a couple of Stiff Richard songs.

Polute self-titled debut release, pic courtesy of Legless.

Do you have a song that you’ve been a part of that you’re really proud of?

AM: It’s weird, I don’t really approach music with heaps of intention. A lot of the time it’s me, grabbing a guitar and mashing chords until stuff starts feeling good. Sometimes it’ll be utter crap for three minutes and then something will feel right. I feel the beauty of a song is when everybody else contributes to it and then it becomes what it does. So I’m equally as proud of everything. Fluff it out with the rest of the team!

What else is in the works for Legless at the moment?

AM: We just finished recording the second Split System album. Can’t wait. I’m pretty stoked on that. That was a really fun process. The first seven inch and album were written, I think we’d only really played with each other properly like five times up until that first Vol. 1.

Wow. It’s a great record.

AM: To have like a year under the belt and a lot of it was done over the phone, sending snippets. We had a couple of jams and recorded Vol. 1 and then with this one, playing with each other for a year and actually having a few jams leading up to it, it was fun.

We’ve got the Stepmother album coming out later in the year as well. There’s a few other things in the pipe works, but I’m still not sure, I don’t want to jump the gun on a few things. Stepmother and Split System you can expect later in the year, most likely.

Split System Vol. 1, pic courtesy of Legless.

Cool! Looking forward to them. What can you tell me about Stepmother?

AM: It’s like a completely bonkers horror movie rock and roll album. It’s pretty crazy. Graham’s done an exceptional job. It’s going to be a split release with Tee Pee Records in the US. That’ll be out later in the year.

Who’s one of the most raddest people that you’ve met through what you do?

AM: Honestly, it’s really funny. I feel like the thing I feel most privileged about is that my favourite bands are the people that I’m actually putting out at the moment. So, between C.O.F.F.I.N, Smooch, you can go through the catalog; they’ve all become really good friends. So equally, everybody. The Rack Off Records girls from Blonde Revolver and all that crew. It’s a really good little community at the moment and everyone’s having a good time.

Before doing any of this, Mikey Young was definitely one of those people I looked up to and he definitely influenced me. When we were in the early days of Stiff Richards, he was a really good mentor without intentionally doing it, just being a good person and making me realise that all the people you’re going to meet in the music industry aren’t just wankers. I’d go around and mix at his house. He’d just be in his boxer shorts and have coffee with you, super casual. I was thinking, ‘Oh, this dude is my hero. And he’s just the most normal guy ever!’ He’d load me up with five records and send me off on my way.

With Gimmie, when we started, we knew no-one. We’ve met so many lovely people in the Australian underground music community. There’s moments when it feels like everyone is really supportive of each other.

AM: Yeah, I think that age of bolstering yourself up, and those “glory” years of, like, oh, look at me, it’s gone. There’s actually strength in supporting each other, and the competitiveness is starting to die out a little bit, and everyone’s kind of bringing each other along with them. So it’s nice.

Yeah. That’s why I really love Nag Nag Nag fest that Greg and Steph from Display Homes put on every year. It just has such a great environment and vibe. Everyone’s just really nice. It was such a nice day this year. Every single band was great. We were there from the very beginning till the end and watched every band, everyone totally ruled!

AM: Oh, totally. And everyone had a happy day. You get a lot of drunk people in a room, and it’s like there’s always one idiot that ruins it for it. But it didn’t seem to be any negative energy there for the whole day, so it was good. It just seemed like a happy family.

Before, you mentioned sometimes you feel defeated by things. How do you flip that for yourself?

AM: I don’t know. I’ve had a lot of things happen in my life that I won’t bore you with, but I just found with a lot of those challenges, even with losing my dad and stuff like that, through processing my own anger, I realised that you don’t get results from letting that negativity have a flame. Move on to something positive and time will heal everything. Life will throw you punches, but it’s a complicated world and it’s never going to be perfect. And if you feel like a victim all the time or let things get you down, you’re never going to get back up. You’ve really got to just keep trucking and do the things that you know is right and elevate yourself instead of complaining about what else is going on. You know what I mean?

Yeah, absolutely. Surrounding yourself with positive things and positive people, really makes a difference too.

AM: Yeah. Everyone has a right to be down and stuff, but unfortunately I feel like unless you can get back into some kind of momentum, it’s easy to get stuck. So I keep busy and do the things that make me feel good. And it’s worked. Like doing the Legless-thing. I run a property maintenance business as well. I do window cleaning. I’ve been really busy, but when I slow down, I realise that I like being occupied. And if I’m not doing stuff, then I’d rather be in nature. I like exerting energy by walking or doing something else. When I get stagnant, I want to go do something.

We go to the beach if we’re having a rough day. Going for a swim or a walk can change your day.

AM: Yeah. The ocean heals a lot of stuff hiking. I do diving, and I go free diving with my partner a bit. I’ve always been drawn to the mountains too.

As we mentioned you’re about to go on tour, what’s the rest of the year hold for you?

AM: That’s going to absorb a bit of time [laughs]. As I said at the beginning of our chat, I’ve just moved house. I’m not back until mid-September, so by the time I get back, and get back into work, I’ve got the Legless releases teed up and then Christmas gets really busy for work for me. Usually once Christmas is over, we get back in a creative mode again once all the craziness of the holidays is over. Then probably start recording stuff again. I’m hoping that Stiff Richards might have some new music sometime next year, we have the intention of trying to record over January, we’ll see.

Will the Split System record come out before the end of the year?

AM: That’s the aim at the moment we’re talking with discussing label options. I’ll definitely be putting it out, but we’re just contemplating a few things at the moment. Before Christmas, otherwise early next year. Probably do a big run of shows for that. See a bit more of Australia.

It was so cool to see Split System at Nag Nag Nag this year! We loved your set!

AM: It was a pretty loose set. We got a bit excited early and were super drunk by the time we played, but it was such a good energy there. We were a little bit worried after, like, oh, jeez, that was pretty rough. Everyone was having such a good time, it didn’t matter.

Check out all the awesome things Mawson does and is a part of:

Legless Records: leglessrecords.bandcamp.com

Stiff Richards: facebook.com/stiffrichardsband/ & instagram.com/stiffrichardsband/

Split System: splitsystem.bandcamp.com & instagram.com/splitsystem666/

Doe St: doest.bandcamp.com/ & instagram.com/doestband/

Polute: polute.bandcamp.com/

Snõõper: Bringing Fun Back To Punk

16th Jun 2023 | gimmiezine

Original photo: Pooneh Ghana. Handmade mixed media collage by B.

Gimmie love Nashville punk band, Snõõper! They’re bringing fun back to punk rock! Their debut full-length Super Snõõper is a heady adrenaline rush. The band breathing life and a freshness back into the genre with their highly entertaining, mighty, live shows that reach a level of sublimity, complete with puppets and props. Their videos are art works full of wonder and humour, made by vocalist Blair Tramel.

We first heard Snõõper when Billy Reily vocalist for RRC/3D & The Holograms sent us a couple of tracks a few years back from a band that he had discovered and really loved. So much so he put out their first seven inch release Music For Spies on his DIY Australian label, Computer Human Records.

This week sees them in the country to kick off their first ever Australian tour with Gimmie favs Gee Tee. Gimmie caught up with Snõõper co-founders and all-round sweethearts, Blair, and Connor Cummins about a month ago to get an insight into their creative world.

We’re excited that you’re coming to Australia!

BLAIR TRAMEL: Us too! We’re so excited. We feel like we’re visiting friends there, even though we’ve actually never been there. It feels like we’re returning home in a way, because we had Billy and RRC stay over here recently. It’s going to be fun.

CONNOR CUMMINS: Yeah, we’re really excited!

Billy put out your first seven inch on his label, Computer Human Records.

BT: Yeah. It was over COVID. We were like, sure, let’s do it. We were very thankful for him.

Yeah. I remember we first heard of Snõõper through Billy. He was like, “You have to check out this band, they’re amazing!”

BT: We played with them at Gonerfest recently, and then they played a really fun show with Gee Tee here in Nashville. It was awesome.

CC: Mikey and a bunch of other people all stayed at our house for a couple of days. It was really nice.

Lovely. What’s something that you took them to see or that you did together?

CC: Well, it’s funny because everyone was partying so much at Gonerfest, we just sat around and had pizza. We went for walks around the neighbourhood, but we didn’t really do too much.

BT: My memorable experience was when we took them to Kroger, which is a grocery store close to our house. Have you ever heard of Kroger? It’s a Southern specific general grocery store. They had so much fun there. They were like, “The carrots here are so weird!” because they’re pre-sliced. Everything was just so American at the grocery store and they were so weirded out. Ishka rode the electric shopping cart! They had so much fun, and everyone was like, “You guys are definitely not from here!” The cashiers loved them.

Nice. It’s so awesome that you get to come here and do it all again with them.

CC: Yeah, we’re really excited.

I still can’t believe you’re coming, it’s so exciting. I never thought I’d get to see you play live.

BT: Yeah, it is great. I feel like RRC, Gee Tee, we’re all kind of part of the same scene, and that’s felt really nice because there’s not a tonne of bands close to us, that are making similar music. Australia just seems to have everything cool going on.

We do! That’s why we started doing Gimmie.

CC: Before I knew about a lot of the garage punk bands in Australia, I was a huge fan of Total Control, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Royal Headache and all those bands since I was younger. I’m really excited to come over and see everything.

BT: It seems like you guys have all the cool stuff, like all the bands, but then also there’s this really cool puppet group called, Snuff Puppets. They’re awesome. I think they’re in Melbourne. They make huge giant puppets. They did a lot of stuff over COVID, they made these big noses and ears and all kinds of cool stuff and they were all trapped in houses. It was really fun watching their videos; we reached out to them. We’re like huge nerdy fans of theirs. We’re like, ‘Please hang out with us. We want to see the puppets!’ That’ll be cool too.

I love that Snõõper use puppets live. It reminded me a little of Quintron and Miss Pussycat. I love how Miss Pussycat makes puppets and does shows.

BT: Totally. We are huge Quintron and Miss Pussycat fans. They played Gonerfest a couple of times and they’re in New Orleans, not too far away from us, so we get to see them often.

New Orleans is really cool, they have tonnes of stuff like Mardi Gras and everything. But the parades and the puppets there, oh my gosh, it’s super cool! New Orleans is a unique place in that way.

What’s it like where you live?

CC: Kind of like the country, I guess. But we’re in the city.

BT: We live in the city, but if you do go 15 minutes in any direction, not towards the city, you end up being in the country. A lot of farmland and stuff not too far from us.

CC: Nashville is like a big circle, we’re on the west side of the circle. If you go outside of the circle, which is not really that big, it’s just like hills and trees and stuff.

BT: It’s nice. The nature is so pretty, but politically, it’s a little bit crazy. In Tennessee, it’s the South, so it’s funny. You have the prettiest land, but then some of the meanest people living on the prettiest land, a lot of unhappy people. I feel like it can be pretty closed off.

CC: There’s a lot of good people, too.

BT: Yeah, totally. It’s a good place. I think there’s just a lot going on with abortion stuff here, gun rights, very extreme kind of politics.

It’s really full on. Watching it unfold in the news from over here in Australia, seeing a lot of the stuff that’s happening in the US, things like a lot of books being banned that relate to identity, race, gender…

BT: Especially in Tennessee, that’s a very big thing in the South. But what’s cool about it is that Nashville itself is such a hub of diverse people, and so the community within Nashville is so strong because the surrounding areas can be a little bit..

CC: Yeah, Nashville, I would say, is very blue.

BT: Yeah, totally. So that’s great in a way, you know, when you live in a not so great place, but you have a great community of people.

CC: Yeah. There’s not really much of a punk scene, there’s a lot of young kids who are really excited, but they’re just not starting bands. Kind of unfortunate.

BT: People, I feel right now, want to move away from Tennessee because politics are so crazy here. The people that are staying and trying to really maintain the community, that’s really important right now.

Yeah. Do you think you guys will stay in Tennessee for now?

BT: Yeah. I’m from California originally. My parents moved out here not too long ago, and I’m very close with my mom, so we’ll be here for a while.

CC: I’m from middle Tennessee, so I’ve just been here forever. I would love to move away someday, but we have a pretty good thing going here.

BT: And it’s a small town in a way, everywhere you go you know each other, so that feels nice.

Yeah, that’s like what Brisbane and the Gold Coast is kind of like.. Sydney and Melbourne are a lot bigger and more spread out, but here where we are it’s really nice.

BT: That’s awesome. The only thing that I wish we had is a beach; we do not have a beach.

CC: It’s very hot and humid. Especially like today, it was a very thick heat. It’s nice, though.

BT: The bugs are really loud in Tennessee, there are certain things where it’s like, you know you’re in Tennessee when…

CC: Yeah. We have chickens and stuff like that.

BT: People seem to have all kinds of fun nature projects in Australia.

There’s so many cool things happening all the time. I’m glad that I get to be a part of it all. Connor, I know that you’ve played in about a million bands: Body Cam, Chainshot, Brothers, G.U.N., Pissbath, Safety Net, Sex Hotel, Vacant Future, Soft Option, and you’re Spodee Boy.

CC: Yeah, that’s true. Brothers and Vacant Future, those are like deep cuts. That’s cool that you know about them.

What inspired you to start making music?

CC: Growing up, I always liked fast, aggressive music, and would go to shows. I definitely always wanted to start. Where I’m from is like, 30 minutes from Nashville, it’s a college town, and they wouldn’t really be punk shows, but there would just be lots of house shows all the time. When I was 14 and 15, I would tell my parents I was going out and I would go to house shows. Everyone was really supportive of younger people going to shows. It was a really inspiring thing. I wanted to start my own band, and I wasn’t really good at an instrument, so that’s how Pissbath started. It was a noise punk band, and so I was learning how to play guitar, but I had a lot of distortion pedals, so I could hide it a little bit. After that band happened, I just kept trying to learn new instruments and then did Vacant Future on bass and Brothers on drums. After a while, after I learned a little bit on each instrument, that’s when I started doing Spodee Boy and putting them all together.

I’m so glad you have, because with Spodee Boy and Snõõper, I love that it combines so much stuff I love. It’s like there’s no rules with what you do.

CC: Thank you. Sometimes it’s hard because I feel like people can’t really relate, but I guess I don’t really mind because I’m just doing it for me. I like a lot of post-punk, and stuff like the Gun Club; that comes out a lot in the Spodee Boy stuff, which is really fun for me. Sometimes I feel like it’s not hardcore enough for really punk people and then it’s too, I don’t know, sometimes I feel like my friends don’t really understand, but I love it.

I’m so glad that you’ve done it. Even if your friends don’t understand.

CC: Snõõper is the most fun band I’ve ever been in, because it’s just me and Blair.

BT: Connor likes to record his own music, do all the instruments and do specific things, which I understand because I like to do my own visual stuff. I have no experience with music so he can really be creative in that way. I write the lyrics and do the vocals, but mostly I do that so that I have a place to show the puppets and the things that I make. We work really well together because we both really let each other do our own thing within the band, which is nice.

CC: Yeah. I guess what I was saying about Spodee Boy too, it’s not really about my friends minding too much, but sometimes it gets kind of lonely because it’s just you all the time. It’s great because you have complete creative control, and then sometimes in bands I’ve been in where it’s been too many people, there’s too much going on and people can’t make decisions and stuff. Just me and Blair has been the perfect balance because we live together and we’ve been together a long time. We can just be like, “Hey, what do you think of this idea?” And we’ll just be like, “Yeah, let’s do it!” Versus talking to five people about something.

BT: What’s important to him isn’t necessarily important to me. So he’s like, “I made this song.” I’m like, “That sounds awesome! I made this random puppet or prop or whatever…” so we combine them and it works out well.

