Orstralia: A Comprehensive Guide To Australian Punk History

16th Jul 2024 | gimmiezine

Titled after a track on The Saints’ classic second album Eternally Yours, Naarm/ Melbourne author and musician, Tristan Clark’s books: Orstralia: A Punk History 1974–1989 and Orstralia: A Punk History 1990–1999 narrate the evolution of Australian punk from its underground inception in the ’70s and the emergence of hardcore in the ’80s to its commercial ascent in the ’90s. Clark’s comprehensive volumes delve beyond the music, exploring cultural and sociological contexts. Enriched with interviews from an extensive list of artists including The Saints, Radio Birdman, Boys Next Door/Birthday Party, Babeez/News, Victims, Leftovers, Fun Things, Zero, Psycho Surgeons, X, Depression, Hard-Ons, pioneering all-female artists Gash and the Mothers, Cosmic Psychos, Grong Grong, The Living End, Bodyjar, Frenzal Rhomb, and many more. The story is covered city-by-city, as well as significant regional centres, providing an unprecedented account of Australian punk history.

Gimmie spoke to Tristan about his 8-year-in-the-making project, how he used his discontent from a customer service job to start the project, his punk rock origins, and of the tragedy and triumphs he documented of the people that create Australian punk.

You’ve been involved in the Australian punk community for about 30 years. Your books, Orstralia: A Punk History 1974 – 1989 and Orstralia: A Punk History 1990-1999 are about to be released; how are you feeling?

TRISTAN CLARK: I’d like to say relief; it’s been such a lengthy process. It’s still hard to fathom that it will be out there. There are still all manner of things to do around it: I have to post a lot of stuff. I guess the perception is, ‘All done, it’s out,’ but there’s still a lot to do. It was probably approaching eight years from when I first started the book till its release. Admittedly, I finished writing it quite a while ago, but I was just waiting for it to get published. It was a glacial pace, almost probably worse than releasing punk records.

How did you first discover punk?

TC: I saw a skate film called Gleaming The Cube (1989). There’s a scene where he [Christian Slater as Brian Kelly, a 16-year-old skateboarder] puts on headphones and it’s D.R.I. playing. You know what D.R.I. are, such an intense experience. I had no frame of reference for it at the time. It was kind of terrifying, yet simultaneously alluring. Back then, obviously, you didn’t have the means of identifying and procuring that kind of music. So it passed me by.

A few years later, a friend acquired a tape, someone had passed on to him on the bus at school and then in turn he passed it on to me. Immediately, I could connect it back to that music that I’d heard previously. On that tape I recall first hearing Poison Idea ‘Feel The Darkness’. Needless to say that led me down a, an unforeseen dark path, pardon the pun.

Have you always sort of lived in Naam/Melbourne?

TC: I was born in Tasmania, but we moved here when I was six. My recollections are all pretty much Melbourne.

What were you like growing up?

TC: I was a pretty introverted, quiet kid. As to how I developed an interest in punk music, that’s a pretty uninteresting one. My upbringing was largely suburban middle-class normalcy, so there’s nothing notable to speak of. It was all good family, sports, and a good school. A lot of underage drinking, which later lent itself to punk. But I was kind of wary of the traditional life patterns that I was seeing around me. There was some sort of internal urge to break from that. I didn’t have a clear vision of why, but I was always aware that I was a bit different, internally, from most of the people I knew. I was also lucky in that, I didn’t struggle socially at school. That difference over the years has probably seen me perceived as a little snobbish at times. Really it was an awkwardness and introversion, which I came to realise later that’s quite pervasive amongst punks.

How did you find your local scene?

TC: I was pretty fortunate in that a kid at school, he was either playing in a band or he was really attuned to what was going on and he would put up fliers around the school. There was a noted all-ages venue that was close to where we lived that was part of the circuit touring bands or even international bands would play. I saw Fugazi, NOFX, and Propagandhi there. There was a big all-ages scene at that time really thriving, it went deep into the suburbs. There’d be 100s of kids attending shows in suburban halls. It was also very unregulated back then, which made it even more enjoyable. This was from ’92 onwards.

There’s some younger bands at the moment that are making a real conscious effort to put on all-ages shows. In Melbourne, given that we have a huge scene here, there’s always been a conscious desire to put on shows away from licensed venues, there’s a consistent history of shows in unconventional spaces, like under bridges and in disused buildings. There was one put on a couple of years ago in a tall office block right on Southbank overlooking the city. We’re sitting in this plush boardroom with our feet up on the desks. It was quite incredible till the cops came shut it down.

I’ve seen video online of some cool shows in Naarm, like the shows Christina Pap from Swab puts on in drains.

There’s been some really incredible ones of those, more often not involving the police as well. They’re just great, that kind of thing, especially as a young person would be so enthralling.

How has punk influenced your life? I know you’ve played in a lot of different bands: Bloody Hammer, Infinite Void, Deconsume, and more. I have some of your records.

TC: These kinds of aspects are just not things that I ponder. It’s interesting. You spend three decades of your life immersed in something without really giving much consideration to what the reason for your motivations are—at least, I don’t.

My background was more in the political scene, really quite explicitly, explicitly political, and that was very much entwined with activism. Therefore, a lot of stuff, even, I have to admit like a lot of zines and writing about punk just seemed of secondary importance to me, like frivolous navel gazing. I was more into dense political reading. As you get older, you get a bit less dogmatic and allow space to investigate these things.

When I was young, following high school, I was studying graphic design. I was promptly kicked out and banned from that. At that stage, I developed this budding political awareness through punk. I saw my future in an advertising agency, which was something that I couldn’t really reconcile with my very undeveloped anti-capitalism views back then. So then I went off to study politics, but that was very quickly subsumed by bands and touring and I dropped out.

Punk has come to permeate every facet of my life. At times I feel like I’m a relic in that still rigidly set in those ideals. I’m not inflexible, but maybe I am [laughs]. I’m still very much interested in politics. I still love the music and frequent shows regularly. My social circle is still primarily punks and my socialising does tend to be shows. There’s not even the thought of going away or pursuing something else. It’s been such a constant and all-encompassing to my life. Especially the last eight years spending every spare moment writing about it.

In the ‘About the Author’ section of your book it says you’re an educator; are you a teacher?

TC: A classroom aid. I work at a non-mainstream high school, a small community high school that’s traditionally attracted a lot of students who would be considered freaks and weirdos. Of course, there’s been numerous punks amongst them. There are kids that have played in bands. It’s interesting that we have a large proportion of students who are neurodivergent. There’s a number of punks amongst them, and it became quite evident to me from this and through my research and interviewing, just how sizeable that segment of people who have been attracted to punk are neurodivergent. But that probably hasn’t really been recognised or acknowledged.

I noticed that reading your books. I remember quotes from Link Meanie talking about mental illness. I had no idea he struggled with that. I learned a lot of new stuff from your book. I think his talking about that will make a lot of people feel seen and maybe not so alone. I think your books are going to start lots of conversations, which is really great.

TC: It was interesting how intimate that interview was. I’ve never met the guy, but we totally revered him as teenagers. It was surprising that a lot of people I’d never met face-to-face, once you get into conversation, how much they were willing to reveal. Really personal, even traumatic stuff at times.

Tragedy is a big theme throughout the book. At times it’s so brutal. Like, when Ed Wreckage from The Leftovers was talking about his band and said a couple of people in the band committed suicide and others died of cancer. Ultimately, Ed passed away before the book came out.

TC: That is definitely one of the overarching themes, sadly. But, you know, as someone like yourself, who’s been around for that long, you’ve seen all that firsthand. I was having a conversation with one of the first punks I ever knew this morning, and we were talking about how many people we know who are dead.

I gave the book to my dad to read before I signed off on the final edits. I was like, ‘Oh, what’d you think?’ His first response was, ‘A lot of dead people.’ That was quite jarring. The other day, I catalogued how many people I interviewed that are now past, I made a post about it to acknowledge those people. It’s a dozen. 12 out of 200, is kind of staggering. I don’t think it’s necessarily exclusive to punk, but they’re not lifestyles that are given to temperance or longevity.

I understand that you got started with your books because you said you were unhappy working a job in customer service and you were kind of looking for some purpose or some meaning.

TC: I was disgruntled with where that side of my life was going. In terms of my creativity or my social life, I couldn’t fault it, but my professional life didn’t really exist. I was working this crushing customer service job. And then I just happened to reread, Inner City Sound by Clinton Walker. It’s a cool book, but it’s very limited in what it documents. Seeing other books from places that were being published, it became evident that there was nothing that could be considered comprehensive that had come out of Australia. There’s a lot of other projects and books from here, but a lot of them tended to consign themselves to a specific place or time or a limited number of bands. I felt there was a glaring gap that someone needed to fill. I saw myself as that idiot that was going to undertake that project [laughs].

People pointed out to me along the way, ‘Oh yeah, you know, so -and -so tried’ or ‘Many people have begun but never saw it through to fruition.’

Congratulations on finishing it! It’s a big achievement. Before you started doing interviews for this book, had you done interviews before?

TC: No. When I started, I really had no formula. It was really spontaneous. It very quickly fell into more of a conversational form, which lent itself to drawing out a lot more of those deeper and intimate responses from people. That was the positive side of it. The negative is, you have to go back and transcribe bloody two hours of tape that you’ve just done, waffling on to each other.

Who was the first interview?

TC: A friend of mine. He played in Thought Criminals in the late-70s. They’re one of the more noted bands of that time. Their record’s quite revered. So then I felt that I could use that as leverage with other people, like, ‘Oh, well I’ve interviewed this band, I’d like to interview you.’ Amazingly people were so forthcoming and placed trust in me. I was a random guy with this big claim that I was going to write this great book! People didn’t really question that, they were willing to offer me their time. I’m forever thankful for that.

What were the things that you were most interested in finding out about from the people you spoke with?

TC: Initially, it was more to do with the band details and minutia but it quickly became evident that wasn’t the interesting aspect. It was more people’s stories. Obviously, you want the humorous anecdotes that will get people to pick it up but I found people’s personal lives were more compelling than often the music itself. People had these really rich lives either adjacent to punk or after punk. I began to really try and capture that aspect.