I love that. Creative couples are my favourite. That’s like me and my husband. It’s just us two that do all the Gimmie stuff.

CC: Yeah. That’s awesome. It’s a beautiful zine.

BT: So special.

CC: We had a small shop, just kind of like a distro for a little bit, and we carried Gimmie. They were great. They’re beautiful zines.

BT: We were very thrilled when you asked us for an interview. It felt like a big honour. When we were getting your zines in the shop, we were only open for a little bit, but people were like, “I have to get the new one!” whenever we’d post about getting it in. People were so excited.

Awww, that’s awesome to know that there’s people in Tennessee are reading Gimmie!

BT: Yeah, it’s great. I was going to say, one more thing that makes living together with someone that you’re in a creative thing with so cool is, we just leave everything out, it’s become part of our life having the props out and the music stuff out.

CC: We run a small label together too, called Electric Outlet, so there’s always stuff scattered everywhere around the house..

BT: Then you can just pick stuff up and make something, like, “Let’s make a video!” and it’s right in front of me. That feels nice.

Totally. That’s exactly what we do as well. Jhonny built me my own art space area because I was putting too much glitter over his area, because I use a lot of glitter in my art, the Gimmie collages I make.

CC: That’s awesome.

Yeah. I like using things that people often say is kids’ stuff. They say, “That’s not real art stuff.” I’m like, ‘Well, it is!’

CC: We’re big fans of that. We totally understand. Blair does so much papier-mâché and all kinds of crazy stuff.

BT: I love that stuff. I’m a teacher, so I work with young kids, and the way that they get excited about just stickers or whatever little thing, it’s amazing. So I’m really big into anything that’s fun, it’s awesome.

Totally. How did you guys first meet?

CC: We met when I was playing in Vacant Future, and the guitarist Blair was dating at the time, we have been friends for a really long time…

BT: Yeah, it was really nice because me and this guy broke up and then Connor was just still my friend after, even though I had been dating one of his friends. And then we were friends first and he dated other people and I dated other people. Then one day we were like, wait, we always end up hanging out with each other, though. And then it just went from there.

CC: Yeah, we’ve been dating for six years, but we’ve been friends for about nine.

Just having someone that understands being creative is the best if you’re a creative. Because when you with someone that’s not, they just don’t get it.

CC: Yeah, we’ve talked about that a lot.

BT: It’s hard to even imagine, honestly, because everything for us feels so normal that sometimes I have to take a step back and be like, wow, this is totally not what the majority of people do in their relationships. But to us, we come home and we’re really deeply immersed in our projects that we have going on. It means so much to us, but to anyone else it doesn’t mean anything at all, probably. It’s funny and it’s a nice thing to have with someone.

Snõõper originally started as a recording project? You didn’t think you’d ever do it live?

CC: We really weren’t sure. It was cool because Blair had been doing animations for a while and she’d done an animation for Spodee Boy and some other friends bands, and did a Liquids one. She was making animations during COVID and I just had the 8-track over here and we were like, “Okay, let’s just try…”

BT: I was trying to learn how to play drums, so I was like, “Play music with me, play music with me!” I never really took drums that seriously. It was like the fourth or fifth time I’ve been trying to learn. Then we were playing music more often together and I was making more videos and we were like, “Let’s just do a song.”

CC: It was good because it was also a break for me with recording. Before Snõõper, I used to be like, if I record it, I want it to sound almost identical live. I don’t want it to sound like a different band or be like worse or something. And so there was like a sense of when we started using the drum machine, I was like, I don’t know, we can never play this live. We’re never going to be able to bring the drum machine and do all this stuff. But then it was good because creatively, I started being like, well, let’s write whatever we want and let’s not worry about playing live, let’s just plan to never play live, then we don’t have limitations on the music.

BT: Totally. We could sound as crazy as we want if we never feel like we’re going to play it live.

CC: We got more and more excited about it. That’s kind of become what the LP [Super Snõõper] is. The way I look at it now is the seven inches are like our demos, because when we recorded them, we were like, wow, these are fast!, and now the way we play them live, it’s like double speed. Cam, our drummer rewrote all the drum machine parts and wrote them his way. So the LP to me feels like a totally different band from just me and Blair on the 8-track.

BT: As soon as we did start playing live, it was a whole different thing because obviously we had live members and everything. We were really nervous to play live at first. I remember the pandemic ending and feeling like now we have to. The pandemic went on for so long, and there was no live music for so long. It was three months, then four months, then a year, and then we kept getting crazier and crazier with the home recording stuff. We’re like, surely it’ll never end, and then it did and we’re like, oh, no.

CC: I remember when we started playing live, our set was like ten minutes because we were nervous to integrate the drum machine songs. I remember being in the practice space and starting to sweat and being like, “Oh, yeah, you just got to play like this.” And they were like, “What do you mean?” And we were kind of all stressed out. Now it’s a breeze. Now we know how to write with everything and it’s great. But I remember at the start of the band, when we were prepping for our first show, we were just like, I don’t know if this is going to sound.

BT: We would record it and be like, ‘We only have eleven minutes worth of music!’ It worked out, ultimately. I’m glad we played live.

CC: I would also see a lot of the bands, like American bands, that are kind of inspiring to Kel and Ishka, like The Coneheads and stuff like that. And sometimes, specifically the one time I saw the Coneheads, it didn’t sound like the recording and it really bummed me out. I was like, oh, people have this expectation for these 8-track artists and it sounds so good on recording and then you see it live and you’re disappointed. I was always really afraid with Snõõper. I was like, I don’t ever want people to be like, they can’t play that fast. We were really nervous. We were like, if it doesn’t represent the music correctly, then this is a total failure.

BT: Yeah, I remember feeling like a lot of those bands in that early scene. They seemed tired while they were playing their songs or a lot of the recordings were so fast and kind of sped up and then you’d see them and they didn’t have the energy. I remember feeling really stressed about that and coming out of COVID people were so excited to see live music again and everything felt really intense. I would go on runs and try to prepare and was like, we’re not going to be able to keep up!

CC: Yeah, we tried really hard. We would take big breaks from drinking and we would just practise all the time and we really wanted to be as fast live as we are on the recordings.

BT: We felt like we would look like posers if we didn’t because we built up hype a little bit too over COVID.. we were making videos, people were seeing our stuff, and then it was like, either we never play or we have to play really good. It was an interesting transition to playing live, for sure.

CC: The pressure was kind of on too. Well, not on, but it felt like we were coming up with kind of the post-Coneheads American punk scene. Prison Affair was starting. Kel had been doing Gee Tee since Spodee Boy days, but then you could kind of see the change where he started going in a specific direction and it was like Gee Tee, Prison Affair, Research Reactor Corp, Snõõper… It felt like we were all in this scene together and we all had the same ideas.

BT: Well, I think also a difference between the American style of this music and the Australian style that Gee Tee and all those bands are doing, is the American egg punk bands were really anti-social, in my opinion. It’s great, but it wasn’t super fun. But all the Australian bands that are doing this style, they’re fun, they party.

CC: Yeah, in America. I felt like, not to name specific names, but there are a couple of people who are doing home recordings who you would meet them in real life and you’d be like, ‘I’m so excited to meet you! You’re kind of like a hero to me.’ And they’d be like, “Oh, cool..”, and kind of like cool-guy you and they had to stay mysterious or something, it was a huge bummer. It was really not fun. It made everyone not really like each other. I feel like in the Australian scene everyone’s really good friends and even if they do their own recordings, like Ishka does Tee Vee Repairmann stuff, it’s still like a community. Here it’s very divided. Like, the Liquids person doesn’t really hang out with the Lumpy and the Dumpers person; Lumpy and the Dumpers person doesn’t really hang out with the Coneheads person. And everyone’s kind of jealous of each other. It’s a very strange thing.

BT: It’s just this thing of like, “I’m weirder than you..”

CC: “I’m weirdest and most anti-social.” It kind of sucks all the fun out of it.

BT: There’s also an element in America where it’s like, “Oh, you took your home recordings and then now people are listening to them? You’ve sold out!” And that’s such a funny thing. For us, we’ve always wanted to just have fun with it and there’s not much thought, and I think that’s the same with what we’ve seen in the Australian scene, it’s great. Everyone has been so welcoming and just down to have a good time together.

CC: I feel like I owe a lot of Snõõper to Billy (Research Reactor Corp) because in the past, any of my bands, I always thought you always do the band thing in a certain way; you do a demo tape, then you do maybe a second demo tape, and you get a seven inch record, then maybe in three years you put out an LP. But, we only had two songs recorded, and Billy was like, “I want to do a seven inch.” And I was like, ‘Wow, he wants to put out a seven inch! We don’t even have that many songs yet.’ It was really cool, and then it was like, ‘Alright, now we’re going to take this really seriously.’ He kind of kicked us into gear. The support from everyone in Sydney really kind of started the band because we didn’t really have much support at home.

BT: That’s why I felt, like I said earlier, it’s like we’re coming home in a way. I know that sounds so weird because we’ve never been to Australia, but everyone has been so nice to us. It’s been awesome. It’s like the origin of Snõõper.

CC: When we were discussing this summer, we were technically offered stuff in Europe first and some other places and we were just like, ‘No, we just want to go to hang out with our friends in Australia.’ That was the number one goal. We were like, ‘We can do all that other stuff later but this is what we need to do now.’

Yeah, I can’t wait to see your live shows! I see all online videos and it just looks like the most fun ever. You look at everyone, you’re having fun, the crowd is having fun.

BT: I always feel like if people are spending their time and money coming to a show, it should be a party.

CC: Growing up and playing in hardcore bands, Chainshot and stuff like that, I really love playing hardcore music, but Blair pointed out it’s not really fun for everyone else because it’s just so mean sometimes. I still think it’s really fun to play really fast and tight, but it’s cool to make it fun for everyone and not just aggressive and angry.

BT: Punk and hardcore sometimes, I like all of that because at least everyone’s really intense in some way. But sometimes I feel like if you put any effort into anything, like the outfits, having any thought goes along way. I feel like the littlest things can make a difference in a live show. It’s like magic to me. When I see people playing music, I’m like, wow! I’m blown away.

CC: Yeah. Blair really changed my whole perspective as a musician in Snõõper, I’d never really thought about having props or anything. At first I was like, ‘Oh, props… we’re a gimmick or something.’ Now I understand. I don’t think I could go back to doing a band that doesn’t have some kind of visual element. I love Kel from Gee Tee wears a mask, or having some kind of outfit, makes it better than just seeing four people be really good at their instruments. The props and visual elements have changed my perspective on performing.

I couldn’t imagine Snõõper without that visual element and all the other fun things like your videos. Every time I watch your videos there’s so much to look at, so much happening, you pick up different things every time you watch it.

CC: That’s awesome. We were looking at an old picture the other day, and we were wearing matching tracksuits, the guitarists do that now; we were looking at one of our first shows and we’re all in t-shirts and jeans. We were like, ‘This seems like a different band.’

BT: ‘This seems wrong! How did we ever play like this?’ [laughs].

CC: It’s been happening for about six months, we kind of accidentally started doing choreography. We would be at practice and one person would kick at a certain time and then everyone else in the band would be like, ‘We’ll do that.’ Then we kept working on it and someone would turn to the left at a certain time. And then we’re like, ‘Oh, let’s all do that.’ Now we’ve got stage moves! [laughs].

Previously you’ve mentioned how you just do whatever you want to do and people have no expectations of you. Now that you’ve signed to Third Man Records for your debut record Super Snõõper that’s coming out soon, and it seems like lots of people are finding out about you; how does it feel that people do care now?

CC: It’s strange. It doesn’t feel really that different yet because when we signed with Third Man, we basically were like, we’re going to be really controlling still about everything. We changed all the art to exactly how we want it. We involved all of our friends from before. Like Ian Teeple, who did the second seven inch cover; he made the insert. Our friends from New York, who do a lot of posters for us, made the inner labels. We had to include everyone that’s been a part of this.

BT: What we care about now is keeping our original vibe the same.

CC: We don’t want it to seem like anything has changed, because nothing has.

BT: I do think it’s gotten more overwhelming. There’s a lot more emails, which is so hard for me personally, but Connor does a great job with all of that. Navigating this new element has been stressful because we really did go into this without any thought at all. So this was never something that we were like, we really want this and we’re prepared for, but it’s been great and we’ve been learning a lot. Connor does most of the booking, he’s basically the manager of the band, which he never wanted to do going into it.

CC: Yeah, I think we really won’t relinquish control because if we ever do, then the band is kind of over. It’s our baby that we made.

BT: My mind is completely not thinking about what people are expecting of us, I’m just more focused on getting things done.

CC: A lot of our friends work at Third Man Records, so it doesn’t feel like there’s any pressure. They all know us, and they know we’re going to do it exactly how we want to, for better or worse.

BT: But Third Man has been so helpful. We have all of the props around everywhere. Let me see if you can see this big phone [pans camera to giant papier-mâché phone in their living room] it’s all gotten bigger and crazier. Third Man has really helped us out because we were having to rent vans and stuff to go to even just local shows. They’ve lent us their van to go to a show. It’s been great.

The craziest part of all of this is that we are here making these crazy puppets and stuff, literally just for fun, and now people are giving us money to help us out with like, ‘Oh, you want a music video?’

How did you first become interested in puppets?

BT: I’ve been doing papier-mâché for a really long time and I used to just make random stuff. Actually, I would make a lot of masks, they would fit on your head, just have a hole on the top, it’s just hollow. I would think it was funny to put them on and take pictures around the house. My friends would come over and we just thought it was so funny. I was doing that for a long time. I really like Bread and Puppet Theatre; they’re a lot like Snuff Puppets. They make these huge puppets. We were looking at a video of theirs online one day and I was like, ‘Wait, I could just make a puppet backpack.’ So now it’s like this big PVC pipe thing and the heads fit on top of that and you wear it like a backpack and it has a big long pole. They’re really tall and you can move around in them.

CC: I was trying to think of how we got to the puppets. I guess one of the first things was actually the video game. [Turns to giant papier-mâché arcade machine sitting behind them].

BT: That was the first prop. We have a papier-mâché weight. It was really funny because the weight was the first thing that we used and people were so responsive. When I would bring out the weight on stage, people were like [does funny actions] and it was just fun. We started wanting more moments like that with the audience.

CC: I used to get in trouble at the beginning of the band because people would be so excited that I would throw the weight out in the crowd and they would go crazy, but then it would just get destroyed.

BT: ..and I’d be like, ‘No, I have to make another one!’

CC: They would tear it apart in like two seconds.

Is that the same weight that’s in the ‘Fitness’ video clip?

BT: Yeah. I’ve probably made 30 of them now…

Wow!

BT: Someone would get excited and throw it off the stage or someone would grab it, and it was always chaos. Now I’m a little bit more protective over it, and I place it behind the drums when I’m done with it. Everything is so delicate because it’s all just papier-mâché. In the back of the van, it’s just me constantly being like, ‘Oh, no, what was that?!?’ And then having to get out the hot glue gun or make repairs on the way.

CC: That’s a funny thing that’s kind of been brought up recently, the guitarists all have our pedal bags and stuff, and then Blair now has this big bag that has duct tape, glue gun, paint, all this stuff; that’s her pedal bag [laughs].

BT: Everything is very lightweight. People will come pick up the props, like these big guys, and then they’re like, “Wow, it’s really light.” And I’m like, ‘It is, it’s all paper!’

What’s the story behind the cover image on Super Snõõper?

CC: That image is from outside of a venue here called, Soft Junk. That’s an art space that’s really cool. That’s where we do all of our shows; the sound is good and it’s DIY.

BT: It’s the best space!

CC: Everybody can bring their own beer. It’s a really cool venue. You’ve maybe seen it in pictures; it’s got two stories. It’s really fun. There’s giant hands in the background. There’s a picture of us playing live, well it’s not actually of any of us, but it’s a picture of The Bug, and he’s in the crowd.

BT: We love that picture so much!

CC: We thought that picture was so cool. We were like, we should recreate this for the album…

BT: But with everyone in tracksuits, because we had been wearing tracksuits for a while at that point. We got there and then we started doing all the shots in the exact way we had envisioned them and immediately we were like, ‘Oh no, this looks like a cult photo or something.’ It got real spooky real fast. The photographer was so sweet. She’s like, “Everybody hold hands around The Bug.” She’d be like, “Put the hoods up. Put your hands down.” We were like, ‘This looks so weird.’ So we kind of tried to loosen up and go outside for a couple of shots.

CC: Everyone was taking a break and the photographer was like, “Hey, let’s just try some out here.” It just looked cooler.

BT: You should have seen the first ones, it was cult Bug worship [laughs].

All the songs on Super Snõõper are from other releases except for all the ‘Stretching’ kind of sample interludes…

BT: Yeah. The way we do the live set now is that we don’t stop in between songs, but we have to tune, so we started making samples that go in between the songs to give us 30 seconds to tune our guitars, take a sip of our beer and then get ready for the next song. All the ‘Stretching’ parts are samples that we’ve made at home.

Do you have a favourite sample you’ve used?

CC: The second one. I actually don’t know the song we took it from, but it’s an old country song. The lyrics are: all the roads lead back to Nashville. It’s really funny because sometimes I think people don’t really know where we’re from, they think we’re from LA or something [laughs]. No, we’re actually from Nashville. People are always really surprised. I like to keep the hometown pride going.

There’s also the Suburban Lawns cover you do!

CC: Yeah. All the other songs are from the seven inches except for the cover of ‘Unable’ by Suburban Lawns. The set is laid out in a specific way where all the songs should flow. There’s the intro sample, then there’s ‘Bed Bugs’ which goes into ‘Pod’ which goes into ‘Fitness’. Then there’s the break and it’s kind of like mini sets. The first three songs should all be listened to kind of back-to-back. The middle four songs should all be listened to back-to-back. Live, it all flows.

BT: We’ve put a lot of thought into our live set, which is what the layout or the track listing on the record reflects, how we play it live. It’s very specific because we want to keep our stamina and energy up and we’ve calculated what’s feasible in this first set.

CC: It’s almost more of a theatrical play or performance. We can’t really switch up the songs. When people come to multiple Snõõper shows, it’s usually like the same set. We might switch the first and middle song, but the set has to flow the right way to give you the full experience of how it’s supposed to be.

You re-recorded the songs for the album?

CC: Yes. On all the seven inches, it’s me on all the instruments and Blair singing and doing some of the samples. On the LP is the full band. Our bassist Happy and our drummer Cam, have added little parts and stuff…

BT: The songs are faster and have more energy because we feel more confident playing them now. I personally have had such a hard time listening to this record. There was a night where Connor and I came home, we put it off for a really long time listening to it, and we would send it to the rest of the band and be like, what do you guys think? And let them make edits. It’s kind of embarrassing to say, but it was so hard for us because it sounds so different than the way we first recorded them. We put off listening to it forever, and the rest of the band would be like, “Have you guys listened to the record?” And we just wouldn’t text back. So we had to listen and we didn’t even make it through the whole thing. As soon as it sounded a little bit funny to us, we were like, oh, we can’t do it.

CC: The demos were hastily recorded, I would record the song and then Blair would be like, I’m stoked, I’m going to do vocals right now. She would do vocals and then we would just upload it and not mix it or master it. We would rush it so fast because we were just so excited, and now….

BT: …now we’re thinking about it! So back to your question earlier, now we’re thinking about things and it’s just so hard. When we were doing it the first time, we weren’t thinking about it at all and it sounded perfect to us because there was no thought or expectation. It was great. Listening to this record we’re like, I wonder if people are going to like it.

CC: These songs now on the LP are like how they should be. Sometimes when I listen to the demos, I still really love the way they sound, but I’ll be like, that was a terrible drum take. I was just excited. So I was like, I don’t want to redo it, I just want to move on to the next thing.

BT: I’m confident in the way that the new record sounds and confident enough to not really overthink it.

CC: We did the LP recording in four days. We didn’t spend too much time on it. We only did one day of overdubs and we were like, let’s just do it like we do live and not think about it too much.

Did you record it yourself?

CC: The entire band recorded it.

BT: At our friend’s studio.

CC: Erik Nervous came down and mic’ed everything and produced a little bit.

Nice. I’ve seen lots of people online call Snõõper, nerd punk. I also saw a person had commented: This band is about to blow the fuck up.

BT: [Laughs] That’s so funny. It’s really nice. The internet community has been so nice. I’m always looking at comments being like, are they going to say something mean? And then people say such nice stuff. I’m shocked that everyone’s been as nice as they have. The internet has gotten nicer lately. Something is up [laughs]. There was a time where people were being so mean on the internet, lately we’ve experienced everyone being pretty nice on there.

That’s because you’ve made something amazing!

CC: Aw, thank you.

It sounds so cool. I had to get used to the album though, because I’m used to hearing the seven inches and then also seeing the live videos. The album seems more polished.

CC: It’s just because it wasn’t on the 8-track in our living room. I feel like in some ways it’s a little bit of a curse because we didn’t really mean for it to sound that lo-fi. I learn more about recording every time I record. We just put out the single ‘Waste’ right before the album and I was like, ‘Okay, only sounds like how I think the 8-track should sound.’

BT: We’re going to continue recording in the way that we always have, that’s the plan for Snõõper. Something we don’t want, is for people to listen to this and be like, ‘Oh, they’re doing something different now’—we’re not. The way we look at it is, this is for some people and then our 8-track or original recordings might be better, more geared for other people.

CC: We would show early recordings to people who didn’t get it and they would be like, “This sounds like shit recorded with your cell phone. This is terrible.” We were like, maybe we should make the record where it’s the same songs but just digestible for other people.

BT: There was a reddit thread that was so funny, our friend sent it to us and was like, ha ha; did you see this?

CC: It was like, “Would this band sound good if it didn’t sound like shit?” And they continued “It sounds like shit, but it works for them.” We were like, ‘Okay, that’s kind of a compliment, I guess.’

BT: We live pretty close to a music school called, Belmont. They do a lot of audio engineering. The thread on there was popping off. People were like, if it was really polished, it just wouldn’t be the same.

CC: We were aware of that, that’s why we were nervous about the LP. It was actually really scary. We were like, ‘Are we going to alienate everyone?’ And they’re going to be like, “Oh, they did big production. It’s not good anymore.” The response has been so good that I don’t care anymore. It is what it is. Can’t do anything about it now.

I read another comment online and they said that you sound like Ween.

BT: That’s the highest compliment. I love Ween. And Connor loves Ween now, too.

CC: We were listening to a lot of Ween when we made the second EP. Like ‘Fruit Fly’ is kind of a Ween song. And our covers that we do, I feel like, not ‘Unable’, but the ‘Come Together’ cover and ‘Bring Me Down’ are very Ween inspired.

Do you have a song on the LP that you really love?

BT: Let’s see, so ‘Fruit Fly’ is my favourite Snõõper song, but it’s not my favourite re-recorded song.

CC: I think ‘Powerball’ is my favourite off the album. I think it sounds way better in the demo.

BT: I mean, ‘Pod’ now sounds like a real song to me. I like ‘Pod’. It was our first single, I’m going to go with ‘Pod’.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with me?

BT: I think we’ve covered everything. Thank you so much for listening to us. We’ll be meeting you soon! We’re so excited.

Snõõper’s album Super Snõõper out now on Third Man Records. Follow @snooper_7. Find Snõõper on bandcamp. On tour in Australia now: GET tickets.

Gimmie’s new favourite band: Perfect Actress

9th Jun 20239th Jun 2023 | gimmiezine

Original photo courtesy of Perfect Actress. Handmade mixed media collage by B.

We know saying that a band is our new favourite is a big call, well, it’s simply the truth. We saw Perfect Actress play at this year’s Nag Nag Nag fest. They were the opener and there was a handful of people in the room, us included. We saw them soundcheck a song and from just seeing that we were intrigued and blown away. When they played their set we witnessed four really cool, diverse, highly creative individuals – Naomi Kent, Darren Lesaguis, Gus McGrath and Marcus Whale – come together and make magic before our eyes. Their energy, fun, and smiles were infectious. Their songs were well-crafted compositions and the band are one of those ones that feel fully formed out of the gate. After the set, we spoke to them and discovered that they’re also really lovely, genuine humans.

Gimmie spoke to vocalist and keys player, Naomi, just before they announced their debut EP and released single ‘Leather’. Today Gimmie premiere their very first music video shot by Garden Reflexx for banger ‘Perfect Actress’ and share that chat.

How’s your week been?

NAOMI KENT: It’s been really busy. I work full time. I had an art show on Thursday. Work Friday. And then yesterday, we had a show in Canberra and I worked today. We drove down to Canberra, played, and then I left everyone in Canberra and I got the 6PM bus home. It was a big day, but it was really fun.

You’re originally from the Yugambeh Country/Gold Coast?

NK: Yeah, I was born on the Gold Coast. I lived overseas growing up and then we moved back to Australia when I was eleven and then I moved to Sydney in 2019.

Whereabouts did you live overseas?

NK: I grew up in Canada and America. My mom is Canadian and my dad got a job doing soccer coaching over there. So dad was driving every day from Canada to America and crossing the border. And they would always say like, what are you doing here? And there was a bunch of casinos. So, I think at one point he just started telling them that he was going to the casino.

What was it that inspired you to move to Sydney?

NK: I had to do an internship with my studies. I studied fashion design and I couldn’t find one on the Gold Coast, so I thought, I have to move to Melbourne or Sydney. I just decided on Sydney and I never looked back.

What was it that made you want to pursue fashion?

NK: I’ve always wanted to. When I was little I watched The Flintstones and I would go on my mum’s really old Apple computer and I used to draw. I made a fashion line for Pebbles Flintstones.

Amazing!

N:K Yeah, it was fun.

Was there lots of leopard print?

N: Yeah. I would name each piece of clothing. I think it’s nice to have your fingers in different pies and just see where it takes you.

How did you start playing music? Did you play music before you moved to Sydney?

NK: No, not at all. But I was always around people who played music. Maybe you would know the band called Donny Love?

Yeah.

NK: I used to live with Andrew and Randy from that band at one point. So I’ve always been around people that were making music. And then I think it just happened. I never made music by myself. I guess I really started with Perfect Actress. There’s kind of an overlap of Carnations and Perfect Actress where I’d started.

I was living with Gus and Marcus, and we were like, let’s make a band. And then COVID happened so we couldn’t practise at all. After the second lockdown lifted, I think Mac from Carnations said that he wanted me to come and jam with them, so we did.

Carnations practise a lot more. I felt like Perfect Actress was on the back burner for a bit. And then our friend Grace, who does Rebel Yell and 100%, was doing a show and she wanted us to play, and I was like, okay, we really have to do this now.

I think at that point, we only had three songs, and then we just got the ball rolling. My first show with Carnations was only a few weeks before the first show with Perfect Actress.

How did you feel like playing those shows for the first?

NK: It was really fun. I remember me and Mariana being really nervous for our first show, and then now we’re just like, oh, we’ve got this. We just have lots of fun with it. But it’s always funny when Perfect Actress play because my band Carnations always come, they’re always really supportive and its nice.

We really love Carnations as well. We’d been wanting to see you play for ages. At Nag Nag Nag, there were so many people there that had told us Carnations are the band you have to see in Sydney.

NK: That’s so nice. I love playing in both of the bands. It’s so fun.

When you started Perfect Actress, was there like a particular sound that you wanted or did it just sort of come from playing together?

NK: In both bands we always like to make a playlist, especially when we were first starting, to figure out what our influences are and where we would see it going. I feel like Gus, in particular, loves Sonic Youth.

I love this band from Ohio called, Crime of Passing. I love them.

They’re so good. I was meant to do an interview with them when they released their album but it unfortunately fell through. I called at our scheduled time and they didn’t pick up.

NK: I got to see them in Memphis last year when they played at GonerFest because my friend played. It was so good. I really love their style. I feel like they’ve influenced me a bit.

Marcus loves prog rock, so there’s a lot of the drive and progression in it as well that I think comes from him.

Your band combines so many things that we really love together, so well too. We really love your band.

NK: Oh, that’s so nice. Thank you.

Is there any particular performance that you’ve seen a band play that has really stuck with you?

NK: I feel like Marcus Whale my bandmate, when I first saw him play, I was shocked. Even when I see him play now, I really get a kick out of watching his audience because I feel like everyone is really captivated and mesmerised by him. That’s really fun to watch. It’s always fun to watch his shows.

Yeah, his solo stuff is really cool.

NK: Who else have I seen that I’ve enjoyed watching? 100% the other night. They’re really fun. I loved the cover of ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

Growing up, what kind of music did you used to listen to?

NK: I grew up listening to a lot of UK pop music and then as I got older, I really started to appreciate a lot of 80s music. I feel like that has really stuck with me. I love China Crisis and Gary Newman. Obviously, Depeche Mode. I listened to The Cure a lot as well when I was younger. I like the British.

Perfect Actress have a cassette coming out? When will we see it?

NK: I think July or August. We’re releasing one song, and then I feel because we’re all a bit busy, we’re kind of staggering each thing. We’ve filmed a music video. We’ll have a digital release launch night and video premiere type of thing. Our cassettes probably won’t be made until July or August. Yeah.

What song is the video for?

NK: ‘Perfect Actress’. We did it with our friends Jenna and Andre, who are filmmakers. We filmed it a couple weeks ago. It was during one of our sets. There’s lots of close ups and us being rat bags. It’s nothing too crazy, but I think it’s a nice introduction to our music.

Video shot by Garden Reflexx

Was that one of the first songs you wrote?

NK: No. I think ‘Instagram’ is the first song we wrote. We wrote that one really long ago. ‘Perfect Actress’ we wrote just before our first gig. Gus and Marcus had established a beat, and then Marcus was like, ‘You know what would be funny? If we just wrote a list. Of our favourite actresses in their movies.’ We were like, yeah, let’s do that!

Do you have an all time favourite actress that you’ve mentioned in the song?

NK: My favourite is Nicole Kidman in To Die For. Her acting is so phenomenal in it. I actually saw Laura Dern in Wild At Heart the other day. I thought her acting in that was really good. I don’t think there’s a minute without her back being arched or her hands above her head. It’s so funny. I love it. Did you have a favourite movie?

I really like the The Godfather trilogy. I like a lot of movies though. I went to film school. I grew up watching a lot of movies with my mum. She used to go to the video store and she’d get out 20 VHS tapes and watched them while she did the ironing and I’d sit with her. I love a lot of 80s movies. All the classics like The Outsiders, Pretty In Pink and Breakfast Club.

NK: I love Molly Ringwald!

Me too! She should be in your song.

NK: I’ll have to figure out where to fit her in!

When writing songs, do most of the songs sort of start the same way?

NK: Someone will bring something in. ‘Dream’, and this song ‘Hands’ (that is not on our EP, but I think we’ll record it at some point), those ones were Gus and Marcus. I guess because they live together, they have more free time to learn. Marcus wrote the lyrics for ‘Hands’ and I wrote ‘Instagram’, but they kind of start out the same. It’s usually like, if we’ve been at practise and we’ve figured out the instrumentals, then the next time we come in, I’ll try and think of some lyrics for it.