I remember one interview I did with one of the guys from Last Words, it had gone on for an hour and a half. We got to the end of it and he happened to mention in passing that he was now a pastor. I’m like, ‘Oh, sorry, we’re gonna have to go back and unpack how you get from playing in a punk band in the Western suburbs of Sydney in the late-70s, living in a migrant hostel, to now being a man of the cloth. There’s a lot in-between here that I need to know about.

Any other really memorable stories or even ones that didn’t make it into the book you could share?

TC: You had really polished performers like Jay from Frenzel Rhomb or Russ from Cosmic Psychos, who have honed their interview skills over many years. They have a wealth of anecdotes to humour you with. But often it was the really unassuming ones that you went into with very little detail about their band or their lives and you’d come out of it and just be like, oh wow! That was so rich and fulfilling, or maybe traumatic as well.

I made a conscious effort… bands like The Saints and Birdman, obviously everyone’s heard Ed [Kuepper]’s story, ad nauseam, same with Deniz Tek and Rob Younger, but I made an explicit point of tracking down other members of the bands that could offer a different perspective. I spoke to drummer Ivor Hay. I said to him, ‘Oh, has anyone ever interviewed you?’ He’s like, ‘Outside of the documentary? No. No one’s ever talked to him about the band.’ It’s quite different to that standardised narrative that you get from Ed.

I think that the thing that makes The Saints’ story extraordinary is, when you look at the Ramones and The Damned, you’re talking these great cultural centres of London and New York. Then you talk of the Saints you’re talking about Oxley, that was the most conservative and stifling environment. Their message more spoke to suburban alienation and monotony, and that oppressiveness that was ever-present to people in Brisbane, transgressive or, buck the norm at that time.

Was there anyone that you wanted to find for the book that you couldn’t?

TC: A few people. Especially women it seemed were reluctant to share their stories. I could only speculate whether there’s trauma or an unwillingness to revisit that aspect of their lives. I’m not sure.

I was hoping there would be more women featured in your book, but I do understand the reluctance of women to participate. I wanted to include a lot more women in my own book because there have always been women involved in punk, and I know that there is a feeling that we often get written out of the story. As a woman in punk myself, it’s very, very important, but many I asked didn’t want to speak for it or ignored my request. I wanted to ask you about it because some people may see your book and complain there aren’t enough women, but what they don’t see is how many people you may have asked. It wasn’t through lack of trying on your behalf.

TC: That’s how I feel. Given the extensiveness of my research, I couldn’t uncover too much—it still is uniformly white and male. But then the proportion of women that I did get is reflective of the numbers of performers. Ideally, I would have liked more. I’m scared of that critique. But I did try. My book would probably be close to like 10% women.

I really appreciated all their contributions and the perspective they gave.

TC: For the most part, they were positive. There’s probably periods through the 80s where that real masculinist sort of thing was dominant, especially during the hardcore era.

It’s still that way to a degree. The hardcore scene, more so than the punk scene.

TC: That’s probably not something that I’m too exposed to. But within that more politicised scene that I tend to still be involved with, it’s changed so much and it’s fantastic. There’s always going to be problems, issues, but there’s been a definite attempt to rectify things and people are quite vocal about confronting issues and certain attitudes.

Your books are named after The Saints’ song ‘Orstralia’. When in the process did you realise that was going to be the title?

I originally had the title of Gobbin’ on Life. If you look through the content it seems quite suited, but then I had, especially some older men, questioning it. Even people that weren’t involved in the project were like, ‘Oh, that’s a dumb name.’

It can be scary putting stuff like this out into the world. People love to critique and judge.

TC: I am anticipating some backlash. I had an article in the City Hub the other day and they titled it: The Rise and Fall of Punk. I never made mention of a fall at all. He was an old school journo, he wrote shorthand. When I read the feature I felt sick. That’s not what I said. No, no. And then I stopped reading it. I thought that hopefully no one will see it, and then some people started sharing it on the internet. I guess I’m just going to have to live with it.

Are there any punk books that have made an impact on you?

TC: A lot of books are strictly oral histories. They’re still fascinating and have great anecdotes, but they then tend to lack context. I really wanted to sort of be able to place punk within its political and social and economic context within Australia.

I’ve read a few books, John Savage’s England’s Dreaming, that’s the classic. But beyond that, not a lot of them. I probably read, Please Kill Me years ago. I was always more into political writing.

I really liked that your book went beyond the major cities scenes and bands.

TC: That was a very conscious effort to do so. It is hard to excavate that history from outside the city centres. It took quite a bit of effort, but if I was trying to tout something as a comprehensive history, I had to do that. It was fascinating to hear about bands that never amounted to much in a conventional sense. A lot of them only ever played a small number of faltering shows, but they had some great stories that accompanied them.

I tracked down The Rejects who were the first punk band in Rockhampton in the late-70s. They were staggered that someone knew about them, let alone wanted to ask them some questions. They played one show ever at their high school graduation.

I noticed at the beginning of your book, in the preface, you said that some of the views expressed in the book don’t necessarily align with your own values. Reading through the book I was alarmed to come across the views of a particular band from Western Australia.

TC: Yeah.

Was it hard to sit there and hear these things during an interview?

TC: I didn’t actually give him any allowance to express any sort of repugnant views. I really stuck to the music, but he’s still, as far as I’m aware, a neo-Nazi.

People probably, they’ll find that contentious that I included people like that. You know, there are a couple of neo-Nazis that I interviewed or former neo-Nazis, and people will find that problematic. But I’m like, well, I don’t want to hide all these distasteful aspects of punk, I think I have to include it. Perhaps that requires me to speak to people that I never would otherwise – I find their views horrifying – to give the full picture. But yeah, that was a pretty interesting one. We did the interview and nothing distasteful was said and it was polite enough, but then he said, ‘Oh, the guitarist in my current band is now living in Melbourne. You should like meet up with him.’ And I was just really evasive, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure.’ Then he keeps calling me. I do’t want him to think somehow that we’re friends or maybe that I have some sort of sympathy to his views. I’m really polite. I’m not going to be like, ‘Fuck off.’ Eventually I stopped answering and that was the end of the correspondence, thankfully.

There’s people in the book that I included that I’m aware of things that they’ve perpetrated that makes me feel really uncomfortable, and especially uncomfortable meeting them in-person or speaking to them. I had to put that part aside, just say, ‘Look, this is your purpose, to try and glean information from them, to give a fuller sort of history.’ There’s a difficulty in that when I know what you’ve done in your past. Like, with the singer from Bastard Squad. I’m kind of scared that what I’ve written, not that I wrote anything that isn’t true in there, you know, most of that, aside from killing his girlfriend; he didn’t want to talk about that. But there’s a lot of sort of unsavoury elements in his life.

One thing about making the book… it’s interesting how people can oscillate between extremities, like especially people that, you know, found themselves as neo-Nazis and then could have sort of this ‘Road to Damascus’ moment and atone for that by then turning into ardent pacifist anarchists. And that they’re able to somehow make that switch. It’s like the same energy, but the opposite way. Like I said, my thinking is still fairly rigid and very much sort of in line with what it was 20 odd years ago.

Is there anything you learnt about yourself throughout the whole process?

TC: Probably more so the aspect about the neurodivergence, but that also coincided with my job as well that I started working. I was like, oh, you know, these certain things resonate with my own behaviours as well. But, beyond that, no, I’m not sure. Maybe I guess a patience and resilience that I wasn’t aware that I had. I felt at times that I was doing what was almost effectively informal counselling for some of people.

I’ve gone into a role at work where you take on this wellbeing role. So whether you know that ability to sort of sit and listen to people and really empathise with them. Maybe that in part really honed by interviewing so many damn people and listening to the often troubling stories and thoughts.

Anything else you want people to know about your book?

TC: I guess, weirdly, it feels like maybe some sort of semblance of reflection on it, and this might sound contrived, but it almost feels like an offering to the people and scene that’s given me so much.

I’ve speculated so many times about, what my trajectory might have been if I stayed that suburban stoner kid. I can’t imagine it to have been a tenth of the experiences I’ve got to enjoy because of punk.

Punk, it’s permeated, fashion, art, more mainstream music, that’s undeniable. It’s imprint on Australian culture is surprisingly much larger than what you would think for something that has mostly being fairly marginal, aside from brief periods of sort of prominence. It’s something that’s probably not been duly acknowledged.

Buy the books at PM Press (worldwide) or from Orstralia (Australia).

Artist and Split System bassist, Deon Slaviero: ‘Looking for new ways to approach creating… keeps the process fresh and interesting.’

27th May 202427th May 2024 | gimmiezine

Original photo: Jhonny Russell / handmade collage by B.

Split System bassist, Deon Slaviero’s creative journey began in childhood, inspired by his brother’s guitar sessions. He started playing music himself in high school, forming bands and collaborating with friends. His love for art grew alongside his passion for music, influenced by the dark, bold imagery of heavy metal album covers and the chaotic style of street artists. Additionally, the warped, monstrous characters from cartoons fuelled his creative vision. These diverse influences continue to shape Deon’s distinctive artistic style. He creates artwork for releases, shirts & posters, for bands including EXEK, Screensaver, Autobahns, C.O.F.F.I.N, Stiff Richards, Grade 2, Unknowns, Cong, Ghoulies, Lothario, Private Function, Civic, and more—basically, everyone!

Gimmie caught up with Deon to explore his art, creative process, influences, challenges, and future plans—it’s exciting, and we can’t wait for it to manifest.

Also, we got him to choose songs he’s been listening to on repeat for our CRAFTY CUTS selections. He chose a track from a local band who he recently saw live that were fire! A track that’s his go-to when creating. There’s also his go-to track for creating, a gem from a 1978/79 Brisbane/Meanjin punk band, and a favourite from a local band whose entire discography he loves. Additionally, he selected a track from a band blending Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and T-Rex, a standout German punk band, and favourites from Sydney/Gadigal and Melbourne/Naarm bands.

Why is it important to you to make art?

DEON SLAVIERO: Making art is somewhat meditative for me, once I get into a flow with an idea I’m completely absorbed by it – it’s a nice space to be in. It’s also a really good activity to shut off from a hectic schedule and hang out with the creative part of my brain for a bit.