Do you find writing lyrics hard?

NK: Yes, I do. I just feel like I don’t have that tapped in yet. Just because life is so busy and winding down, it’s hard to think of words sometimes or sit down and read and find inspiration.

Was writing ‘instagram’ hard?

No, that one I found easy, but because it’s just kind of like one or two word increments. I really like performing that song. I always make a joke to the audience that it’s about deleting Instagram.

What was one of the first songs you ever wrote?

NK: I guess it was ‘Instagram’.

So you were doing Perfect Actress before Carnations.

NK: Yeah, I think I had the lyrics for that song before Carnations stuff. For Carnations, the first song I wrote by myself was ‘Videodrome’. That was inspired by the film [featuring Debbie Harry]. We have a song called ‘To Die For’ [featuring Nicole Kidman], which is about the movie as well. But I’m trying to not write about my favourite movies lately [laughs]. I got to think of another theme. But there’s endless inspiration in movies.

Totally! Did you learn anything from making this EP?

NK: Probably that this stuff probably takes longer than you think. But also just that we will just keep getting better and better. Especially with the Carnations EP, I feel like we’re already onto more complex and intricate song structures. It’ll be the same with Perfect Actress as well. The songs that aren’t on the EP are songs that we’ve figured out, and wrote after that; they’re just getting better and better and more intricate and more fun and a bit different to what’s being released.

I can’t wait to hear the new stuff! What’s one of your favourite places to play on Gadigal land of the Eora Nation/Sydney?

NK: Perfect Actress had their first show at Red Rattler; I thought that was really fun because it’s a DIY project space and it’s a safe space. It’s queer friendly, which is a big important thing for all of us. I would love to do more shows at Red Rattler I also really like MoshPit in Erskineville. It’s cute. It’s like really little, it’s really cosy and nice, the sound is good.

Nice! I like smaller, inclusive, DIY spaces best.

NK: Yeah, me too.

I’ve seen bands I love play bigger stages and sometimes it just doesn’t hit right, it doesn’t have that same feel as they might at a more intimate venue.

NK: Yeah. When you’re a bit more squished, it’s more personal, I guess.

Totally. I’m still buzzing from seeing Tee Vee Repairmann at Nag Nag Nag, they were amazing.

NK: Yeah, yeah! He [Ishka] really knows how to get the crowd going.

I got teary when they were playing I was moved so hard by the power of rock n roll! It was so great to finally see Ish do his thing as frontman.

NK: You can just tell that he loves what he’s doing. He’s always jumping around. He was just born to be up there.

After the show, I went up and I told him and told him how incredible the set was. I think it’s important to tell people you really dig what they do. He said, ‘It’s just rock and roll!’

NK: So modest. That’s so lovely.

Yeah. You mentioned that you had an art show this weekend. You were knitting?

NK: It’s was on a knitting machine. My friends do art programmes here and there and they were running this programme at the Powerhouse Museum, which was fun. It was very distracting trying to knit and have people ask questions and coming through.

The night before, Perfect Actress had a rehearsal and we figured out that we wanted to do a cover of ‘Star Power’ from Sonic Youth. We did that, and then it was stuck in my head all day, so I thought for the knitting piece I would do text of Star Power written on it.

That’s awesome. I’ve seen a few of your creations and I’m hoping you’ll do a new drop soon!

NK: Yeah, one day. It’s so hard to balance work life sometimes. I work full time and I practise with Carnations once a week too. I do have a studio, but I feel like I don’t get enough time there.

What kind of job do you do?

NK: I’m a shop manager at a second hand buy sell clothing shop. I took the job because it’s like a five minute walk away from my house. I love it. Working full time is a bit rough sometimes when you want to do so much more outside of it.

Totally! I work two jobs and do Gimmie stuff the rest of the time.

NK: Yeah, it’s a lot, but you got to hustle.

You mentioned earlier that Perfect Actress was the first time you’d started doing music…

NK: Yeah.

Was music something that you thought you would do when you first moved to Sydney?

NK: Not really. I always wanted to, because I had so many musician friends, like Grace from Rebel Yell. Then I met Marcus. I met Gus from California Girls. My boyfriend was in Eternal Dust, which I loved very much. Music was always around me. It was probably inevitable that I’d start making music.

I’m so glad you did!

NK: Yeah, me too. It’s always fun to get together and make music. I like that Perfect Actress and Carnations sound quite different. It allows me to scratch both itches.

What’s something music-wise you’ve been really getting into lately?

NK: I’ve been obsessed with Colin Newman for a while, who’s a singer of Wire, but I really love his solo stuff. I’m always in and out of obsessively listening to his music all the time, listening to all his albums through and through. I really love his music. I feel like I’m really into New Wave at the moment, which is fun, because I get to play the keys and try to mimic things. That type of music is just so fun too, the whole sound, but even the look of it. And everyone just having lots of fun and experimenting with things.

Any shows coming up?

NK: Carnations has a show with Snooper, Gee Tee, and R.M.F.C.. We saw Snooper play in Memphis last year when we were there for GonerFest and they were so fun. I’m really excited for the Australians to see them! I’m really excited to play that show.

Perfect Actress’ EP available HERE. Follow them: @perfect.actress

Lothario: “I don’t want to hide anymore”

2nd Jun 20232nd Jun 2023 | gimmiezine

Original photo: Jacob McCann. Handmade collage by B.

Lothario is here! And we couldn’t be more stoked. A new solo punk project from Naarm/Melbourne-based creative Annaliese Redlich, who is also the host of 3RRR radio show Neon Sunset; producer of podcast All Ears – exploring the ways music challenges, comforts and connects us; she’s also a DJ; AND she’s so much more as you’ll find out reading this conversation.

Lothario debuts with 7” single ‘Drunk Fuck / Black Hair’ – a vulnerable and agitated, raw expression of wildness. We’ve been lucky enough to also hear a sneak peek of her up coming full-length album, which we can attest, is filled with sharp-edged raucous expressions of love and personal power. Heavy underground hitters – Ishka aka Tee Vee Repairmann and Rob Craig aka Buck Biloxi feature on tracks. There’s all kinds of legends in her current live band too.

Annaliese recently stopped by Gimmie HQ for a long yarn about her world. There were tears, joy and laughter, as she shared her story of how she got to where she’s at and where she’s going next.

What’s life been like for you lately?

ANNALIESE: It’s a really wonderful place to start. I feel like life has been at warp speed for me lately. I’ve been finally feeling like so much stuff in my life has been opening up and calling for action from me, in ways and places that will just keep growing. My biggest desire as an energetic person, is to follow through on all of those things. I’m also finally learning a bit of rhythm with my creativity, I’m getting to understand the libido of my creativity. Before, it used to be this thing that kind of jumped through the window and surprised me or affected me at certain times in my life heartbreak and loss. Now it’s its own existing creature that is very active. So, life lately has felt very fast but good, not out of control.

Isn’t it great when creativity comes, almost like a calling, you get this feeling, and you just feel compelled to do it. You have to!

A: That situation has allowed me to be my truest self. I’ve often questioned it, but I’ve just done it anyway, and it’s kind of alarming. But it’s also really good to know that this little thing is stirring inside of you like a magnet, pulling you through all of your own layers of bullshit or self-understanding or terrible narrative towards the thing that is most important for you to do, even if it’s kind of scary or ugly or concerning, or doesn’t often look like it’s going to be the most amazing thing you’ve done. But then a while later you’re like, oh yeah, my compass was working. That was good.

Yeah, previously you’ve mentioned about how you sometimes might have an opportunity, but you realise that it’s not the right time.

A: Yeah. You could say that with relationships too. Timing is everything. If you’re talking about getting something in your life from A to B, if a journey or an experience has got to be linear like, that, cool, I started here and I ended up there; I don’t think life really works like that.

I know in my creative life, in my journey of self-understanding, it’s like it’s all about creating new neural pathways. Maybe it won’t be by the time that I reach that endpoint or reach that next phase that I wanted to, but something else really fucking cool or interesting will happen on the way that will inform me about a whole other landscape that I need to be a part of. You got to be philosophical like that.

You’re originally from Meeanjin/Brisbane?

A: Yeah. Born in Brisbane, moved to Melbourne to finish uni and to just feel a closer connection with music at my fingertips. I hung out in various punk scenes there. I’d go to The Art House all the time, seeing every possible show, and DIY shows across Melbourne.

The first kind of biggest unconscious pull for me, well, other than going to Melbourne, was starting to volunteer at Triple R radio. I loved listening to the radio but I had zero interest in being on it. In terms of having any kind of on air engagement, I was terrified actually. Even going in and volunteering to help out on phones, because I was like, oh, there’s going to be all these cool music people there, and everyone’s going to be probably a wanker, just too cool for me. whatever, let alone any thought about doing on air stuff. The second that I got there, not only did I feel completely comfortable, but in the most sort of surprising way. I was around so many different kinds of people, all with this common pull to this great place that allowed a diversity of being and expression. They were just like, do a read on air and do a graveyard slot. And I was like, no, okay, they kept harassing me. I felt very lucky to be asked to do that stuff, but had zero self confidence with it. Then I was like, wait a minute, I’ve always collected records, I’ve always played music. I did some DJ nights in Brisbane with my rock and roll records. I thought, oh, wait, why can’t I do it? Why not me? Yeah, sure. Not many people get that chance. Not many people get that level of egging on. That turned into a year of a radio show, then two years of a radio show. Now I’m up to nine years, through a few different time slots, which is wild.

Now I’m a podcast producer, it’s shape me now as an audio producer. I have just learned how to multi-track through that and produce the 7” single for Lothario. I’ll be putting out a full record at the end of year, too. It all comes from that, so it’s wild.

We’re really excited for it. I was listening to the Lothario tracks you sent through and I’ve seen some live vids online stuff. It feels like it’s a really powerful project for you. It seems like you’re really stepping into yourself and your own power. Lothario has a real hypersexual-vibe that’s coming from a place of empowerment and self-definition…

A: And, hyper-aggression and hyper-vulnerability. It’s great to hear you say that. It really feels like that for me and that’s not something that I actually anticipated or thought about. The fact that anyone else would pick up on that or care about it means a lot. That was a really beautiful insight.

When I first started this, I had a flood of music ideas at the end of the year last year. I always had this dream to do it. I love playing in bands. I love the energy of other people in the way that, an idea that I might have, when I play it with a group of people or someone brings in a part or mishears it and it changes; it turns into this beautiful other thing. Collaboration, has always been so important to me. But I’ve also just always wondered what it would be like to take something 100% on my shoulders. How maybe that process could happen in myself; what would it feel like to be actually in control of the tool that you’re using and create what it was that was in your mind. I never thought I could do that.

I always wanted to do this kind of multi-tracked, very organic, not kind of clean or clinical in a production sense, but create something with samples or live guitar and vocals. I just always reach this point of I can’t figure it out; I can’t finish the song. Or I finish the composition, but I can’t fucking make it how I want it. I’ve done one guitar track. I’d managed to do some bass in there, but I can’t do the drums – it was this gaffer tape and rubber band situation that did my head in and I gave up. My creative process got totally stifled and the libido got crushed out of it.

When I sat down to have another crack at it, and I wasn’t even consciously doing it, I was like, I’ve got this riff. Cool. Oh, well, I can use Pro Tools now, and I know how to do that because I’ve created podcast series. I thought surely I can give it a go. I don’t know drums, so I’ll just like, bang on the table to do a metronome for it. Wait, I got an idea for a vocal line plugged in. And it’s like, oh, cool. That feels good.

I got talking to my friend Rob Craig in Louisiana, who’s a musician called Buck Biloxi, he’s sort of a (I will say this in kind of hilarious inverted quotes) “elder statesman” of New Orleans punk. He’s a kind of one man band situation himself, but has had a lot of groups Buck Biloxi and the Fucks and Giorgio Murderer. He was like, ‘I’d love to hear your music.’ And I was like, oh, I can’t. No one’s hearing it. It’s very private. I can’t play drums. He’s like, ‘You can figure it out.’

I sent him the tracks, and I was just like, oh, my gosh. Because while he’s a mate, I really hold him in very high esteem. And I was just going through this point in my life where my inner narrative was like, everything you do sucks. Don’t hide your vulnerable self from the world. Do you know how that works? How about you try the other thing? I was actively going through this thing of, yes, but maybe I’ll do the opposite. I thought he was probably going to hate them. Oh, my god.

He wrote back straight away and was really into it.He said, ‘Can I record some drums for you? Would you like that?’ I was like, yeah! He did, and it just worked. Then I was getting flooded with these ideas and had this set up in my living room.

Lothario is a character. I’m not just hypersexual. I’m not just hyper-angry. I’m also vulnerable. I’m all of these things. I’m not hiding, I don’t want to hide anymore. I don’t have like an instrument to hide behind either [laughs].

I’ve done lots of musical projects, mostly in the punk, garage, rock and roll realms, but also, at the same time as doing that, I was the front woman for a late 50s to mid 60s soul and R&B-style band, singing like Etta James. We were called Anna-Lee & the Double Lovers. I did that from 2000 – kind of a foundational Jamaican ska and rocksteady classics thing, not so much Motown. I started it with a bunch of guys that I knew who were all professional players. But we’re all these record nerds because I love collecting 45s. I love that music! There’s all of these amazing tracks, like B-side tracks that nobody knows and they’re the most heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, incredible songs. And we all had these records and I was like, oh, let’s get together.!

I love that idea of putting on a glitter gown and creating a show. I would do my hair in a beehive. And the guys had the right gear, the right amps, and we really worked on the sound. I love performing a show and playing a character. Having nowhere to hide because I was just out the front was really challenging. It was about becoming a better singer. It’s hard work. I love getting physical and being present. I feel I do struggle with the guitar, so I feel a little bit hogtied. So doing this is kind of a bit more freeing. All these Lothario songs, it’s the most exciting, most validating or satisfying thing I’ve ever done.

The live band is Billiam and Locke, who plays with Billiam a lot. Moose from The Uglies is going to play bass and Sarah Hardiman wants to join on guitar for a couple of shows. And, Steph Crase (Skid City, Fair Maiden, Batrider) from Summer Flake. I’ve looked up to them for so long. While I really want to build a relationship, I love these people and I love having people want to be involved in making music with me, particularly this music; I love the idea of it not being the way I started this. Why do we have to be wedded to the same players? It’s important to get the right mix of people. I might even get to play love with my mate Rob from Rob New Orleans that I mentioned. What an honour. How exciting. We’ll see how Lothario evolves.

It must be really liberating to have project that’s so fluid!

A: Yeah. I am going to the States for a couple of months at the end of the year and I already have an American touring band. We’re going to do some dates there, probably in the southern parts. I have mates in LA and New York that could do some shows or I could do some shows, just me, OG Lothario.

Once I realised that the worst demons are the ones that you carry yourself and nobody probably says things bad about you as you bad as you say about yourself… once you can fucking sit down and take a good hard look at that stuff in you, that’s haunting you and holding you back, or can reframe that in good directions for you, then the rest, is pretty easy.

Yeah, you have to do the work. if you look at yourself and you do it honestly (I’ve done that myself in the last few years) and you work on that doubting self-talk and things that haunt you and a finally live your life in the truth, all the best things start to happen for you. There’s a confidence that comes with truth, there’s no my truth, only the truth.

A: It really does. It’s so true. I see a counsellor. I thought I was living in my truth. I was always looking for that truth. There’s a level of confusing shit that you have to go through sometimes to figure out which way your compass points.

I’m always in awe of many of the musicians that we know and love through Gimme that you highlight that are in great bands that really resonate, especially younger people. It’s not about popularity, it’s about, these people are in their skin. You can tell that they’re in their creative skin really early.