How did you first become interested in music and art? What kinds of things did you find yourself drawn to?

DS: As a kid I remember my brother playing guitar at home and bashing around with his mates in our shed. I always thought it looked like heaps of fun and wanted to be involved. I started noodling on the guitars he had lying about and just fluffed around till something eventually sounded okay. In high school (around Year 8) I started hanging with some crew who were into similar music to me and jamming with them. I’ve stuck to that approach which has given me the opportunity to collaborate with some really inspiring musicians and make some great friends over the years.

My interest in art kind of coincided with my interest in music, in my early teens I was introduced to a bunch of bands on the heavier side (Diamond Head, Mortal Sin, Venom, Dead Kennedys, Slayer, Metallica, Misfits, Motorhead, Iron Maiden) which all had bold and iconic album covers usually including some kind of mortal decay paired with bold illustrated logos. Discovering these bands and the associated imagery really resonated with me and sparked my interest in horror/darker leaning imagery.

Did you have a favourite artist growing up? What do you appreciate about them?

DS: As a kid I was always drawn to animation, in particular Aaahh!!! Real Monsters which featured all these bent monster characters usually with multiple limbs and warped faces – Gromble and Ickis are my favourites. ARM is great for inspiration when illustrating.

As I got into my teens I was drawn to street art. One artist that stood out to me was Neck Face, I love all his line work, bold colours and how chaotic his ghoul characters look. I also draw heaps of inspo from his work.

When and how did you first begin making art?

DS: I remember loving drawing as a kid. Mum always encouraged creativity in the household, I remember her teaching me how to draw Disney characters and always having art supplies around to tinker with. Towards the back end of high school I found a deeper interest in art and started to develop more of a style.

As for what I’m making now, that kind of came out of just making art for myself and mates musical projects and it’s snowballed from there.

You studied at RMIT; was formal study helpful to your art practice in anyway?

DS: After studying at RMIT I actually stopped practicing art for a while, I think the structure of study stifled my creativity/drive and I shifted my creative energy to making music. Now that I’m back to practicing art on a daily basis I definitely draw a lot from what I learned about spacial awareness and composition and weaving in and out of those ‘guidelines’ to try and create something visually interesting.

Can you tell us a little about your art workspace?

DS: Currently I’m set up in my spare room at home which doubles as my music studio. Amongst guitars, amps and keyboards are a few old scanner/printers and a bookshelf filled with my collection of reference books. The dream is to set up a shared creative space with a music studio and have the room to do some more large scale works and printing.

We admire your unique art style, particularly your striking posters, flyers, and album artwork. Your distinctive aesthetic is easily recognisable. Could you share some of the key inspirations behind it?

DS: Thank you so much! I’m stoked you’re liking it.

I’m really interested in creating movement/flow through the interplay of layering shapes and creating a storyline through that. I generally find shape inspiration through everyday objects around me, observing my surroundings whilst going for a walk or ride. I think the inner city marriage of organic and man made structures creates a unique landscape through the interplay of dissonant and complementary shapes.

I am also an avid collector of old printed material, specifically fan zines, travel guides, coupons, instructional material and classified sections. Distorted and aged print just looks so gritty and has heaps of depth, I love it. Old booklets and brochures can sometimes have some real quirky taglines which can also spark up an idea for me.

Has your style changed over time?

DS: I’m constantly trying to evolve my style and explore new ideas. Looking for new ways to approach creating and coming up with a concept keeps the process fresh and interesting.

I used to be caught up in making more concise and cleaner works, letting go of that has allowed me to be more free within what I’m making and just trust the process rather than being too calculated from outset. Sometimes the little mistakes can make a piece stand out and lead to more ideas.

What mediums and techniques do you enjoy working with most? Are there any downsides to the mediums you choose?

DS: Collage, cut ups and mixed media are the techniques I enjoy working with most, I love my scanners and photocopiers. Collaging, scanning and digital processing can be laborious but I do think the end result is worth the yakka.

Are there particular motifs that you’ll never get tired of using in your work? Do they have a special significance to you?

DS: I always try to base my work around a central character that ties into the subject of the work. Depending on the imagery I use, whether it be photographs or illustrations, these elements can really set the tone for the work, create a narrative and dictate how I choose to lay out the composition.

I really enjoy artwork that looks striking on first glance and at closer inspection more elements pop out and send your eyes on a journey around the page – that’s what I’m ultimately trying to achieve through my work.

What do you find most challenging about making art?

DS: Self-doubt in my output is definitely something I struggle with. I‘m super critical of my work which can be stifling at times, especially longer lasting work like record covers and merch. Posters are good in the sense that they only exist for a small period of time. I like how they are somewhat disposable so it takes the pressure off allowing me to be more experimental.

Can you tell us about the best and worst bits of doing commissions making art for someone else?

DS: I really enjoy collaborating with the clients I work with, workshopping visual ideas and concepts really helps the process and gets the best results. Bringing someone’s idea/vision to life and seeing their reaction is so rewarding.

The worst part would be trying to balance my commission work with other parts of my life, there are a lot of moving parts at the moment so it can be tricky to balance at times. I wouldn’t change anything though, it keeps me on my toes and I love what I do.

What’s one of the pieces that you’ve had the most fun making? What did you enjoy about the process?

DS: Probably the ‘Whip Around Melb’ poster for Split System – I had heaps of fun creating the Speed Demon character and the piece has a good balance of hand drawn, scanned collage and digital elements. The band ended up using this imagery for some T-Shirts and as a backdrop for our Golden Plains set which was animated, it was so cool to see the little devil dude bouncing around on the big screen.

What’s some of the best advice you’ve ever gotten in relation to making art, and who gave it to you?

DS: Advice from my high school art teacher which has stuck is: ‘Try to create something new everyday, you never know what might come out’. I think it’s a great habit to be in and has helped me develop some ideas I’m really proud of.

What’s next on your ‘to-make’ list?

DS: Ahhh, there are so many things to do!!

Planning to screen print a few of my own t-shirt designs which I have been meaning to do for a while. I’ve just got a few screens made so I’ll be printing some tees soon!

I’ve been working on putting a zine together which will be purely illustrations and little comics mostly drawn whilst sitting in the van during my two month stint touring Europe with Split System and Bad Dreems last year. I’m keen to showcase some of my art that is 100% hand drawn and not digitally manipulated.

Split System is taking some time off gigs over the next couple months to work on some new music which I’m really excited about. It’s always great creating some noise with my Splitties brothers and I’m really looking forward to what we cook up next.

What do you like to get up to when not making art?

DS: When I’m not making art I’m usually playing bass with Split System and Bad Dreems. Other than that hanging out with my partner doing some wholesome outdoor exploring.

I also really enjoy music research and finding some gems from the past. Recently I’ve been deep diving into the NTS radio archive finding some focus shows. Here are a couple playlists I’ve been enjoying: ‘POST PUNK BRITAIN: IN FOCUS – THROBBING GRISTLE’ and ‘OUTSIDER OLDIES – HOZAC ARCHIVAL SPECIAL’.

Anything else you’d like to share with Gimmie readers?

DS: DM for commissions!

Plus, Deon’s CRAFTY CUTS selections:

Future Suck: ‘Hell For Leather’

Buddies from Melbourne. This track hits so hard and Rhys’ guitar solo in this rips. Their set at the Legless/Rack Off – Total Tote Takeover gig recently was on fire.

The Cleaners From Venus: ‘Living On Nerve Ends’

The Cleaners are a newish discovery for me. Martin Newell’s output of jangly lo-fi pop tunes with clever one liners is in great abundance. Cleaners are always my go to when I’m doing some artwork.

Exek – ‘The Lifeboats’

I love all of Exek’s output, so it’s hard to pick one song. The Lifeboats is one I’ve had on rotation a lot lately, hits some NEU! and Brian Eno (another green world era) areas which I really dig.

Fun Things – ‘Savage’

Brisbane band from 78/79, this one is an Aussie punk rock nugget.

Buzzcocks – ‘Breakdown’

From their Spiral Scratch release with Howard Devoto on vox. I love how raw and bratty these songs sound.

Listen HERE.

Lafff Box – ‘Talking’

Nothin’ like some fast German punk. Lafff Box rule and their whole S/T is great – quirky, catchy and hardcore, all the good stuff.

Peace de Resistance – ‘Heard Your Voice’

This track is my favourite from PDR’s Bits and Pieces LP. The record is like a mix of all the bits I love about Lou Reed – Rock N Roll Animal, Iggy Pop – The Idiot and T̤.̤R̤ex ̤- ̤̤Electric W̤a̤r̤r̤i̤o̤r̤̤. PDR has a knack for making songs that sound so familiar and nostalgic but fresh at the same time. I’m also a big fan of their other projects, Institute and Glue.

The Velvet Underground – ‘White Light/White Heat’

Post Warhol VU. This track is so gritty and groovy, I really love the constant piano and claps throughout the track. Feels like they were trying to get back to basics on this release and keep things gritty/stripped back compared to the debut which was a lot warmer sounding.

Listen HERE.

The Judges – ‘The House Always Wins’

Relatively new Melbourne band with some shredders on the tools, this track streams along nicely from start to finish.

Gee Tee – ‘Pigs In The Pit’

I was a little late to party with Sydney punx Gee Tee but after catching them at Binic Festival last year I was a convert. I love that their songs aren’t too serious but seriously rock. The Pigs In The Pit chorus line is a real earworm too.

Check out Deon’s work @deonslaviero + find and listen to his band Split System out via Legless Records.

CONVERSATIONS WITH PUNX – Bob Vylan: ‘Recognising the power that you hold as an individual, and what we can do with that power as a collective.’

27th May 2024 | gimmiezine

UK grime-punks Bob Vylan stand tall, casting a bold and unyielding light upon the world with their new album, Humble As The Sun. They’re one of punk’s most vital voices right now— with their rallying cry for empowerment, championing a sense of revolutionary self-love, and their ever-present foundation of nurturing and growing community. They inspire us to dream big, persevere through hardship, and channel our anger for positive change. The sentiment that we have to heal, be strong in ourselves first and then we can be strong together permeates the album. It also dissects toxic masculinity, discusses colonisation, police brutality, racism, wealth inequality, and exploitation in the music industry—as always, they say what needs to be said.

Gimmie caught up with Bobby Vylan, the band’s vocalist, guitarist, and producer, for a fascinating insight into the album and their creative process. The conversation delves deep into topics like spirituality and life-changing moments. Additionally, we learn about Bobby’s early beat-making experiences on Playstation’s Music 2000, his love for Shakespeare, their commitment to the DIY ethos, and his experience walking in this year’s London’s Fashion Week.

BOBBY VYLAN: Music is a creative outlet. I really don’t know what I would do without it, to be honest. It’s been a constant throughout my life as a way to express myself. A way for me to communicate how I feel about certain things. It’s important to me because it keeps me sane, to a certain degree; it keeps me here.

You’ve been making music for a long time, even before Bob Vylan, you were making music through Music 2000 on PlayStation.

BV: Yeah. Exactly. I’ve been making music for a long time, in various different forms, various different degrees of seriousness, by which I took it. I was introduced to software, games, and stuff that allowed me to make music, get into creating beats and backing tracks, and then I got into writing lyrics. I started recording and getting into mixing, exploring the more technical aspects of creating music. It’s been an ongoing journey; it’s still ongoing in terms of learning the guitar, being able to play that more proficiently; and even my mixing ability, to be able to mix tracks and get them to a point where they’re ready for the public to hear.

I know that you completely love to explore things and lose yourself in them. What have you been losing yourself in lately?

BV: To be honest, I’ve been losing myself in life a lot lately because there’s been so much going on. Things have presented themselves; they’ve come up, and I’ve thrown myself into it, which is good, but also tricky because I have to find time for myself. With this album coming out there’s so much to do on the business side of things. We have tours, festivals, TV appearances, and all kinds of things that have come up as the band gets bigger. On top of that, there’s been normal personal life change as well, which is quite beautiful, especially as it happens as the seasons change.

Because I’ve been throwing myself into life, I haven’t been making a ton of music; I’ve been experiencing life. It’s important because it gives me something to write about later on. You can fall into a dangerous trap of not living life as an artist. You need to live life in order to have something to write about; I write about personal experience so much.

Yeah, it’s helpful for artists to realise that it’s all part of the process.

BV: Exactly.

Your new album, Humble as the Sun, still feels political like your previous work, but to me, it also feels like a spiritual album in a way.

BV: For sure. It’s political purely because my existence as a Black man is somewhat politicised in the country that I reside in and in so many countries that we travel to. Naturally, it’s because of that. Again, I’m writing about personal experience, so it’s bound to have a political aspect to it.

With this album, we definitely wanted it to feel more uplifting and empowering. A spirituality aspect is needed for that: to believe in yourself, to feel as though you hold some sense of power; recognising the power that you hold as an individual, and what we can do with that power as a collective. It’s definitely a lot more spiritual than the other albums, for sure.

This is because of the space that I was in when creating the album, both physically in terms of the studio space that I was afforded to use and mentally. I had worked so long and hard to get to a position where I could make music, and this could be my life. So it would have felt disingenuous to to only talk about hardship and not talk about overcoming that hardship. There is a lot of hardship that I overcame in order to be able to do what I’m doing and I want to address that.

I get that, especially as a Blak Indigenous woman myself. When we make art, people often expect us to create from our trauma. Sometimes, obviously, that’s important for us to do for ourselves and our community. But I think it’s revolutionary and healing in another way to write about our joy as well.

BV: Absolutely! I completely agree.

I understand that Humble As The Sun got started and inspired by meditation. What drew you to it?

BV: The studio space—it was in the back of a residence. You had the main house that some people lived in, completely unconnected to the studio space, and then there’s a garden in the back. I’d find myself in that garden, meditating, watching nature, and enjoying the sun, seeing how the seasons would change in that space. The cat prowling around, looking for a mouse to eat, or the bird that would come and take some of my lunch and fly off back to its nest—it was quite eye-opening for me because I was very much lost in the city, in all of the hustle and bustle of it. Also, the hustle and bustle of being a touring musician, going to festivals every weekend and doing tours for two, three, four weeks at a time. That studio space really offered me a place to slow down.

Sometimes, I would go there and not even necessarily work on music or anything. I would just go there and sit and listen to music on the speakers that they had there, or I would watch videos on YouTube or a TV show. Other times, I would sit in the garden and peacefully take in everything that was happening around me in a very meditative state—no phone, no computer, just sitting and being and watching and trying to clear my mind as much as possible, not think about work, not think about personal life, not think about the traveling that I’ve got to go and do, the business side of things. I’d just try to clear my mind and be present in the moment. That heavily influenced the message in the album for sure.

I love how at the end of song ‘Hunger Games’ you talk about being present. The lyrics really resonated: Here, now / You are stronger than you think you are / You are love / You are not alone / You are going through hell, but keep going / Be proud, be open / Be loud, be hopeful / Be healthy, be happy / Be kind to yourself / Be decisive / Here, now / Do not live every day as if it is your last / Live every day as if it is your first / Full of wonder and excitement / As you wonder along, excited / Marvelling at the possibilities of all that stands before you / Here, now. That feels like the essence of being present; what does being in the present mean to you?

BV: It’s a tricky thing because I find myself wandering with my thoughts, and I found that to be very helpful. I am not Eckhart Tolle, where it’s like, I’m here constantly, I’m present constantly, always in the now. That type of attitude would serve me if I wanted to be like a Yogi or some sort of guru, but it doesn’t serve me for the life that I live.

It’s finding a balance of being here in the now but also allowing my thoughts to wander because they allow me to play out different scenarios and see which is the better decision to make and which choice I should be making. If I do this, I’m not constantly present in the moment, but I find myself realising when I’m wandering into toxic thoughts, and I can be like, just take a minute, take a beat and be present right now and try not to worry about what may or may not come. Accept what is, and that doesn’t necessarily mean don’t look to change anything.

It’s not accepting it in a very passive way, but it’s accepting it in a way of doing what is within your power to do, in terms of the change that you can have in your own life and other people’s lives in the world in general.

Yeah, that’s a really important point. I did an interview with Dick Lucas from the Subhumans for my book and he was saying that, ‘If everything is taken away from you and you’re beaten black and blue, even if you’re at the point of death, you can still think for yourself. That is the bottom line, you have to keep your thoughts intact no matter what happens, from thoughts come everything else, words, expressions, ideas, creation—life itself.’

BV: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s something I try to remember as well as much as possible. It can be hard though. Life’s really difficult.

It is. I’m so glad your new album is uplifting, in a way, countering and balancing all the crappy stuff out in the world.

BV: Yeah. You know, the record is made for myself. I need this music. I didn’t make it because I’m like, ‘Oh, the world needs this music.’ No. I need this music! I need this album. I’ve been enjoying the album for ages. I’ve been listening to it over and over again. Actually, now that it’s out, I’ve probably listened to it far less because I listened to it on repeat every day for months and months. I picked it apart and asked myself, ‘Do I want to say this? No, I want to say that.’ Then when I got to a point where I’m like, ‘Oh, this is done, it’s perfect,’ so it’s finished. And I listened to it and I enjoyed it; I was no longer critiquing it. Like, is it mixed right? Now it’s out there. I’m listening to it far less because I’m like, everybody else has it now so it’s not mine anymore.

I really love the song ‘Dream Big’! It’s very inspiring and puts a smile on my face every listen. By the time the song’s finished, you feel like you can go out and do anything. Where do you think your self-belief comes from?

BV: It comes from a lot of different things in and around my environment. Some of it is definitely down to where I was growing up. But some of it, is nature. It’s just something that I have. My father tells me stories of when I was a child and I was very headstrong. I wasn’t necessarily rebellious without a cause. I just knew what I wanted to do and I knew what I didn’t want to do. That all plays into my self-belief.

I grew up in council housing. It wasn’t a terrible area by a long mile; there were areas in this country that are far worse. We didn’t have tons of money, but we didn’t go without. I definitely knew that if there are things that I wanted, I had to figure out a way to get them myself. My mum always did an amazing job at making sure that me and my siblings knew that.

Though we didn’t have everything that we wanted or needed necessarily, we always were exposed to other ways of living, certain things that other people in our environment weren’t necessarily exposed to. My mum really wanted to make sure that we didn’t fall into the trap of just accepting our place in society is here. I thank her a lot for that. That definitely helped in terms of my self-belief.

It’s funny, because when I would express certain things to her, she would be like, ‘I don’t think you can do that. I don’t know about that.’ But that’s her fear for her son, if he’s gonna commit himself to a life of artistry, he’s gonna be poor forever. That’s not fun because she was working so hard to get by and keep us afloat. She probably thought, ‘I don’t want that for him’.

My self-belief comes from a feeling that I don’t want what is given to me. I know what I want. I know what I want to do in this world. Jim Carey said: you can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love. If you can fail doing the thing that you don’t want to do, that you have no interest in doing, but you’re doing it because you’re fearful of doing the thing that you do want to do or people have pushed you into this direction, I would rather fail at the thing that I want to do. I’ll give it a go because otherwise, god forbid, I’m one of these people that are like, I could have done this.

Yeah. I think as human beings, the things that are most important, obviously after having the basics to live, is love and connection. That’s the foundation of everything.

BV: Yeah, absolutely. And, it can be hard to focus on that. Sometimes when you’re focusing on so many other things in the world, like trying to survive, trying to keep a roof over your head and everything else, it can be hard to maintain connections with friends or family. It’s important to try and make that time for people.

It’s something that I’m getting slowly better at.Taking a little time away, focusing on myself and my loved ones around me. The things that you value the most as a creative is the time that i have to create. I also value the time that I have to experience things like what we were talking about earlier, living. I value having conversations with friends, family and people in my community. Learning things. I value being able to have the time to think and feel. I value being able to put into words, all of the things that I’ve been experiencing.

Do you remember the first time you realised that your words had power?