I’m always impressed by passionate people, especially those that find what they love young, dedicate themselves to it, and stay the course. A lot of people in life don’t even know what they’re passionate about, if anything. What made you choose the name, Lothario?

A: It’s kind of a joke! I’m aware that “Lothario” is an attractive man who swindles women out of whatever they have that they want, ruthlessly and in cold blood. I’m interested to know why there’s the double standard of women in music, of the way that our sexuality is presented (I can’t believe we still have to fucking talk about this, by the way) but the fact that if you’re up on stage and performing publicly you’re in the gaze, but you’re not doing it for the gaze. So many things are asked, and are expected, of women and people presenting as women that aren’t even questioned with men. I guess I’m taking stock of my own sexuality and sexual drive. Sometimes people are well-meaning but other times dickheads come up to me, and ask me, ‘Oh, did you write all of that?’

That’s just gross. People would never go up to a male musician and ask if he writes all the songs.

A: Yeah. It’s like thanks for the compliment, you’re essentially saying that you like the riffs, you like the song, you like the chorus. That’s cool, but would you say that to a dude? You fucking wouldn’t.

You’ve told me in previous bands you’d mostly write about love and heartache; is that still the case with Lothario?

A:Yeah. I was going through a tremendous amount of heartache and writing about it. Processing soul crushing heartbreak stuff, and also the potential spark of love again.

I may call my LP this, Loser Songs For Lovers or Love Songs For Losers. It’s not an entirely original idea, but the record is like a trajectory of heartbreak from, like, holy fuck, I don’t even know who you are in a relationship anymore, and where did you go? Then the crushing devastating loneliness and sadness, grief. And, I’m going to go out hook up and crush a beer can against my head. I was kind of leaning into that character of the stupid bloke that you see out in the street on countless strip malls, in countless capital cities every Friday/Saturday night, just charging around, fucking and fighting. I found I have a fair bit of that in me [laughs]. I’ve never fought people, but in my own level of intensity and energy, gone out and destroyed myself. It’s like, oh, gosh, here I am in this incredibly emotionally vulnerable state, and I go out with my couple of my mates, just out all night doing naughty things, but kind of hurting ourselves. What if I made that into a character and it’s just even questioning in myself, am I questioning that because I’m a woman and I shouldn’t be doing that? What if I was a lad, a bloke? I’d be fucking celebrating it. I’m going to fucking fight tonight. Yeah, all right! You just need that no nonsense anthem to charge to, which is a bit of what this is about.

What was the first song that you totally followed through on and finished?

I finished ‘Black Hair’ and ‘Drunk Fuck’ pretty much at the same time. Those songs will be a 7”. It was important to me to pair those because it was a prolific period.

‘Drunk Fuck’ is: Six ft-something with nothing to say / But Saturday night it’ll be okay / Bored and horny, getting dumber by the day / It’s Saturday night in the USA / It’ll be okay / You look all right in the blacklight / Come on and touch me up and give me that drunk fuck. Just fucking take, take, smash, smash!

‘Black Hair’ is about being shut down and shut off, and then seeing that very unexpected spark with someone. Like, whoa! What was that? Do I trust this? No, I don’t trust this. I’ve been here before. Fuck. I don’t want to, but could this be it? Could this be it? It’s a sign. That door is starting to open. And maybe you’re letting that light in a little bit. It was funny to me that I wrote those both at the same time because they were both things that were happening and they’re still both happening.

So you’re still working on tracks for the full-length album; the ones I’ve heard are demo versions?

A: They might not even be. I’ve got another six, so I don’t know. There’s offers to put out 7”’s on other labels, then I’ve got Under The Gun I’ve just confirmed for an LP for around the end of the year.

That’s so exciting. You put a snippet up on your instagram of song ‘Doggy’, which we love.

A: Originally I was going to call it ‘Good Dog’. Ishka from Tee Vee Repairmann plays drums on that one.

Awesome! Ishka is the loveliest and so talented. Do you have a favourite song you’ve written?

A: One of my favourites on the album is labelled as ‘OD’ or ‘Overdrawn’. ‘Overdrawn’ is: Headed out tonight, won’t stop till the daylight / Pretend that you are dead, wish we’d never met / Overdrawn and I’m outta my head an dI feel like shit.It’s really about self-punishing. There’s no libido in that, actually.

A lot of the narrative of the album is about self-loathing and punishing yourself; is there a moment where things change for the positive?

A: Yeah. Kind of stuff with ‘Black Hair’. It’s a bit sweet, but there’s still a whole lot of jdark.

Song ‘Hogtied’ is musically quite dark, it’s all about breaking up with the self. It’s looking inwards. Although, it’s named because my best friend and I sing the Hog’s Breath Cafe theme song to each other a lot, and we were talking about Hogs Breath Cafe. But really, it’s looking inwards and asking; what do I have to do to be enough? What do I have to do to if I do this? If I do that? If I break the crown and kill the king will that wipe the doubt that lies within?

It’s about a dream that I had ten years ago where it was actually, this whole aesthetic of Lothario. I went to sleep one night and I woke up differently the next day. This huge thing in my consciousness had shifted with it, and I wrote it out. It was about the most gruesome gory battle that I had to face of killing the king, who was like my beloved father. I was small and not the same grandeur as him. I pulled out this little tiny knife and I just ended it. There was a lot going on for me at that time, but it’s the insight that I’ve gotten at different points in my life. My dreams are very important to me, and very powerful.

Very much like the dreamer! Proud of you and this project, Lothario, Annaliese. Oh, and FYI just in case you’re still wondering—you’re totally enough, now and always.

A: Awww thank you. I love you.

Lothario’s ‘Drunk Fuck / Black Hair’ 7” available to preorder digitally HERE and coming soon on 7” via Italian label Goodbye Boozy Records. Follow @xlothariox.

Dragnet’s Accession: “Everything we’ve got is on the album, nothing left up our sleeves.”

31st May 2023 | gimmiezine

Original Photo by Jhonny / Handmade collage by B.

Dragnet’s new album The Accession has humour, technique and style, rolling out songs about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, horse tranquilliser, arrogance, and feelings. Lyrical one-liners pull punches with impeccable timing; the songwriting their sharpest to date. Gimmie spoke to vocalist Jack Cherry and bassist-vocalist Meaghan Weiley about their record.

What’s life been like lately?

MEAGHAN WEILEY: it hasn’t been too bad. I started a new job at the ASU which has been super fun. I feel like everything is so busy at the moment, so I’m trying not to be busy [laughs].

JACK CHERRY: I feel like I’m at the stage now where both Dragnet and Vintage Crop are both ramping up to do stuff this year. I feel like I’m in the eye of the tornado at the moment, where I feel like I’m not busy, but I know in three weeks time I’m going to be so busy. It’s exciting though, I guess that’s kind of why you do it. I can’t complain too much.

We know a little about your background from our previous chats, Jack; Meaghan how did you come to be in Dragnet?

MW: I met Jack through going to Vintage Crop shows. Vintage Crop were the first band I found through listening to all the stuff on Anti Fade. I found them through going to see shows at The Tote… actually I think the first show was at The Old Bar. I thought the show was so sick. That’s how we connected and met.

A couple of years later, Jack said, ‘I’m doing this new project do you want to play bass in it?’ I was like, ‘Cool. I don’t play bass but I’ll do it’ [laughs]. It sounded super exciting, it’s always exciting to play music with new people or people you never really get to hang out with heaps.

Had you played music before?

MW: I had. I did music in school. For my HSC I played piano but I hadn’t really picked up a guitar or any of that kind of stuff. I had done a band called, House Deposit, which was the only time I had picked up a guitar. We put out an album, but it wasn’t very frequent.

Jack, you’ve previously told me that making your last Dragnet album All Rise For Dragnet was about immediacy and not having to go through the kind of creative process you do with Vintage Crop; has the way you make songs changed since then? I feel like everyone contributes on new album, The Accession.

JC: Yeah, it couldn’t be more different from what I said back then. We recorded this album in November 2021 and it’s coming out now. It’s been the slowest process I’ve had with any album. I really have to eat those words because it’s not immediate. It’s probably better this way though, to be honest, because we had time to work on it and think about it. If we did it the way we did the last one then it probably would have been the same as the last one. This one feels like it’s growth. Everyone contributes. Maybe this album is more about me letting go of a lot of that control-freak-ness. But, I haven’t let go at all; the idea is nice [laughs].

I don’t think it was on purpose for it to sound different. It was recorded to tape this time and we did it all with less of a rush, even though it was done in a full day.

It was recorded live, right? You mention that on the first song.

JC [Laughs] Yeah. It was recoded live and we didn’t use any tricks. What you hear is just us, what you’d hear at a show, but it’s on your stereo instead.

It reminds me of hip-hop albums I love to listen to, it has a braggadocios-ness.

JC: I’m so glad you said that because that’s it, 100% it is. That’s perfect.

We really love the song ‘Lighten the Load’ that you sing on Meaghan!

MW: I actually didn’t write that song. As fas as I know it’s an old Vintage Crop song that didn’t work for Vintage Crop. Jack was like, ‘I have this song, you should sing on it.’ It’s cool because our voices work really well together. That one was fun, I got to yell into a microphone for one take. I really enjoyed doing that. One take and it was good enough.

I love the opening lyric: I want talk about my feelings.

MW: It’s funny because… maybe Jack chose that song for me because a lot of the stuff that I had written prior for House Deposit is quite honest and talking about feeling.

JC: Just to go back a little bit, that song was never a Vintage Crop song. It was always a Dragnet song.

MW: You pranked me?!

JC: Did I tell you it was a Crop song? Because it never was.

MW: Maybe Luke or Tyler told me, they knew that song.

JC: I did a big batch of demos before we started writing that album and I had shown the guys all of the songs but they were never meant for them. I wrote the lyrics thinking of me but then it felt like something Meaghan would sing anyway. I thought it was a good chance to share the song and to literally “lighten the load”. It seemed perfect.

Let’s talk about the song on the new record. Let’s start with ‘M-99’.

JC: I wrote that one in a night, it just happened at the computer. I was like, ‘This is exactly the song and how it will go. It just rips as a band. I don’t know how it happens that way sometimes but it was one of those rare easy songs that came together. Lyrically, it’s about a TV show, Dexter. He uses M-99 horse tranquilliser to subdue his victims, and that’s literally the whole song.

MW: The first time we did it at practice we were like, ‘Whoa, this is sick!’ We were loving it. It’s so fun to play, its really awesome.

When we saw Dragnet at Jerkfest last year it was one of our favourite sets of the day.

JC: Thank you. Awesome! That’s so great to hear.

MW: That’s so cool.

JC: Playing early in the day felt fun in that there’s no expectations, we can just go out there and try and have some fun and it didn’t matter if people didn’t enjoy it or we played sloppy. I find that with performing there’s a line where you want to be exciting and unpredictable but you also want to play well, I’m exploring that a lot more now.

Being just the frontman I din’t have to worry about technical proficiency. I’m still learning the best way to let loose but also still maintain that image of the band. I’m not the sort of frontman that is going to crawl on my knees or do backflips. I’m trying to find the right storage moves. Jerkfest was great for that because we had an audience but it was low expectations.

What about the song ‘Strike’? There’s a video clip for it.

JC: We put it together at a practice in Geelong years ago.

MW: Dragnet has gone through a million different practice spaces for some reason. I think we were in an industrial warehouse in Werribee. Some dude had built a studio there. I remember Jack had the bass line for it and we just played it over and over again. Everyone figured out the right stuff for it.

JC: It had to of been the end of 2019, a long time ago.

MW: Really early Dragnet.

JC: I have a voice recording of it on my phone. I reckon we revisited it two years later. Everyone reconstructed their parts from a poorly recorded phone recording. I remember Dane playing around trying to find this riff because he had forgotten it.

What do you remember from making the video for it?

JC: The whole thing was orchestra by Sam and James. Sam runs Spoilsport Records, he lives with James, who does a lot of our art stuff. Sam had told us he wanted to do a clip of the song and that he and James were going to step out into the video world and make stuff. They said, ‘Let’s do a green screen video.’ They found the other footage. We turned up on the day and played the song twice to a backing track and the rest was all them. We didn’t get a draft of it until two days before it came out and then it was out in the world. Our side of it was really easy, I codlin’t imagine there side was.

MW: I remember that it was really, really hot that day. It was in a converted office space that used to maybe be a dance studio, the walls were lined with mirrors. We also went to the pub afterwards and there was a party at the pub.

What can you tell us about song ‘Birdman’?

MW: That’s a Dane specialty.

JC: [Laughs]. That’s Dane start to finish – he wrote the music and words. We all just try and do it justice.

MW: It’s about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Dane likes to write a lot of songs about gaming. That game is so fun.

JC: Yeah, he insisted that we have those audio grabs for the Tony Hawk game in the song. That breakdown bit, he had already made a 30 second clip with noises from the game that he said we had to use. I respect the vision, it’s great.

MW: I hope we don’t get sued [laughs].

That could be good press for you, with a headline like: Tony Hawk sues Naarm band Dragnet.

MW & JC: [Laughter].

The ‘Interlude’ track is fun!

JC: [Laughs] Yeah. That grew out of, when we first started I was really into it… I had a prerecorded intro which is the first song on the first album ‘All Rise For Dragnet’ and we’d play it over the speakers while we’re on stage going about our business, but there’s a backing track on. It’s like part of the show but it’s not really. It’s almost like a kind of performance art. We used to have an interlude intermission in the live show. We’d press a button on the sample pad and play a 30 second break and we’d all stand around and tune our guitars while the song played. It kind of confused everyone, which I love. I thought it would be even funnier to do an interlude on the album, purely for my own enjoyment. I think the band think it’s funny too…

MW: Yeah I think it’s funny.

JC: The motto of the band is: funny but not a joke. That’s something that we walk the line of really well. That track is funny but it also serves a purpose of being the end of the A-side and and preps you to come into the B-side. I think that’s our brand.

MW: Sometimes I don’t know if it’s a joke or not as well [laughs]. We get so carried away sometimes. People think we’re a funny joke band, and I’m like, ‘Is it?’

JC: That’s the thing, I remember seeing Sam the mixes of the record to see if he wanted to release it. He wrote back: this is so funny. I had to clarify that it’s not meant to be a joke. There’s funny parts but the whole thing is serious.

MW: I think it’s important not to take that stuff seriously. It’s so easy to get caught up in it all—even just in life as well.

Side-B kicks off with ‘Purple Agitator’…

JC: That’s the other one on the album that was made in 2019. It just came out. It still feels like a bit of a weird song for us. When we play it, I’m not quite sure if it suits the band or not. It’s probably one of the most different songs I’ve written. It doesn’t sound like something I’d write. I’m excited for the album to be out, people might enjoy hearings omitting different from us. The three Dragnet singles have all been angular and punky. ‘Purple Agitator’ is more subdued.

It’s one of my favourites on the album. I think it does fit. When I listen to Dragnet I expect the unexpected, so in that spirit it fits.

JC: I guess that’s fair.

Next up is ‘Maths Test’.

JC: That’s Dane as well, he wrote the music and pretty much the lyrics; I jumbled a few tings when we recorded. That one is not about a video game. It’s self-explanatory lyrically. I don’t know if he was exploring anything too metaphorical with that one. It’s just like, no one likes maths.

MW: [Laughs]. We always struggled learning that one. I love the way Dane writes a song because they’re a little bit complicated. It’s always a fun challenge learning his songs.

JC: Dane’s riffs are a nice compliment to the rest of the songs because his influences are a little bit different. We recorded with Billy from Anti Fade, when we did that one as we were recording he asked, ‘Is that one of Dane’s?’He knew just by the riff. That’s a good thing.