BV: I don’t think it was a conscious realisation, but it definitely would have been when I was a child and I said something and I saw how it got me in trouble. Like, I saw what I said upset somebody. The realisation of, I know how to get under this person’s skin. I’ve got siblings, so that offers a perfect training ground, right? [laughs]. To figure that out, how powerful your words can be, that clicked probably when me and my siblings were arguing about something.

So you’ve always kind of been a bit cheeky?

BV: [Laughs] That’s usually the word that people would use to describe me. I always acted in good faith. I was very, very rarely acting out of malice and trying to actually hurt somebody who didn’t deserve it or upset somebody who hadn’t upset me, you know. I wasn’t a bully or anything like that.

Again, I knew what I wanted to do in this world. When people would present obstacles, whether that was a teacher in the school or a friend telling me that you can’t do this thing or do that thing, I would be sure to let people know that ‘No, I’m capable! You might not be able to do it because you don’t have that belief, but I could do it.’

I’ve always been this way too. I had an English teacher that told me I would never, ever, ever be a writer. Yet that’s been my career for the last 30 years since I was a 15 years old!

BV: Yeah, exactly. That’s it. People tell you those sorts of things for various reasons. Sometimes so they can upset you. That’s all their aim is, to upset you and discourage you. Other times, it’s to protect you, or they think they’re protecting you from a life of hardship or pain or upset. Then other times it’s just because they don’t believe in themselves, or it didn’t work out for them; they feel it won’t work out for you too.

I always had this opinion of, I’m watching people on TV doing the thing that I want to do. So it worked out for them. That is somebody flesh and bone and blood doing it. If they can do it, then I can do it. Why would I concentrate on the people it didn’t work out for? I’m not watching them on TV. There’s absolutely no reason why I could’t.

That’s what you’re talking about on the album closer, ‘I’m Still Here’?

BV: For sure. That song is the biggest testament to resilience on that album. It’s talking about how I grew up, where I grew up, what I was doing, and all of those things that I’ve gone through, and of my friend that is currently locked up. All of these things I’ve seen that I narrowly escaped, and those that I didn’t escape.

Of course, there is an element of being calculated, streetwise, and smart, avoiding certain things. But it’s also by luck, by chance, by the grace of God. Even when I was going through all of those things, I always had that in my mind of like, what I’m doing right now, how I’m living right now is not necessarily my forever. It doesn’t have to be my forever. This is not as good as it gets for me.

For a lot of people that I grew up with, they had it in their mind that, this is as good as it gets. This is as good as it gets for us. If we could be career criminals and not get caught or only do a handful of years in prison, life will be good. That wasn’t my thinking. That wasn’t my lot in life—I always thought there’s more for me. I don’t know where it is or what form it takes, but there’s more out there and I need to find it.

Have a moment with Bob Vylan where you felt like things really have changed and that they won’t be the same in your life anymore?

BV: Absolutely. There’s certain things that they happen and it’s like, this is a turning point. For example, when We Live Here, the first album and single from that album started taking off, it was during lockdown. I didn’t realise at the time, I suppose, to what degree it would change things, but I knew something was changing. We’d put music out before and no one had really listened to it. And then I saw the audience find us. I was watching the YouTube views go up in real time. I was like, wow, we’d never gotten 10,000 people watch a video before. Then it’s like 15,000, then 20,000, then 30,000, and on. I saw at the top of a Reddit thread: listen to this! Then seeing it getting shared on like Facebook, and people with blue ticks following me and saying, Hey man, I heard this song it’s so cool!’ They were from other bands that I’m a fan of or they were actors or whatever. I thought, ‘This is cool.’ It was that moment where I could feel something’s changing, you know, but then there’s other moments that are not so, I suppose, they’re not so.

Sometimes those moments are not so joyous, though. You might go on tour, and you’re away for home long time, long periods of time and you come back and things have changed at home, maybe with friends or with family. I’ve got a daughter and I come home and she’s grown. I’m away for three to four weeks, in that time, she’s learned something new. She’s doing something new. She’s got this new thing that she’s saying. And I’m having to play catch up to her. Like, ‘Oh, what’s that? Where did you hear that? Where did you learn that?’ Even just seeing her, it’s like, ‘Did you grow?’ You realise things won’t be the same as they were when I was sat here and I was watching her do this stuff in real time. So some of those moments of change are joyous, and others are harder to come to terms with. You have got to be accepting of both.

Totally. I saw you walked in a show at London Fashion Week at the start of the year. That must have been pretty surreal, especially growing up in the world where you’ve come from.

BV: Yeah! It was for a brand I was familiar with, Saul Nash, I’d seen their clothes in the store and I really like them. Saul’s clothes are great, he’s got a great eye and he’s very innovative in terms of how he approaches sportswear. To get asked to do that was great, it was a lot of fun and an experience that I hadn’t had before. So, again, getting those opportunities is really cool. I met a friend there, we’ve worked in the future together. The person that was overseeing all of the hair on the Saul Nash show, then worked on my hair in the ‘Reign’ video. I love meeting people and forming connections and friendships. It’s really beautiful when you get those opportunities.

But it’s important not to get lost in those sorts of things, though, because they’re fun, but it’s not real life. I feel lucky, I feel very fortunate, that I’ve got people, the majority of my friends and my family are not in the industry at all in any sense, they work 9 to 5s. I get enjoy the opportunities when I’m in it, then I come out of it, and I get to just be how I am at home.

You mentioned the ‘Reign’ video, which I love. What was the inspiration for the visual elements in it?

BV: There was a lot of things that me and Taz [Tron Delix ], the director, went back and forth about, we had a couple of meetings and talked about what we wanted to get across with it.

For me, the African Moors that conquered Spain (and they were present in Malta – I’m part Maltese), so I wanted to present this visual representation of regalness and royalty that wasn’t stiff and stuffy like the English monarchy, but is more like the African monarchies. The Moors are extremely extreme. The most popular representation of a Moor in popular culture is Othello. Othello is a Moor—I love Othello. It’s probably my favourite Shakespeare play, though it is the saddest one. I took my dad to watch it not too long ago. Othello in that play is presented as someone extremely strong. He’s a leader, but then he has the potential to be corrupted, to be swindled. He’s a human after all. And so for that video, we wanted to create this idea of royalty but have it rooted in today. We also wanted it to feel relevant to what Bob Vylan is doing.

You also have Jamaican heritage too? Does the culture influence your creative choices?

BV: For sure. It influences the music a lot. ‘Ring the Alarm’ for example, on the album, is very, very much inspired by Jamaican culture and reggae and dancehall music. Even some of the drums are played on the album. They’re jungle drum breaks, the way that they’re played coming from this mix of Jamaican people bringing reggae music over to the UK and then mixing it with electronic music that was happening here in the UK; those fast drum breaks with reggae samples thrown in there. It definitely influences a lot of the music in terms of the sonics and the production.

Visually, I suppose, maybe I’m even less conscious of how that culture is pulled on. Except for ‘Wicked & Bad’ for example, where we shot the video in Jamaica. I really wanted to do that. The way that I wear things, the things that I decide to wear, my personal style that’s obviously influenced.

I grew up around a fairly big mixed Jamaican and white community. We pulled a lot of things from our parents, and then mixed them with things that were happening now in the UK and in England. Meshed the two things together to find our own or create our own identity.

How did it feel for you to go back to Jamaica, back to where your family are from?

BV: It was great. It’s a beautiful place. It’s troubled, though, because of a lot of corruption that happens over there. It’s a shame that such a beautiful island has got such a violent past because of its colonial history—the British occupation of the land. There is a lot of sadness in seeing that because you realise what that place could be. It’s unfortunate that at the moment, at least, it’s not able to be that, but hopefully at some point, it’s able to be; it’s able to live up to its full potential. That it’s able to remove its connection to the British and become its own country.

We speak about independence and it is independent to a certain degree, but there’s still a heavy, heavy hand from the British in that country. I would like to see that removed completely and to see the country be everything that it can be. We see culturally what it exports; that is absolutely incredible. One of the biggest musical stars ever has come from this tiny island—Bob Marley is arguably one of the biggest musicians ever in history. Reggae music and the popularisation of weed, and Rasta culture, and the Rasta religion, it’s all from this tiny island. So what it’s done artistically and culturally for the world is absolutely incredible. But what it receives in return pales in comparison.

Yeah. There’s even that connection to punk rock with Bob’s ‘Punky Reggae Party’ and how Don Letts would play the reggae at The Roxy (the UK’s first live punk rock venue), and then you’d get bands like The Clash who were heavily influenced by reggae.

BV: It’s influenced the world over. Look at the origins of rap music. It all comes from DJing and MC culture, like the toasting culture of Jamaica. As I said earlier, you get jungle music, it comes from reggae culture. It’s been extremely influential culturally and artistically from really the beginning of time.

Absolutely. One of the reasons I love Bob Vylan so much is that you mesh together so many different things to created this whole new thing. You’ve built on what’s come before and you’ve taken it in a new direction.

BV: That’s important to us, to not, not tread old ground. To constantly look for ways by which we can push things, and push them in new directions. We don’t want anything to sound like the punk of the 80s, that’s not what we’re trying to do. We want something new, something fresh.

Last question, what’s something that’s made you really, really happy lately?

BV: The sun and the sea. A couple of days ago, it was really nice weather here, and I sat by the sea, listened to the waves, and just relaxed after a busy week of playing shows and promo for the new album.

I got home and went and sat by the sea. I saw that people were enjoying themselves in the sun, and kids are running about and splashing in the water. There was something where I was like, yeah, it just feels complete in terms of, I’ve had such a busy week promoting this album, and I’ve gone through a roller coaster of emotions because I’d been sick just before we put the album out.

The day before the album came out, I’d been violently ill, I was throwing up. Then Friday we played shows and I was still ill, then I slowly got better. We’d put this album out and we’d been running around the country trying to play shows and do signings. Sitting at the beach, I kind of just took a moment and acknowledged everything that I’d done that week, and looked to start the new week fresh and at peace.

Follow @bobbyvylan & check out their music: https://bobvylan.bandcamp.com

Conversations with Punx book

7th Mar 2024 | gimmiezine

Imagine having the opportunity to engage in profound conversations with the creators of punk and hardcore, spanning from its inception to the present day, diving into the most timeless and perplexing questions about life. These inquiries explore forging a path on your own terms, the art of creating something out of nothing, standing up for what you believe in, changing what you don’t like, the ethos of DIY, the power of community and purpose, and the highs and lows of life’s struggles and wins. Plus, the journey of transforming your life and the lives of those around you, while navigating this often tough world. There are moments of clarity, connection, insight, and profound beauty waiting to be discovered in the pages of Conversations with Punx, a book that formed in its own time over two decades.

When I (Bianca, Gimmie’s co-creator) was 24 years old in 2004, I faced a confusing, difficult, and heartbreaking situation. Seeking answers and tools to process and cope with what was happening, I turned to interviewing, something I had been doing since I was 15 through making punk zines. I found answers through deeper conversations with individuals from bands that provided the soundtrack to my life: Black Flag, DEVO, Agnostic Front, Suicide, Bad Brains, Radio Birdman, Crass, Straitjacket Nation, X-Ray Spex, Gorilla Biscuits, Ramones, The Stooges, Zero Boys, The Bronx, Misfits, The Slits, The Bouncing Souls, Minor Threat, Suicidal Tendencies, At The Drive-In, Special Interest, Bad Religion, Sick Of It All, Adolescents, Operation Ivy, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Poison Idea, Bikini Kill, Youth of Today, Hard-Ons, Avengers, Descendents, Big Joanie, Amyl and the Sniffers, and many more. From these 150+ conversations emerged surprising insights. Maybe the wisdom, resilience, and humanity at the heart of punk can spark something in your own life too and change how you see the world.

This isn’t just another book on punk and hardcore; it’s a book on life. It’s not a documentation of a certain place at a certain time, because punk is dynamic and ever-evolving. It’s not a thing of the past; it’s happening right now in cities and towns all over the world. What you know of punk is not its only story; what you know of life is not the only possibility. Punk is a big wide world with a lot to offer.

The book is limited edition. 450 pages.

Cover art by: Mike Giant

GET the book at: https://conversationswithpunx.bigcartel.com

Al Smith from Geld: ‘It’s quite confronting to feel so much emotion surging through you.’

1st Mar 20241st Mar 2024 | gimmiezine

On album Currency // Castration Naarm/Melbourne hardcore band, Geld, have found a perfect balance of ferocity and ecstasy. Capturing the raw intensity of anxiety and the transformative power of release, they’ve dialled it up, coalescing all they’ve done before into making a brilliant record, their best yet. The album never drags, and it’s not the heavy moments that hit hardest, it’s the points of difference that have helped Geld carve out their own identity and enables them to stand apart from the heavy pack.

Geld’s guttural vocalist, Al Smith, sat down with Gimmie for an hours-long chat. He discussed the band, their album, hardcore, and the isolation the band has felt. Al also tells of wild shows, having a boner for community, and of a tour where he could have died. Additionally, we discuss Turnstile, soapboxes, and mental health. He also speaks about a Naarm/Melbourne band deserving of wider recognition, and his involvement in other bands with new releases in the works: The Neuros and The Vacant Lot.

In a couple of years, I’ll have been chatting with punk and hardcore bands for 30 years. I’ve been doing it since I was teen.

AL SMITH: Wow. There’s so much stuff in the scene aside from being in bands, those auxiliary roles of photographers and writers that are important. It seems like there’s no one actually doing any writing much at the moment. What you’re doing is pure music journalism.

Thank you. I just write about something I love and share that with people.

AS: When I was young, I came from the suburbs and didn’t know anyone in music. The way that I would consume music and find out about stuff was through community radio. I had my Maximum Rocknroll subscription and I’d go down to Missing Link and get all the fucking zines and pore through it all. That’s not really a thing that happens anymore.

We started Gimme online during the pandemic and started doing the print issue too. In the first year I interviewed over 150 bands. We mail the print zine out ourselves, and it was really cool to see where it goes, a lot of regional places, which is awesome! We’d get nice messages from people that got it, saying that it really helped them feel connected to music and the scene, especially during lockdowns.

AS: That’s incredible. When we got interviewed to do our bio. Everyone at Relapse was like, ‘Look, if there’s going to be one thing, aside from the record itself, that you actually think about and want to get right, it’s the bio.’ Because every single publication is just going to rinse and repeat that.

I was vanity searching, seeing what people have been saying about the record. If someone does 200 words aside from them just posting the bio, that’s a lot of effort, it seems. It’s wild that that’s the landscape of music journalism.

On a grassroots level, it seems like people are just kicking these bios down the road. I was reading Gimmie, and it’s obvious you guys really care about music. It’s a dying art form to do actual hard music writing. What you’re doing is cool. We were really happy that you asked us to have a chat.

I’ve been wanting to talk to you for ages! I only knew you through your live shows and music, and you seemed pretty scary, so I was reluctant to ask. Talking to you now, obviously you’re not scary.

AS: [Laughs]. It’s all pretend!

Just before we started chatting, I was really nervous, despite doing this for so long I still get nervous before talking to anyone. To be honest, I feel kind of awkward anyway in social situations.

AS: I’m the same. With a one-on-one, I’m like aces. But if you get a group of four people, I’m shocking. But also, I could imagine it being a little confronting because you don’t know what this person’s gonna be like as conversationalist. Maybe you’ll be like, so how was making the record? And they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s fine.’ That’s it [laughs].

There’s lots of things I want to talk to you about, because I LOVE Geld, and other bands you’ve been part of as well. Why is music important to you?

AS: I was a bit of a loner when I was younger, and getting into music in early high school was a thing that I actually cared about. The only reason I wanted to start playing in bands is, I wanted to contribute to the cause. All these people that I love from afar are doing all these fantastic things. And it feels disingenuous to get so much out of something without throwing your hat in the ring. Like you with writing, or again, photographers, or people that love to book shows and stuff. It’s contributing to something. A huge part of it was, on a personal level, my own sense of agency.

Playing in Geld has been something where it’s like, we’ve all been in heaps of bands and we’re all a little bit older and we just wanted to do a band that was the synthesis of everything we like about being in a band. That includes friendship, the social dynamic to how its collected in an artistic standpoint. It’s weird to think about it because I’ve been playing music for, shit, maybe almost going on 20 years now! It’s now just, like, fucking wallpaper—one big thing.

When the pandemic happened and we didn’t have shows, that routine that we’re all so used to wasn’t there. For a while, it was refreshing because it can be exhausting going to shows and doing the whole thing.

When that period of lockdown was over and we could somewhat safely start going to shows again, I had this real come-to-Jesus moment where I was like, holy shit! I totally took for granted how much this enriches me as a person and how it’s like, magic. My mental health started to get so much better. I started going to shows and started playing shows again.

There’s that old adage: someone’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to go play this show,’ or ‘I’m going to The Tote again,’ or something like that. When it all came back, there was this refreshed air of positivity. I think a lot of people had the same experience as me. It was like, oh, this is actually a really important community that does offer lots to people.

It’s sort of always been the only thing that’s really made sense to me. It’s like an extra limb. It’s just sort of there.

I totally get you because I feel the same. We wouldn’t have stuck with this so long if it wasn’t important to us. Music gives us so much. You find friends through music. It’s gives you community. It helps you discover and express yourself. I found my husband through music. All the things that I do, it’s pretty much because of music. It can give a sense of purpose.

When I first got into the punk and hardcore in my teens, I became really obsessed with it. For a while, it became so much part of my identity. As I experienced more and grew as a person, I learned that there’s a much bigger world out there.

AS: Yeah. I’m always a little tentative to drink the Kool Aid too hard. Because the last thing you want to be is a really fucking boring person that is just like, ‘My personality is hardcore,’ that sounds kind of gross.

Totally!

AS: You can draw a direct line from punk and hardcore—by extension, music in general—to basically everything in my life. Like you, I met my partner through music. My entire friendship circle is sort of geared around this thing, and, again, something like the pandemic made you take a step back and realise, oh, okay, it is a pretty seismic change to take away something that you’re constantly doing; you just take it for granted.

At one point in my life, I enlisted into this thing because I cared about it from a personal level. It started to permeate into other parts of my life, like my social circle. I’m super lucky that I was around a scene that was a real diverse scene. A lot of people aren’t as lucky as us to be in a community that has different folks from different genders and backgrounds. I’m so lucky that I had heaps of women in my life—strong women—that were able to help shape a lot of my core values, that have sort of unconsciously come into me. I’m pretty happy with where I stand with my values right now.

Honestly, if you do the Sliding Doors-thing, and I went off and did something else, maybe I wasn’t going to have those values, and maybe I wouldn’t have this kind of mindset that I hold pretty dear. Along with having mates to get pissed with and being able to see sick bands, there’s also a certain moral compass that gets defined within people in a small community that is so diverse.

What are the things you value?

AS: I’ve got a real massive boner for community. Ultimately, at the end of the day, those are the things that are important: having a connection to people and being able to create and do things in this very holistic context. We all take it for granted from time to time, but it’s something that’s so enriching for so many reasons. I guess I’m the biggest lefto soy boy cuck there is! [laughs].

To be honest with you, it’s somewhat uncomfortable to talk about your values because I don’t want to be like, ‘Of course, I’m like a far-left leaning person that is very heavily centred around community.’

I know what you mean. I asked about your values because you mentioned you’re happy with them and I was curious to know more. I got many of my values sparked from being part of our community, even just through listening to punk bands, reading liner notes, and interviews with bands, I learned so much. For example, it made me take an interest in politics and influenced my dietary and lifestyle choices.

AS: Those kind of things can spawn from a superficial standpoint, like, ‘That cool person is doing that thing.’ But then after a while, you can look back at it and think about it, and it’s like, ‘Oh, no, this is actually something that’s pretty cool.’

I’m endlessly grateful that I fell arse-backwards into a community that was able to help me shape my ideas in a pro-human context. Because if I was to be ingrained in a corporate community or something like that, I don’t know if I would still have these same values. That’s kind of scary.

People scare me most days.

AS: Oh, that’s because everyone’s awful by and large.