‘Sabor Attacks’?

JC: That’s Dane again.

MW: It’s so fun to play, it’s so fast.

JC: He demoed a whole album with songs about the Nintendo 64 game Tarzan. He had 12 songs that were all title after levels in the game. Sabor Attacks is one of the levels. He had the music but nit the lyrics, so I did a deep dive and found a bunch of terms and words for the game. It’s a real time strategy game, it’s in the same format as a scrolling screen. It’s like describing the game, the mechanics of the game, but not what the game is about, which was an artistic choice.

MW: It’s really cool. I used to play that game, and actually still have it on PlayStation. When I heard the lyrics Jack write it really describes the way you feel when you play that level. It’s so frustrating and annoying, and because the song is fast and agitated in a sense, it really compliments it.

How about ‘Faces Around’?

JC: It was one of the earlier ones that I had for the album. I can’t remember the lyrics right now, but I know the “faces around” bit was in my head one day when I was at work and I thought it’d be a good name for a song. It was after my grandmother died and I just kept thinking I was seeing her. It was interesting. She lived in Tasmania and I never saw her very much to begin with. I don’t know why I think I’d see her face. The song isn’t about my grandma though, just that idea. We did the funny thing where the guitars go back and forth and Dragn-ified it. It was probably the most challenging bass riff I’ve written.

MW: It’s a lot of down strokes for me. I remember always thinking when we play it, how am I going to do this for 3 minutes [laughs]. I don’t know how to play bass! We got it in the end! Jack, you actually sing one of my favourite Dragnet lyrics on that song: I don’t talk about the internet / I don’t have it at my house. Every time I hear it I try not to laugh because I think it’s so funny.

JC: [Laughs]. My favourite is on the HMAS Wanker in the middle of the…

MW: [Laughs]. That’s so good!

JC: The lyrics are all from different things. I think not’s good having songs that don’t have to be stories, it can just be words. That probably fits with our don’t take yourself to seriously thing. If something sounds good, it sounds good and you don’t have to worry about it too much.

The last track on the album, when I first heard it, it was labeled ‘New Idea’ but now it’s called ‘Swell Head’…

JC: Originally I wanted to call the album Swell Head. When that feel by the wayside I took it and used it for the song. I was listening to an episode of Hamish and Andy from 2008 or 2009 and they were interviewing Robbie Williams. Robbie said that when he was in high school everyone used to call him “Swell Head” as he was really arrogant. I liked that name for someone that’s arrogant. At the time I felt like I was a Swell Head for a little while. I felt like I was taking Vintage Crop more seriously and that I was being perceived a little arrogant or too self-assured or something and that album name felt like a good way to acknowledge that and make fun of it. It was a great way to poke fun at myself. 75% of my material comes from…

MW: Hamish and Andy! [laughs].

JC: [Laughs]. From quotes from people, movie lines or stuff out of books. Things that make me laugh. Things that are interesting. It’s like it flips and switch and I have all the lines that go with it; I can write a song in half an hour because something just hits in the right spot.

Why were you feeling like a Swell Head at the time you wrote it?

JC: I was at a point where Vintage Crop had just done our first European tour, we were also about to put out a new album. I was wrapped up in the band and taking it seriously. It felt like I might be coming off that way. An inflated sense of self for a while. I was very conscious that, that kind of thing is very visible to people. I wanted to say, I know, I get it, but I can’t help it.’

Tell us about recording with Billy Gardner.

MW: It was really cool. It’s always fun recording with someone you never have before, you get to see how they do everything. His approach was great because I feel Dragnet, for example, will start writing a new song and we’ll be like, how does everyone feel about that? We’d ask Billy and he’d be like, ‘Yeah.’ It was really easy.

JC: I’ve done a few things with Bill before. This one felt like home for me. Billy’s way is very hands off, he presses record and lets you do your thing, and then he gets out a book and reads while you’re playing. It’s nice because you feel like you’re not under the microscope. Because Billy is a friend, no one feels nervous or embarrassed. It’s cruisy. There’s not a whole lot of judgement, which is nice.

You mentioned the album was almost called Swell Head but it ended up titled The Accession; where’d that come from?

JC: When you sit with a name too long it can get stale, same with any idea. We were kind of directionless for a long time, we talked about names and artwork for ages. It took a long time for stuff to fall into place. When it did, the original name no longer fit. We found the right name.

I think I messaged you at midnight one night, Meaghan, to say The Accession would be the album name.

MW: I remember getting the text and being like—that’s it! It ties in well with All Rise For Dragnet.

Rowena Lloyd did the album art?

JC: Her doing the artwork really lit a fire under everything, she couldn’t finish the art until we had the name. I kept putting it off.

Anything else to share with us about the album?

MW: If you play the first album back to back with the send one the last song ‘Dragnet I’ goes into ‘Dragnet II’.

JC: Strangely, that was the most important thing coming into the process—the second need to start where the last one ended. That was the only rule we had. We left it open enough that we can continue it on the third one, if we want. We don’t have to though. We’d play ‘Dragnet I’ at the end of our live shows, cut it and walk offstage. It felt nice to resolve that, even just for ourselves. Everything we’ve got is on the album, nothing left up our sleeves.

Dragnet’s The Accession is out now via Spoilsport Records or in Europe through Polaks Records. Follow @allrisefordragnet and @spoilsportrecords and @polaksrecords.

Photographer Jamie Wdziekonski’s For The Record: “I’ve only ever really shot bands that I believe in”

3rd May 2023 | gimmiezine

Original photos by Jamie Wdziekonski / Handmade mixed media collage by B.

We’re excited to be celebrating one of our favourite creatives and humans – photographer and documentarian, Jamie Wdziekonski (Sub-lation) – as he looks towards his first solo exhibition opening this Friday night (May 5) at NGBE Gallery in Naarm/Melbourne.

Jamie is also releasing a photo-book, For The Record: 2013 – 2023, which highlights Jamie’s photos that feature on albums from bands including, Amyl and the Sniffers, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Kikagaku Moyo, Parsnip, Tropical Fuck Storm, Traffik Island, Zelkova and many more. Pre-orders for the book quickly sold out online, so the only way you’ll be able to get one is heading along to the exhibition. Don’t miss out, you’ve been warned. We love you Jamie!

After doing what you do for over a decade, why is now the time to finally have your first solo photography exhibition along with accompanying book, For The Record: 2013-2023?

JAMIE WDZIEKONSKI: There was a rush to do it. I got told that the building (53 Lygon Street, East Brunswick) that I have a studio in was being sold; the whole block is going. We have a gallery downstairs that we can use for free (they don’t take commission) and I thought I may as well have a show.

I’ve framed up these Traffik Island offcuts from tests we were doing for the Shrug Of The Shoulders album cover we did at a photo booth; they’ll be at the show. Things basically started with me framing them up. I was going to put those online to sell, but thought they’d look nice in a show.

I’ve always wanted to do a big Sub-lation ten years of photography book. I knew I couldn’t afford to make something that big, so I decided to make a condensed version. I was thinking back to the Traffik Island frames and because they were taken for a record cover, I got the idea to put images in a book that were used in album artwork.

I had thought that when I got back from the Kikagaku Moyo world tour in December, I would start planning it. It’s borderline killed me to get everything together so quickly [laughs], but I’m still here!

Yes, you’ve done it! Yay you!

JW: [Laughs].

Wasn’t Kikagaku Moyo the first album art your photos were featured on?

JW: The first one was The Murlocs’ Loopholes, which was a poster insert with the record, and there was also a lyric booklet with the CD version. There was an image in the gatefold and the front cover of the lyric booklet.

Nice! There’s 58 records featured in the exhibition and book?

JW: Yeah, that I know of [laughs]. I may have forgotten some! I was trying to keep it under 100 pages but then there were just so many releases so it’s now over 300 pages!

Wow! Do you remember how you felt the first time your photos were featured on a release?

JW: It felt really nice.

The Murlocs’ Loopholes came out in around 2014, right?

JW: Yeah, I think. Let me check the book index… [Picks up a proof of the book and flicks through it].

Is that the finished book? Exciting!

JW: Yeah. Each release has a title page and I’ve written what was happening back then and details of labels and when we took the photo.

Have you got notes you’ve written from over the years? Was it easy to get all the info together?

JW: I’m so bad! I call myself a documenter, but haven’t done that properly [laughs].

Same! It’s only recently I’ve started labelling all my interview files properly with date/time/notes etc.

JW: I pulled out my old iPhone and looked back at texts or Facebook messages. Finding a gig is easy, you can type in something like ‘Amyl and the Sniffers, America, 2021’ and you should find information. But, shoot dates for when it was just me and Amyl at Merri Creek; what was that?

The metadata on the files fucked me up because it shows the date something was edited, not taken.

The text bit of the book is what has killed me, the detail that went into the text was definitely an undertaking!

Congrats on all of the hard work! It looks amazing!

JW: Thank you! I’m happy with it. Ben Jones designed the book cover for me.

It’s very cool. Let’s talk about some of the images featured in For The Record. What can you tell us about the shoot for The True Story of Bananagun? That cover is so beautiful.

JW: Nick from Bananagun found the location, the Royal Botanic Gardens in Naarm/Melbourne.

We went out there one day with the intention of shooting without booking a boat and found out you have to book. The guy operating the boats said we could sit in the boat while it’s docked for a couple of photos that we used for press photos, but we had the intention we’d go back for a proper shoot.

We rang them up one day and said we wanted to book one of the gondolas and the guy there goes, “It’s not a gondola it’s a punta.” [Laughs]. You can hire them for an hour and they take you around the lake. The guy that was steering the gondola was picking all of the nice spots to show us. It was one of the easiest shoots because everything was so beautiful and you couldn’t really take a bad photo.

I especially love the photo on the back cover where it’s a bit of a longer distance shot of the band on the boat and there’s like reeds in the foreground.

JW: I took that photo when I first got there. We were going to meet at Fed Square but they all went ahead because I was late. They were already on the boat when I got there and I took that photo as I joined the group. All the colours came up so nice.

Totally! What are some other shoots that you have vivid memories of?

JW: The Amyl and the Sniffers’ Big Attraction & Giddy Up split EP has a photo of Amy in red. It was from my first night watching Amyl & the Sniffers. I had heard their name around and had checked out their ‘70s Street Munchies’ clip on YouTube and thought they looked really cool and that Amy looked really interesting.

They were opening for The Murlocs with Parsnip at Howler. I didn’t meet them until after they played. I didn’t know what to expect – at that point I had never seen a punk band. Amy came out on stage and she was darting back and forth across it, jumping off the foldback speakers. It was the most energetic thing that I had shot at that point. I had only been shooting psychedelic bands, even though everyone is moving they’re still kind of stationery in their spot, this was the first time I’d shot someone that wasn’t—Amy was upside down and everywhere!

I have fond memories of that night. I love Amy, Amy and I are close. I love the Sniffers too. I really connected with them, they were so genuine. It was the biggest show that they had played at that point. They were all wide-eyed and like, ‘You get chips backstage! That’s crazy!’

Amy is totally lovely! I spied the comment she left on your post about your exhibition and book. She said: “You change lives” – and that you’ve changed hers.

JW: That was so sweet. It’s a mutual feeling, they’re changed my life as much as she reckons I’ve changed hers. There’s a mutual uplifting to both of our creative outlets – I love their music and they love my photos and they gel well together.

I know that a lot of people’s introduction to many of the bands you shoot is via the compelling and genuine images you’ve captured.

JW: Amyl and the Sniffers are really fun to shoot!

Your images are really important in raising the visibility and profile of the artists you shoot.

JW: That was the idea and intention behind photographing music. I always wanted to just promote the music that I like and hope that other people will like it too. I never did it because I wanted my work to be in Rolling Stone or something [laughs].

I know that Traffik Island’s album A Shrug Of The Shoulders was a big one for you, as you did the entire layout as well as shooting the photos.

JW: From concept to doing the shoot to layout, even suggesting track listing, which was cool. I’m probably the most proud of that one and the Leah Senior cover for The Passing Scene. They were the albums whose art was my concept. For them to put that trust in me means so much, I really wanted to deliver something cool for them. I think both covers really suits the mood of the album.

Is there specific things you take into consideration when working on a cover project?

JW: Other than those two, most of the other times my photos were used for album covers were photos that I took not knowing they would be used as artwork for a cover; they were live or press shots that were used later.

Are you ever surprised at the photo/s that end up being used?

JW: Yeah. There’s some where I would have chosen different images, but that’s just down to personal taste.

In a way, this exhibition I’m having is curated by everyone – all of the bands that chose those images for their artwork.

That’s really cool to think of it in that way and it’s very much in the spirit of something really important to you—community. I remember you telling me about the studio space you work from in Lygon Street being a real creative community hub.

JW: I don’t love too much attention personally, I much prefer the attention to be on the bands.

Same! That’s how we are with Gimmie too—it’s all about the bands, not us.

JW: [Laughs] Yeah, you know what I mean! It’s weird people asking me for radio interviews and stuff; I feel out of place. It’s nice they care about what I’m doing though.

What you do is totally art, Jamie! You’re an artist in your own right… even though you’re uncomfortable with that…

JW: [Laughs] I feel like if I call myself an artist though I have to deliver.

I was working out that in the last decade your photos have been featured on around ten releases per year.

JW: Yeah.

In 2021, I think there were around 13 releases with your photos. That’s a lot! Very cool. On the opening night of your solo show there’s two bands/artists that you’ve shot photos for their releases that will be launched – Howard Eynon and Zelkova.

JW: I shot a single cover especially for Zelkova, which was cool. It went so well.

Yeah, you showed me the mock up that you’d made in preparation for the shoot and because it was outside I was crossing my fingers all day for you that it wouldn’t rain.

JW: It was a really fun day! There’s a lamp post beside the bridge and it lights it all up at night. They brought screwdrivers with them and unscrewed the little plate in the lamp and under it was the power supply, so we hooked up an extension lead and they played live, which was so cool. It was just me, the band, and the guitarist’s girlfriend that was helping out. I thought to myself, ‘Fuck, I wish more people were here to see this, it’s amazing!’ The sound was reverberating around the bridge. We shot it out in Riddells Creek a couple of weekends ago.

It was the quickest turnaround for me in terms of coming up with a concept, shooting it and designing the artwork for it to be in the book. We shot it on the weekend, I developed the film on Sunday, got it back Monday evening, and had to design the cover Monday evening to be able to put it into my book and submit to the printers in the morning. It was tough but we got there!

Howard is putting out a single, which is really cool. It’s his first official release since his 1974 album.

That’s amazing you were able to inspire him to do that!

JW: I called him and I was like, ‘Howard, I really want you in this show, so I think you’ll have to put out one of your songs in the next two months’ [laughs]. I told him, ‘It’s 2023 – 23 is your favourite number – it’s your year to do it!’ He told me he thought I was right and that he’d really love to.

So good! Howard is so lovely. Thank you for introducing us, it’s always inspiring chatting with him.

JW: Yeah, I’m really stoked that’s happening.

Is there any other albums we can find your work on that you’d like to share a little about?

JW: The Traffik Island one [A Shrug Of The Shoulders] was very involved. We were up at Howard’s place in Tumbi Umbi and it was the last time we’d be going there because Howard sold that property and moved down to Bruny Island. We were having a send off party, there was a stage outside and all the locals they go swimming with, their doctors, dentist and everyone came out for the house show.

Howard was throwing out a bunch of stuff like books, lamps and trinkets; there was a book, Photobooth: The Art of the Automatic Portrait. I ended up keeping it. I loved flicking through it.

Before we went up to Howard’s Zak [Olsen] had asked if I could take a photo for his new album cover. We couldn’t really come up with a concept though and we thought we might just take a photo out in nature. We thought to shoot Zak from a distance and that I’d shoot the trees. I don’t think we even got to try though.

I saw the photobooth book and thought of the idea of shooting the title of the album spelt out in the photobooth. Zak and I still shared a studio at that point so when we got back from Howard’s we knuckled down into planning it out. We went down to the photobooth to measure it out. I stuck up giant post-it notes against the wall of the booth and drew out lines with numbers and shot the test shot so I could see where the frame fits. Luckily the letters needed to be on an A2 size. I brought a bunch of A2 sheets and painted the letters in the studio for ages. We winged it, one night we went down to the booth and it took us three to four hours and put $200 – $300 in gold coins through the photobooth. A few people came up to us thinking we were tagging the photobooth. People were telling us that its heritage listed. Then I took the photobooth strips home and had to scan them into the computer before I could start making the cover. It was really fun! I was so stoked I could do it for Zak because I love his music. He’s probably one of my favourite song writers.

It was really nice too because I had known those songs as demos for so long. He sent me a few tracks years ago. Sharing a studio I’d asked him, ‘Whatever happened to those songs? Why aren’t they on a record?’ It prompted him to think about other demos he had and he decided to make an album.

It’s so cool that you can inspire those whose work inspires you!

JW: I’ve been lucky in picking bands before they take off. Even for me now, it’s quite difficult to shoot a bigger band. I can see why some people that are starting to take photos now would struggle. If you’re starting out now and try to go on tour with Amyl and the Sniffers, it’s difficult. If you pick bands that aren’t popular and that are looking for photographers then you have to put in the yards and fund yourself. Pick bands that you think are going to pop off and that you have a good feeling about and follow them and see what happens.

I’ve only ever really shot bands that I believe in. I don’t want to be a photographer that gets hired to shoot Pitchfork Festival or Coachella. I’d hate to have a list of bands to shoot that I don’t know or like, it would be terrible. I do get to see a lot of cool things and go to really nice places that I probably would have never been to on my own accord. Getting to do that with friends is really nice; it’s so nice getting to know each other and know personalities.

Aside from actually taking photos I think a big, important part of your job is your relationships with people.

JW: Yeah, you have to have a good relationship with a band in order to be in so many situations that others wouldn’t normally be privy too. A greenroom can be such a sacred space for a band, to have unfamiliar photographer in there with you you’re not going to get the best photographs because the band might not be comfortable around you, there could be a barrier. You have to get to know people and you let your guards down and get to know each other—that can really get some nice photos together.

You can tell that, especially from a lot of the Amyl and the Sniffers photos you’ve taken.

JW: I’m lucky that we came together early, and asked if we could go to Adelaide together, which was our first time travelling together. One thing I really remember about them is, how many questions they asked me in the van on the way to Adelaide. They were actually interested in trying to get to know me. Often you’re in a van with a band, and not to say people aren’t interested in you, but with Amyl and the Sniffers they really wanted to get to know me. I was like, ‘Are these guys Suss on me?’ [laughs] ‘Why are they asking me so many questions?’ I’m not that much of a talkative person at best!

I love when people want to really engage and they care about getting to know you and it’s not just about what you can do for them. With Gimmie we never want things to be all business, the humanness is very important.

JW: Yeah, when they’re interested in you and care about what you’re doing. They respond to what you say and don’t go, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, cool.’ They actually ask you questions!

Totally! I hate when people pretend to be your friend just so they can use you to do something for them.

JW: Absolutely. You can generally smell that from a mile away [laughs].

Yep. These days I can usually spot someone like that before they even open their mouth.

JW: [Laughs] I’d believe that.

Anything else you’d like to share with us?

JW: Thank you for writing the foreword for the book.

It’s my pleasure and it was also a privilege. We’ve been a big fan of your work before we even knew you and we became friends. Your images are incredible and important AND besides that you’re one of the loveliest, genuine people we know. When you find incredible people like yourself in life, it’s important to keep them close and look after them. We love you!

JW: Hell yeah. Love you guys too!

Check out more of Jamie’s work HERE and @sub_lation. More info about For The Record: 2013 – 2023.

FYI, an in-depth interview with Jamie appears in our print issue Gimmie #2.

Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice: “I’ve been anxious to show anyone, it felt a bit too real, a bit too personal”

27th Apr 202327th Apr 2023 | gimmiezine

Original photo by Jacob McCann / Handmade mixed media collage by B

Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice’s driving force, frontman – Dougal Shaw, has welcomingly leaned further into electronic elements gleaning krautrock, new wave and ambient music in the creation of new release Bubble.

Exisiting in a solo/experimental space rather than the usual full-band and born of solitude over a two-week period, it’s Shaw’s most personal, vulnerable and full of quirk (textures and randomness abounds) collection of songs yet. They explore solitude, sorrow and the line between sanity and insanity, while coloured with the wry humour that has resonated and endeared Dr Sure’s to us over the years.

Listeners of Bubble will get to understand how this period of upheaval in Shaw’s life has been one of great inward reflection and growth as an artist and human. Bubble is a rewarding listen.

What’s life been like lately for you, Dougs? What’s news in your world?

DOUGAL SHAW: I’m a dad! That’s the big seismic shift in my life. I’m really trying to prioritise being with this little human as much as possible. But yeah trying to keep everything rolling outside of that means not sleeping much and just having every spare moment filled up. My partner is a saint and together we can kinda keep it all rolling.

Dr Sure’s have a new release, a “mixtape” of sorts, that was recorded during a two-week period of solitude; what was happening in your life during these weeks to inspire you to focus on making something? What made you want to explore solitude via song?

DS: It was a kind of involuntary solitude haha. It was during the big lockdown in Naarm/Melbourne that went for like six months. My partner was up in QLD visiting family when it started and ended up staying there for about five months. I was backing her to stay up there, it was pretty rough down here, but also I was definitely going a bit loopy alone. I was fairly void of creative energy and then my shed/studio flooded and the carpet was getting mouldy so I decided to pull everything out, got some self levelling concrete and raised the floor so I could seal the walls. A shitty thing ended up giving me some purpose to get outta bed in the morning. Once I set it back up I spent two weeks straight in there, it’d never been so well organised. Everything was patched in and I’d kinda just go in and hit record and wander around the room playing different things and talking to myself. I made the Bubble songs and another album worth of krauty instrumental ambient things or ‘Frog Songs’ as I was calling them.

Bubble is the album’s title; where did it come from? A reference to song ‘Life in a Bubble’? Is this how life was feeling during the two weeks making this collection of songs?

DS: Yeah, they were calling it the ‘bubble’, you couldn’t go further than 2 kms from your home or talk to anyone not in your house. I was in the shedio round the clock, which felt like my own little bubble within the bubble, and the songs were going into a drive folder called ‘BUBBLE SONGS’. ‘Life In A Bubble’ was just instrumental for ages but I found a note/poem from the same day it was recorded, so I got the robot to recite it for me. It ends with the words ‘life in a bubble’ so I thought it was a nice intro to the project. Also, totally unrelated, when the bub was in Liv’s tummy we started calling it Bubble, cos it looked like a little Bubble on the ultrasound. When he was born we called him Bubble for the first three months before he got a name.

What’s the story behind track ‘All My Friends Are All My Friends’?

DS: It’s like a little bit of insanity in a song. It’s about little faces appearing on my limbs and having yarns with them. It says something about keeping it on the down low so I don’t have to put on 13 masks when I leave the house. Eventually the faces start showing up on mugs and other things. It’s essentially about wanting to introduce my partner to all these new friends of mine when she comes back home and navigating how to break the ice. A lot of these songs are addressed to Liv.

We really love the song ‘Low On Time’ – especially the lyrics: No light for you is no light for me / I think we’ve found the light; what’s it in reference to?

DS: Honestly, it feels like a fever dream when these were made, but I’m gonna do my best to speculate. It’s talking about the simple things that seem so much more desirable once they’re no longer accessible, like driving into the night with the one you love. It talks about the joy of seeing other people succeed and wanting the best for them, and wanting to share in that experience. I think maybe that realisation was ‘the light’ that I refer to. It’s kinda like the epiphany ‘HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED’, in that movie (I’m blanking on the name) where the guy treks to Alaska solo.

‘Outside Looking In’ is another fav; where did the imagery for these intriguing lines: A hostage inthe porridge / An avatar on a dodgem car / A donkey with a house key – come from?

DS: It’s not quite Alaska but seems I was trekking inward haha. A lot of the lyrics were coming from that train of consciousness type writing so it’s a reflection of where my head was at. I was running around this “shedio” and I guess like I was saying about the fever dream, it’s almost like I was outside of myself just watching it all unfold. I think it says, ‘Like a voyeur in the foyer of my mind’. Seems like I was tweaking out a bit. I was trying meditating and some other things to stave off the anxiety and existential rabbit holes my mind was trying to take me down. Just doing whatever I could to hold it together. The music video is a pretty solid visual representation of my headspace.

Was the song ‘Saturday Night’ literally made on a Saturday night? We’re curious, with the line: I just come here for the conversation – what conversation are you talking of?

DS: Yeah it was a Saturday night. Another weekend in the bubble. I just found some handycam footage on a hard drive a couple of days ago, it’s pretty funny, it seems I’d started setting up the camera and kind of chatting to it, documenting the creative process and whatnot. It was 10 or 11pm and I was like ‘it’s Saturday night, I’m back in the shedio solo, let’s party’. It goes for ages like I forgot it was recording and I’m just walking around playing different things and layering up this tune and humming to myself. I think the conversation I’m referring to is with the Juno, my synthesiser. I say something in the song about ‘mother of mars’, which is a reference to Juno in Roman mythology.

Music-wise how did ‘Ophelia’ come together?

DS: I reckon it’s written like the day after I made this Sleaford Mods ‘Jobseeker’ cover for a compilation my pal made on Critter Records. That’s an assumption, but the drum machine is pretty much the same beat. I reckon I walked in the next day and hit ‘start’ on the drum machine and just started layering up fresh sounds from there. Lyrically it’s another one for Liv and talking about how modern technology has failed us cos we can’t hold hands from 3000km’s away and how her internet in Central QLD was really shitty so our convos were always broken.

For us album closer ‘Ghostwriter’ is one of the most interesting on this release; what can you tell us about the ideas behind this track?

DS: So this is like the first and only time I’ve done this but it’s fully improvised. I did the synth, drum machine and vocals in one take and didn’t have anything written down or planned. It’s funny every time the drum machine adds an element I kinda stop playing synth cos I struggle to do both at a time. And I only do the synth lead when I stop singing. The words are ad lib. I guess it’s like the ghostwriter I’m singing about in the song is writing the song. The only overdub is piano which is also one take, as is. To be honest initially I was like oh that’s the rough idea, now I’ll record it properly, I think I tried twice on seperate occasions before realising it just is what it is.

Was there any happy accidents while recording that you actually kept on the release?

DS: Yeah I reckon most of it! I thought about going back and redoing some bits but in the end I think I just decided to keep it true to the time. It’s loose and raw and kind of written free from any idea of a release or a tour or any future to work towards, it was a time of all those things being stripped away and having to face reality and the present. I think that’s why I’ve been anxious to show anyone, it felt a bit too real, a bit too personal. In hindsight after sitting on it for long enough, and having enough distance from that time and that head space, I’m happy for it to exist as it is.

The photo on the cover of Bubble was taken by Jacob McCann; what do you remember most from the day shooting with him? And, what made you go with that image? How is it connected to these songs?

DS: It was at our first annual ODD BALL at Brunswick Ballroom last year. Jacob’s a great photographer, he’s not afraid to give direction and he always pulls something interesting out of his subjects. He spotted that random doorway to nowhere in the green room and got me up there. I just thought it was a striking image that fit with the bubble concept. I always liked cheesy solo album covers with a portrait on them, this is my cheesy solo album moment.

What’s something that you’ve been super into lately that you’d like to share with us?

DS: Mainly hugging my little guy, watching rubby the rubber tree, laying on the floor, learning to crawl. We listen to the Mug record most mornings, it’s his favourite, and mine. And then we listen to Mikey or Cluster & Eno or Gary Numan. We like to get up early and listen to records and let mum sleep in.

What does the rest of the year look like for you both professionally and personally?

DS: Hopefully lots of the aforementioned hugs. This Saturday we’ve got the big double launch with Kosmetika at Northcote Social Club, got Program and Adored on the bill. Last big home headline for the foreseeable but got some tours coming up. Doing a run up the East Coast with Bad//Dreems in June/July. Touring with my other band the Last Drinks, got a new album out this week as well which I’m super excited about. We’re working on new Docs stuff with the band at the moment, polishing a coupla albums worth of songs which I can’t wait to show ya. Some new stuff coming up on Marthouse. Massive thanks to you guys, Bianca & Jhonny, for the support over the years, appreciate you guys heaps and all your do for underground music here in Aus.

Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice’s Bubble out now digitally and on cassette via Marthouse Records HERE. For more info follow @drsuresunusualpractice and @marthouserecords.

Read previous Gimmie X Dr Sure’s chats:

“It’s important to have some kind of light at the end of the tunnel because a lot of what we see in the world today is pretty bleak”

“Being human is a lot to fucking handle”

Cincinnati Punks Choncy: “The DIY punk scene here is ever evolving…”

19th Apr 2023 | gimmiezine

Original photos by Zachary S. Pennington courtesy of Choncy / Handmade mixed media collage by B.

Cincinnati band, Choncy, make sharp, propulsive post-punk, garage, and hardcore-adjacent music. Their debut album Community Chest recently came across our radar and we’ve been giving it a thrashing on the stereo ever since. Inspired by Parquet Courts, Gee Tee, Vintage Crop, and The Coneheads, their fun punk tunes talk about regular day occurrences while having a “rust belt flair. Gimmie got the scoop about all things Choncy from the band – Liam Shaw (guitar/vox), Nathan McVeigh (bass/vox), Simon Schadler (guitar )and Joe Carpenter (drums).

Choncy are from Cincinnati, Ohio; what’s your town like? What are the best and worst bits about it?

CHONCY: Cincinnati is a sprawling city with a tight knit and supportive community. Some of the best bits are the parks in the area and the zoo is pretty sick. We are also overrun with craft breweries so take that as you will. Some of the worst parts of Cincinnati are the dog water infrastructure, the poor quality of public transportation, and they also shot Harambe.

What’s the DIY punk scene like where you are? Who are the bands we should check out?

CHONCY: The DIY punk scene here is ever evolving, new bands come out of the woodwork from the plethora of niche scenes and neighborhoods around the city, combining their influences to create genuine music. Also, Sam Richardson of Feel it Records has moved here which has really kickstarted the scene and put Cincinnati on the map for punk and adjacent. Some bands you should check out are Devils Cross Country, Corker, Spoils, Beef, Louise, and Comando.

In February Choncy released a debut album, Community Chest. Thematically the album explores the trials and tribulations of the modern day workforce culture day-by-day in the Rust Belt; when not making music, what do you each of you do? Liam’s a videographer and editor, and Joe an artist, right?

CHONCY: Joe is indeed an artist; he specifically does freelance graphic design work while he is not working in the meat department at Kroger. Nathan is a mix and master engineer when he is not slinging drinks and pies. Simon is a lighting designer for The Seed, a studio in Brooklyn, NY. Liam does a lot of video editing work including freelance editing for twitch streamers, Poggers.

How did you first discover music?

SIMON: When I was born my dad was playing in the Fairmount Girls, who are still around today, and a handful of other bands in the punk/rock scene in Cincinnati, and my mom was a bass player. So, music has always been a looming factor when growing up, but I distinctly remember Queen’s News of the World being the first album I loved as a kid.