[Laughter]

Don’t even get me started. That’s part of why I do stuff like interviewing people one-on-one or doing behind-the-scenes stuff. I don’t want to be out the front or the face of anything. I’m not interested in attention. I just want to put good work out into the world to counter all the negative I see and experience.

AS: Yeah, I know what you mean. Having a one-on-one conversation, there’s a lot more meat on that bone.We’ve done a bunch of interviews with us as a band, and you kind of fall back into canned answers. Questions are the same, and so you’re just saying the same thing, and it feels like you’re just reeling off a script a little bit. Not that it’s not true, but there’s only so much you can talk about when someone’s like, ‘So you’re a psychedelic hardcore band…’ That was coined one day, and we feel really uncomfortable about it.

I get that; I find labels pretty flaky in general. Geld have a new album called Currency // Castration. One of the first things I noticed, is the title is two meanings for geld.

AS: Correct. We wanted that title because it’s quite good from a visual standpoint; it looks pretty stark. Playing in Germany, basically the healthiest scene in Europe (it might have changed since we were last there, but it was so when we played seven or eight shows there), without fail, there would be some lovely but also equal parts punishing German person come up to me and be like, ‘Did you know that Geld means money in German?’ We were like, yes, we have access to the internet. That’s actually why we named it that. I would be like, ‘Do you know it actually means castration in English?’ And they would be like, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ That’s been a running gag in Geld for a minute now.

To be a bit more serious about it, this record was also the most collaborative record that we have done thus far in terms of how many members are actually contributing songs. We also did think it was a pretty concise synthesis of what we thought the band was like, a good representation. For an all-encompassing record, it suits to have an all-encompassing name.

I don’t know if we’ll make another record that we feel is so encapsulating of what we want Geld to be, or what we think Geld is supposed to be at this particular time.

Album opener ‘Currency’ and closer ‘Castration’ are instrumentals. ‘Across A Broad Plain’ in the middle is too.

AS: A lot of the time when we’re writing these records, what we’ll usually do is write anywhere between 15 and 20 songs. There will be no preconceived notions of what the record is supposed to be or what it’s going to sound like, or there’s no kind of conceptual identity to it. We’ll just keep writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and then after, if we feel like we’ve got enough of a base to work with, we’ll start trying to put things together and see, okay, do we have a record in this? That’s when the songs go onto the canvas and we just look at it and we’re like, okay, does it need anything more

Most of the time, we are like, okay, it probably needs some kind of interlude. It needs some sort of intro, it needs other things. So I guess for a lack of a better word, the ‘Currency’ and ‘Castration’ situation are an aesthetic thing, placeholder titles for interludes that we think are important to make the record feel complete and concise.

I noticed that song ‘Hanging From A Rope’ has the lyric: Across a broad plain in the new age. That song appears before ‘Across A Broad Plain’; are they connected in any way?

AS: Not necessarily. I just thought that it was a good line. ‘Hanging From A Rope’ is definitely the most effort I’ve ever put into lyrics of any song at all—I tried a little harder. Not that I don’t try with lyrics otherwise. If you’re singing about what you know… [pauses]. I’ve always felt really uncomfortable… [pauses again] what’s the best way to put this? I don’t want to dump on anyone. But I feel comfortable standing up on a stage and screaming about something that I can then look back at and be like, ‘Yeah, this is something I believe in and this is something that I can speak truth to power to.’

As a cis white middle-class man [laughs], there is a lot of shit going on in the world that is really fucked up, but I am also someone that is directly benefiting from it because of who I am and my background. So, it feels disingenuous to talk about like… what are the things that actually are going on with me. Most of it is inward and it’s my own mental health. My anxiety and things that are going on inward feel much more comfortable to me. Getting up on a stage and screaming about it, rather than talking about current events. I also feel uncomfortable with people time stamping songs.

‘Hanging From A Rope’ was from a lyrical standpoint is all pretty introspective, like most of the record. That’s always been a running theme in Geld. It’s not like we are nihilistic or apathetic to the things going on around us. But, if everything has been focused inwards, all of the anger comes from our limitations and the things that we struggle with personally, rather than us projecting out what is wrong with the world. Because as a bunch of dudes, I don’t feel comfortable with that. I feel much more comfortable talking about everything that’s wrong with me rather than everything that’s wrong with the world. I understand how some people would see that as difficult.

Everyone has problems. Everyone’s problems matter to them, and sometimes someone is going through something that doesn’t seem big to you but it’s massive to them.

AS: For sure. You never want to get into a fucking dick measuring contest with someone else’s problems because there’s no baseline, there’s no manual for grief and pain. If someone feels something, they feel it, period. That’s it.

It’s cathartic for me in my own mental health, writing about that stuff.

By you being open and sharing those kinds of things, it can help others that resonate with it. How many times have you listened to lyrics and thought, ‘Oh my god, this person gets me!’?

AS: Totally. Also from another angle, Geld has never set out to be a band that sounded different. We’ve all done genre bands before. We’ve all been in D-Beat bands and did a whole bunch of different kinds of music. Those bands are great, some of my favourite bands in the world are like hard, dyed in wool genre bands. But we wanted to do something where there is literally nothing that is not on the table. The only prerequisite is—to do something good. We all have this trust in each other to be objective about what is good, and what is bad, and have a really good bullshit filter. You can do whatever you want in the band.

In the beginning at least, that ended up isolating us a little bit because we were too much of a hardcore band for the punks and too much of a punk band for the hardcore bands. We felt pretty alienated. Maybe unconsciously, that permeated into the way that I’d write lyrics, because I would feel that. If the band is focused inwards, it makes sense for the lyrical content to toe the line with that.

There’s themes of alienation, isolation and anxiety on the record. A lot of songs are about your own mortality and time ticking away.

AS: Yeah. Bemoaning the concept of time being created. It’s a day of me just being stressed as fuck and thinking, ‘Who the fuck started this?’ Someone did it. I want to find that motherfucker and I want to beat them up because they’re the worst. Someone just went, ‘Aaannd, go!’ and that’s how our lives work now.

Yeah. Then you’ve got calendars and everything else that measures our existence, and keeps us on a schedule.

AS: [Laughs] Another thing, from an aesthetic point of view, when I deal with anxiety in an episodic standpoint, re: panic attacks, obviously they’re bad experiences, but the other side of the coin is that that’s one of the times in my life where I feel the most powerful. Because just in terms of pure energy that is being put out, it’s quite confronting to feel so much emotion surging through you. In the most uncomfortable way, it’s also cathartic.

I’ve always related the idea of all the hardcore bands and punk bands I like, when you can see sound, the aesthetic correlation; punk and hardcore sounds anxious. Everything is a tight spring that’s about to break. I’ve always loved it so much, it’s like techno. It’s about attack and release. That’s why people can mosh to it and people can dance at club nights. I see a like direct correlation between anxiety, pent up and then releasing.

Yeah. I know that feeling.

AS: Isn’t that the best feeling in the world? Where you are seeing a band that is killing it and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you realise that your whole body is tensed. It’s just like, ‘Oh, I haven’t breathed in a while.’ [Laughs].

Totally! That was me at your show on the Gold Coast when you played Vinnie’s Dive.

AS: That was such a weird show [laughs].

It was the wildest show I’ve ever seen there. One of my all-time favourite live moments ever, is when you were talking to the crowd and told them, ‘Do better!’ Just after that, I saw a table thrown right into the middle of the pit. After your set, I saw at least five people bleeding.

AS: Sorry. Now we play on a lot of different lineups, a lot of them being HxC lineups, and they don’t really know what to do with fast music because we’re not a two-step band.

For the longest time, again, being a generally uncomfortable person, I wouldn’t say anything to the crowd. Because it’s staunch and it’s stoic and it has this nihilistic standpoint… I’m like, I’m not even going to speak to you. I’m just going to yell and yada, yada, yada.

And then after a while, Cormy [Geld’s guitarist] said to me, ‘Hey, you should actually say stuff and engage because it’s a good thing—you should do it.’ I was like, ‘That’s so stupid, I hate that!’ Eventually, it started to happen, and I started to actually engage and verbalise.

I always thought that the things some people said on stage was sort of time-wasting, placeholder things like, ‘Oh, yeah, thanks for coming out,’ stuff like that. When you see those hardcore bands, the singer going off on some fucking diatribe, I’m just like, ‘That’s so uncomfortable. I feel so weird about that.’

But it’s true, though, people actually engage with the words that you’re saying. People aren’t necessarily present of their own place at a venue and someone’s like, ‘Can you actually do something?’ They’re like, ‘Oh, okay, what? Sure!’ Again, it’s all pretend.

I was standing at the front at your show, and when that table got thrown, I was like, ‘Nah, I’m out.’ I’m going to go stand at the back now because I didn’t want to get hurt.

AS: I seem to remember me standing on that table and immediately regretting it because it was not stable.

So we were talking about you telling the audience to do better…

AS: Oh, yeah. Geld, we’re really big pro wrestling fans. It’s not a character, but… it would be disingenuous, especially for hardcore front people, to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, that is totally how I am all of the time.’ Like, no, it’s not. Even if it is honest with yourself, it’s like this cartoony amplified version.

For me, it’s quite liberating to admit that it’s just a fucking… I’m just being antagonistic because… I don’t care if people move. It’s not going to keep me up at night [laughs]. But it’s fun playing to it. I get a giddy little thrill of just poking the bear and seeing if it’ll incite some kind of reaction. And it did at that show—win!

After seeing that show, we thought the Jerkfest set you were going to play, would be similar so we sat up on a table to avoid the craziness. But it didn’t end up being as wild.

AS: I’ve gotten to this unhealthy way of gauging the quality of shows by how much chaos happens. That is a bad road to go down. Especially because there’s a lot of variables that go into people going crazy and you would just be like, ‘Oh, not many people moved, so I guess we suck!’ Being a hardcore band that doesn’t make people move, you think it’s a bad show. But that’s not necessarily it at all.

Do you have a show that you’ve played that was really memorable?