LIAM: I used to make Call of Duty trickshotting montages when I was a kid, so I listened to a lot of dubstep and YouTube rap.

NATHAN: I grew up listening to 70’s and 80’s rock n’ roll because it was the only thing my dad would listen to. I really didn’t start discovering punk and indie music until early high school, the first band was Knuckle Puck, I heard them playing on the speakers in a Zumiez.

JOE: I have never known life without music, but I remember getting my iPod touch in 4^th grade and discovering minor threat, which lead me down the rabbit hole.

What’s an album that has had a big impact? What do you appreciate about it?

LIAM: Light Up Gold – Parquet Courts. Their style of punk resonates a lot with my style. My song ideas are stolen from them basically.

JOE: Songs From The Big Chair – Tears for Fears. I appreciate the excellent song writing, which tackles socio-political topics and turns them into timeless pop songs.

NATHAN: Floating Coffin – Thee Oh Sees. John Dwyer is essential one of my idols for music and that album will never get old. His raw power in the music with cryptic lyrics has and will blow me away.

SIMON: My Love is Cool – Wolf Alice. When I first listened to the record, I was blown away by the layering of complex sounds that are highly chaotic but functional. The album conveys a particular emotion that is hard to describe.

Live photos courtesy of Choncy / by Zachary S. Pennington.

How did you get into making music?

JOE: Started playing guitar at 12, it hurt my hands too much so then I bought a drum set with my birthday money and it just clicked.

LIAM: I have the least experience with music in the band. I picked up guitar like 3 years ago. But I’ve always had a knack for performing on stage because I used to be a ballet dancer so screaming and dancing is what drew me into wanting to be in a band.

NATHAN: I met my dearest friend Drake Hinkle at a minimum wage pizza job in high school, he introduced me to just jamming in a basement with him and his friend. I had never picked up a guitar before that, but I fell in love with the energy and wanted to join in. I started playing with them on a $50 knockoff Walmart Strat and then switched over to a squire P bass I got for my 17^th birthday.

SIMON: I started drums and piano lessons when I was around 6, and like most kids do I ditched the piano for the instrument that matched my desire to be loud and crazy. During the covid lockdown, I was fortunate enough to keep myself sane by teaching myself guitar and bass using my parent’s hand-me-down instruments and learning some casual audio production through friends to write my own songs.

How did all you meet? How did Choncy come into being?

CHONCY: So Choncy was originally just Liam (guitar,vox), Simon (drums), and Nathan (bass). Liam and Simon were both good buddies throughout high school. Coincidentally during our freshman year of college Simon and Nathan lived across the hall from each other and quickly became pals. Fast forward to fall 2021 we cleaned out Nathan’s basement and then boom baby Choncy. Shortly before Simon moved to NYC for the majority of 2022, we met Joe at the GAG & Corker show at Torn Light Records and were able to convince him to take over the drumming role. When Simon moved back to Cincinnati in August, he quickly joined back as the lead guitarist.

Choncy’s first show was a costume party in October 2021 with Red Metaphor and Heat Death; what do you remember about your debut show?

CHONCY: We went with country/western costume theme, everyone thought Simon was a minion and people thought Liam was John Denver. It was in a frat style basement with a makeshift bar and a Keg. It was a great warm up for the show we played the next day in Simon’s garage (another kegger) with our good friends Gool. Kegs on Kegs on Kegs, Joe didn’t come.

Community Chest was recorded in Amish Studios with Joe Tellman in Nashville, Tennessee; what’s’ one of your fondest memories from recording?

CHONCY: The dizzy wizzy burger on the drive through Louisville, and both the Joes indoctrinating Nathan and Liam into the rip-it energy drink culture. Did you know they were the prime energy drink for active United States military personnel in the Iraq war?

What’s one of your favourite songs from Community Chest?

CHONCY: ’Swatted’ is one of our favorites because it’s about a kid getting swatted in a Black Ops II Ranked S&D Standoff match. Joe wrote the bass part even though he couldn’t play it, that shit is disgusting.

What song was the most fun to write?

CHONCY: ’Company Man’ was probably the most fun to write because it was the first song where we fully locked in with Joe as the new drummer. It is arguably our most musically inclined song, lots of substance.

What’s the story behind the album title?

CHONCY: Community Chest is a card you get from the board game monopoly. Even with rampant monopolies in America still existing, nobody gets a community chest card. We also thought it was a good metaphor for the hodgepodge of our sound.

Joe, you do the art for Choncy releases; how did the art for Community Chest come together? Aesthetically were you inspired by anything specific?

JOE: Initially I was inspired by Snooper’s use of a puppet/shtick on stage and so I bought a dummy from Spirit Halloween as the representation of Choncy- a landlord, boss, capitalist, weak willed and dull individual. After a few shows his body was all but entrails of filling and cardboard on the venues floor. This scene inspired me a lot in the creation of the artwork, seeing parallels between the destruction of our bodies for a large game of life in America. A realization of the use of propaganda, fear mongering, physical attachments, and fleeting desires from someone who was once unaware of such a narrative being projected onto them.

In the artwork, I use elements of the monopoly board game, which ties into the album title or vice versa. I use tools of photography, xeroxed images, and illustrations that are mixed digitally with a distorted perspective, collaged outgrowths, and deep manipulation. Those stylistic choices came naturally after a 2-month period of band group chat banter on half-baked artwork which I wouldn’t have come to alone.

When do you feel most creative? Is it ever a challenge for you to create? What helps?

JOE: I don’t have a specific time when I feel most creative, but it comes in waves very unexpectedly. Often when creativity strikes, I start jotting down notes/poetry/song ideas on my phone to create a repository to remind me of my thoughts later on. It is always a challenge, a good exercise for me is the practice of automatic drawing (closing your eyes and drawing intuitively.) This tends to relieve the perfectionist anxiety, as well as exercise.

LIAM: I feel most creative when I am at work or right before I go to bed. I find myself humming melodies and recording voice memos more and more. Yes, if you can’t create its not worth trying to push through the block. It helps to give your brain time; I also get good ideas on my runs.

SIMON: I feel most creative when I can take leisure breaks and when I have no external distractions. Every aspect of my life requires me to be creative in one way or another whether its work, school, or music. As much as I love creating, everyone needs their breaks. I usually cycle through the focus of my creativity. A lot of my creativity is fueled by real world experiences that I can use as inspiration and motivation, especially projects from friends.

NATHAN: I feel the most creative after I get back from someone else’s gig, I get a lot of inspiration from live settings. I struggle with landing on an idea that sounds good in my ear, I tend to be hyper-critical of my own craft but realistically who isn’t? I usually try and take a step away from what I’m doing to clear my ears and head.

If you could move to any city in the world, where would you go?

JOE: New Delhi. Cows are sacred.

SIMON: Amsterdam. If I ride my bicycle into a car, legally it’s their fault.

LIAM: Sydney. Catch me at a Gee Tee show. *Insert hot rod revving noises*

NATHAN: Outskirts of Zürich. The alps look beautiful.

What’s the rest of the year look like for you personally and for Choncy?

NATHAN: The rest of the year is going to consist of me graduating from the university this April and then hopefully landing a studio job or some good freelance work with mixing and mastering in Cincinnati. I am going to keep working on a few side projects I have going but nothing too crazy. Looking forward to doing a lot with my plants and maybe building a garden once it starts to warm up here. Going to be gaming on some gs-go add me on discord and I will buy you awp, spungas#5145.

JOE: Working and creating. My other band Waning has an ep coming out soon. I am trying to turn my music and design side hustle into a main gig. I’ll be moving into my grandparents’ house to help them out, while rebuilding their barn. I plan on using this opportunity to dig into myself and my creative work while enjoying the simple pleasures of life.

SIMON: I graduate from the University of Cincinnati in April and am wrapping up two design competitions as well as a lighting exhibition for Blink. Going to continue working remote full time with my studio and using the extra time to pursue more musical endeavors with a future move back to New York in mind. Might also speedrun the resident evil 4 remake.. we will see.

LIAM: I might start a solo project, getting into synthesizers and digital audio spaces. Trying to get a better paying job. My degree is useless.

CHONCY: We are working on writing more songs, we want to start introducing more sounds into our music and possibly other instruments. We are also working on more visual content for some upcoming releases. We are starting to branch out to other cities for shows. Just had a successful first weekender, hitting Chicago and Bloomington with Pat and the Pissers. There are hopes to do more things like this soon, especially with how well this weekend went. But most importantly we are going to have fun.

Choncy’s Community Chest out now digitally and cassette via Feel It Records – get it HERE. Follow @choncyband and @feelitrecordshop.

Kosmetika: “Dreaming big and being excited about the future”

5th Apr 20235th Apr 2023 | gimmiezine

Original photo courtesy of Kosmetika / handmade mixed media collage by B.

Mysterious art pop project Kosmetika is about to gift us one of the best and brightest contenders for album of the year with new record Illustration. We’re loving the intricate drum machine bops, melodic basslines, memorable synth lines, English/Russian vocals and odd-form structures. Today Gimmie are premiering single ‘Eighty Four’ and caught up with Kosmetika’s driving creative forces Veeka Nazarova and Mikey Ellis to chat about it and the forthcoming album.

We first spoke with you three years ago when your debut album, Pop Soap, came out. Excitingly we’re premiering a single ‘Eighty Four’ from your new record, Illustration; what’s the song about?

VEEKA: ’Eighty Four’ was one of the first tracks that Mikey and I wrote for Illustration. I would say it’s about a love/hate relationship with the Internet. If you were to translate the lyrics from Russian to English it would read quite abstract, sort of like a collage – a bunch of very surrealistic images mashed together, but overall lyrically it does have this slightly creepy feel to it, despite being a very funky upbeat song.

For instance, in one of the verses I’m describing a moment of me reading a book as a kid and vividly imagining all the characters as if they were right in front of me, just this very special feeling when you are connecting with a book on a personal level. Then on the other hand there is a time when the internet becomes more advanced and takes over humanity, so in the lyrics I refer to the Internet as ‘the water cycle effect’, how it all starts from one drop and slowly turns into rain, makes up a river then evaporates and it happens all over again. Throughout the whole song there is a dialogue between one of my favourite book writers of all time Gogol and ‘the kids’ and it’s him trying to get all the kids to stand up against the Internet and stop them from looking at the screens and being miserable. In the end of the song the Internet supposedly crashes forever.

You told us last time that Pop Soap didn’t have a strong concept and was more a collection of ideas; is there a theme or thread lyrically that links these songs?

VEEKA: Yes absolutely, Illustration has a very strong concept to it. It was written within a couple of months and most of the songs were inspired by the idea of diving deep into your subconsciousness, being self-aware, thinking about yourself throughout the time and embracing who you are as an individual. A lot diving into the past and self-reflection. It’s also about dreaming big and being excited about the future in general.

I would recommend listening to Illustration when you are driving/walking through the city on a quiet night. There were a few songs on the album that were influenced by the astounding stillness of the night city in 2020. This crazy feeling when you are walking through empty streets of the night city and it feels like the most comforting place on earth.

We understand that you were unable to work on the music as the five-piece band, and that co-founders Michael and Veeka started working on Illustration as a home recording project; what were some of the best and worst bits doing things this way? Michael recorded it all, right?

VEEKA: I think a lot of bands/artists faced a similar situation when you couldn’t go out and collaborate/write music with other people. We were just lucky to be living in the same house and because we’ve written music together in the past, overall it seemed like a very natural process. The only thing we struggled with was that we couldn’t record the drums for ages, so had to wait in between lockdowns to be able to go into the studio we had at the time.

MIKEY: The best part about doing it during lockdown was that we didn’t really have any other distractions that would normally interfere with writing an album.

That left a lot of room for experimentation and arranging parts etc which has resulted in quite a strange sounding collection of songs!

The worst/hardest part about it was not getting to work through the songs together as a full band.

I think it would’ve sounded quite different if we’d all been able to work together on the songs but it’s a nice little snapshot of that moment in time – what a bizarre moment in time it was!

What’s your preferred way to write a song?

VEEKA: Usually one person comes up with a concept for the song and then we try to work on it together. Sometimes both of us would have a more solid song idea and the other person just adds a few things to it, it really depends. On this particular album I came up with a basic concept for most of the songs and Mikey shaped them into more finished ideas, doing a lot of the production and arrangement for the songs.

Unlike the previous album that had dual lead vocals, Veeka only sings on this one; are there any different things you’ve been able to explore with in relation to your voice this time?

VEEKA: There are a lot of alternations between spoken word and singing on Illustration, I definitely enjoyed focusing on the spoken word bit and getting it perfect.

Veeka, you sing in English and your native tongue of Russian; do you feel more comfortable singing in either? Why is it important for you to sing in your native language?

VEEKA: I love singing in both languages, it’s honestly a challenge to be able to do both, especially when it switches between the languages in the same song, sometimes my brain gets overloaded and I blank haha but I love the challenge.

I guess I like the idea of singing in a foreign language because it’s very unique and unusual. I believe it gives people some space to focus on the music first, yet at the same time gets the audience intrigued about the meaning of the lyrics. I like to give people the option to translate the lyrics or not, so there is more room for personal interpretation.

What is one of your favourite moments on the new record? Can you give us a little insight into it?

VEEKA: I really enjoyed experimenting with a drum machine and the new synthesisers we bought at the time.

MIKEY: One of my favourite moments on the album is the instrumental track “Institute of Kosmetika”. The song just kind of appeared out of nowhere and one of the main percussion instruments on the track is an empty wooden wine box.

I like to think of the song as a sort of intermission moment in the middle of the album. A palate cleanser perhaps?

What’s the story behind the album title, Illustration?

VEEKA: I participated in this HTRK album title competition back in 2019. They’ve asked people to come up with a name for the new album and the best three names could win tickets to their show. My name was shortlisted and in the end it was my suggested name or the other person’s name. They decided to go with someone else’s title which was ‘Venus in Leo’ instead of mine which was… sIllustration’ 🙂 – so it was sort of stuck with us and we chose to use it for our album.

We love the album’s art by Mikhail Nazarov!

VEEKA: Mikhail Nazarov is my father and he is a very talented artist. Mikhail is a huge Kosmetika fan and he asked me if he could draw an album cover for us. We love his work so much so of course we said yes! We’ve always known it’s gonna be called Illustration so having a hand drawn cover was important to us. We sent Mikhail the demos and he drew the funny robot-like face which we thought was fantastic for the Illustration cover!

What have you been listening to a lot lately? Who are some bands people should check out?

VEEKA: I have been listening to a lot of Eastern European new wave/synth wave plus some experimental Japanese synth albums from the 80s. Artists like Kate NV, Yasuaki Shimizu, Ryuichi Sakamoto ,Yellow Magic Orchestra. Oh and also Mong Tong who are from Taiwan!

MIKEY: I’ve been listening to Vera Ellens new album a lot over the last few days – it’s awesome – it came out last week I think on Flying Nun? She’s an incredible musician/songwriter from NZ and has two other amazing albums which I would highly recommend checking out.

Also been listening to a lot of the Go-Go’s and Melbourne’s magnificent Cool Sounds.

What’s the rest of the year look like for you personally and Kosmetika?

MIKEY: We are planning on playing heaps of shows around Australia and work on some new ideas of course!

VEEKA: Yeah, personally I think we just wanna get better jobs and record as much new music as we can!

Kosmetika’s Illustration out April 21 on vinyl and digitally via Spoilsport Records – GET IT HERE. Follow @kosmetikamuzika_ and @spoilsportrecords

Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie Zine

Author: gimmiezine