AS: Yeah, when we played in Boston in 2018, it was off the back of us doing Perfect Texture, the first record. People had moved at our shows before and we had some pretty crazy stuff happen, but it was the first insane show and probably because someone happened to film it. It’s on YouTube. I remember watching that back and it was like, oh, yeah, all of these wasted years seems like… it was really validating.

it was during the summer in Boston and it was just like it would have been at, conservatively, north of 35, pushing 40 degrees on stage. Soon after that show, I ended up getting pneumonia. We still had four or five dates on the tour. I’m about to say something that’s going to be a real big flex, but if I hadn’t known it was pneumonia, 100% would have cancelled shows. But I just thought I had the flu or a bug.

Every single night was hell. I was in the van shivering, freezing and sweating and just before we’re about to play, someone from the band would knock on the van window and I’d be, all right, let’s go do it! Peel myself out of the van and go and do it. I immediately get back into the van after, and be freezing. It was terrible.

The last show was in New York and I had a couple of days with my partner. Luckily, I got travel health insurance and I went to the doctor. I was honest and told him what was actually going on. He was like, ‘You fucking idiot! You very easily could have died! Pneumonia is straight up, like water in the lungs. You had water in your lungs and you were screaming!’ [Laughs]. In a toxic masc[ulinity], part of my brain, I like, ‘Oh cool.’ But then I felt so embarrassed, like, all humans are supposed to not kill themselves. I felt like I did really badly at that. It was embarrassing.

That’s so full on! Is there anything you do to look after your voice? Have you taught yourself ways to scream where it doesn’t harm you?

AS: Yeah, I think the latter. I try not to be an idiot about it because I have lost my voice on tour at times. Speaking of embarrassing moments, that is terrible.

Do you feel like you let people down when that happens?

AS: 100%. We played a show in Leipzig, and I had lost my voice. There was 250+ people at the show, and I was standing up in front of people being, ‘Sorry!’ It’s like, oh, god, no. I try and not overdo it. There’s ways to fake it without actually yelling. I’ve found a spot, because I haven’t lost my voice in a really long time.

You mentioned that playing the show in Boston, you felt really validated; did you feel validated signing to Relapse?

AS: Super. It’s so very validating! The nerdy suburban kid in me just feeling like I was listening to all of those Relapse bands when I was a teenager. All of us feel really over the moon with it.

Because of the pandemic, by virtue of time, we ended up, this is the longest we’ve ever worked on a record. We were working on the record for two years. It’s super validating, and it feels super rewarding to know that, the scope that Relapse has in terms of distribution and, how much effort goes into what they do; they’ve all been so fantastic. It feels good that something you’ve worked on for so long is getting the platform that is rewarding after that whole process.

You guys have been doing it for sometime! In the next couple of weeks, it’s the anniversary of your first demo.

AS: Obviously you know more than I do [laughs]. It’s been a while.

Your first demo came out in 2016.

AS: Oh, my god. Fuck. Yeah. So we’ll be skirting around 10 years soon.

The discography that we’ve had, we are hyper-aware that it’s atypical for hardcore bands to exist for this long, and getting to a third record is not the most common thing for hardcore bands. We’ve spoken about it a bunch of times; we definitely do attribute that to the initial mission statement of Geld being a band that we all want to be in and that we all are concerned about each other. We’re concerned about how we all feel about it. We’re concerned about being able to be as artistically and socially free as possible.

It’s meant that whenever we finish a record, we don’t have time off. We’ll finish the record, and then it’s rehearsal the next week, and we’ll just start writing the next record. The initial mission statement of ‘nothing is off the table’ means that it’s always enriching to write stuff. It’s not like, ‘Well, I guess we’ll just cut out this riff again.’ It’s, ‘No, let’s mess around and see what happens.’ That’s exciting.

We rehearse at Cormy’s house and have a bungalow that has been really poorly soundproofed. Cormy just had his third kid. There is another side, quite a familial side to it, because we usually roll up to practice, we spend time with Cormy’s wife and the kids. We hang out for a while, play with them. And then eventually we’ll just go and rehearse. We’ll rehearse for like a tight 2 hours and then bail. So we’re not at a rehearsal room on a Tuesday night being either hungover or just mentally bereft from the week ahead, being in a rehearsal room for like 6 hours. That’s so draining and unsustainable. We’ve put a lot of work into the personal sustainability of the band. That attributes to being a band for almost 10 years.

In that 10 years, we haven’t had a break. There’s been forced breaks of someone might go on holiday or something like that, but usually it’s, Thursday, every week we go to practise and do the thing. No one’s really over it. We’re just going to keep the thing rolling.

You have something to look forward to every week?

AS: Yeah. I get to hang out with everyone. I get to see Cormy’s family. Cormy and I are the only people that drink at practise. That’s one of my socialising nights. I’m sort of belabouring the point right now, but we’ve designed the band around us being happy and being enriched, so we want to actually do it. We want to make it the best thing it possibly can be. We are in love with this routine and this process that we’re in.

Nice! One of the songs on the album is called ‘Success’; what does that looks like to you?

AS: To be able to do this, you could argue that signing to Relapse is one of those things that would suggest that we have grander ideas of what we want to accomplish. But I think it’s more so that we just want to be a success making records that we’re proud of; that’s the most important thing. And going on tour and all of the other stuff that we got going on, that’s all just icing on the cake.

Success is feeling like we have done our best. When we eventually stop Geld, we’ll be able to look back on it and be like, ‘Yeah.’ We’ve been really lucky to get opportunities like Relapse. Being able to look back on that stuff and be like, these are opportunities that we seized rather than chased.

Someone made a gag the other day, ‘If we wanted to be successful, why the fuck would we start a hardcore band?’ [laughs]. A successful hardcore band is the biggest oxymoron of all time. There’s the gag of being ‘hardcore famous,’ where it’s, ‘Oh, you sold a thousand records.’ We’d start a fucking hyper-pop band if we wanted to actually be successful.

You’ve got bands like Turnstile, who I love. They’re a hardcore band.

AS: Yeah. Turnstile is incredible! But they’re also incredible because they obviously did whatever the fuck they wanted to. They’re a really good example of a band that emotionally puts work into connecting with people. It makes old-head hardcore dudes really mad.

I love that. I love how Turnstile pushed hardcore to make something new. Glow On was one of my favourite albums the year it came out. To me it’s got all the cool bits I love from hardcore, but without all the gross bits of hardcore like toxic masculinity.

AS: Of course. Hardcore is inherently gross. [Laughs].

It seems disingenuous for someone to dump on Turnstile when it seems so (I’m starting to reuse words here but whatever) disingenuous, that hardcore as a style of music is this synthesis of emotion, and Turnstile have been so fantastic at that—they’ve opted for a different emotion. That emotion is still super synthesised and really full on.

Cormy went to see Turnstile when they played here, and he was like, ‘Oh, my god!’ and was in awe of the reaction that they incite. It’s still aggressive. You still see motherfuckers headwalking and aggressive stage diving, but there is an air of positivity to it. You’d be the biggest idiot in the world if you didn’t see that, and be like, ‘Yeah, okay, that’s pretty cool!’

The guy who mastered your record, Arthur Rizk, played guitar on a Turnstile record.

AS: See, this is some fucking Nardwuar bullshit, you know that! [laughs]. Did Arthur actually play on a Turnstile record?

Yeah, he played additional guitar on the Time and Space record.

AS: Really? I don’t believe you.

The info is out there, have a look. It’s there.

AS: I believe you.

I love the positivity that Turnstile have. Even though hardcore is an aggressive kind of music, I’ve gotten positive things from it. It’s been a positive force in my life.

AS: Exactly. That’s like, again, going back to that’s the way that I felt connected to people. And obviously Geld isn’t a positive band, but I would like to think that there is some level of positivity in the amount of emotion that anyone puts into anything.

The artwork for your album has a pretty positive and happy feel to it. Like, the colour choice.

AS: `I think we were talking about earlier, about us not wanting to subvert hardcore, but just do whatever our take on it is. If that happens to be something that is currently going on or what is a standard thing, we’d be like, ‘Okay, that’s fine,’ but at the same time, we never want to be that. One of my big pet peeves is people doing a style of music and trying to intellectualise it because it’s just, you know, ‘I’m playing hardcore, but I’m actually a smart person too.’ So I’m gonna do this in an interesting way, and it just ends up being super contrived and, like, really unnecessary.

The only time I think that we have wanted to subvert stuff is through, the artwork on records.

Yeah, I’ve noticed that with all the Geld artwork. I really enjoy what you’re doing with it.

AS: The main thing is that for Perfect Texture (and for all three records, actually), Thom the drummer for Geld, he painted the new record cover and he painted the Perfect Texture artwork. In fact, the Perfect Texture artwork is right there [motions to the wall].

You have it! That’s awesome you have the original.

AS: It’s not the original. You know Tom Lyngcoln?

Yeah, I know Tom.

AS: That bastard owns it [laughs]. Thom painted that, and then shortly after Tom Lyngcoln bought it, and we were like, ‘Oh, shit!’ We really wanted to use that for the record cover! So we had to go to Tom’s house in St. Kilda, and take a photo of it.

I love the music Tom makes.

AS: Yeah. We’ve just got so many good bands right now. Swab is one of my favourite bands in Melbourne. They deserve to be gigantic!

We love them too! Christina [Pap] is in my punk book I’ve been working on for a couple of decades that will be out soon. It’s been important for me to include voices that don’t normally get a chance to be heard in punk rock and the history of punk projects. Women, people of colour, queer and non-binary people. Lots of people could learn a lot from the punk community

AS: 100%. There is a weird kind of utopian level of idealism that permeates through punk and that doesn’t always shake out. Obviously, no community is perfect and has issues within it, especially when it comes to diversity and especially when it comes to hardcore. But there have been some pretty incredible stories from ultra-diverse people. It’s not all just white dudes having a yell, shirtless.

[Talk continues about the punk book]

AS: I’m pretty overwhelmed by this conversation. The attitude that you bring to all this is so infectious. There is definitely a purity to the way that you’re speaking about your book and the things that you want to talk about within punk and hardcore. It’s pretty inspiring, to be honest.

That’s the plan!

AS: Do you actually have any downtime ever?

Not really. But everything I do is fun. So usually it doesn’t feel like I’m working. My day job is working as a book editor with fellow Indigenous writers to tell our stories in our own ways. I just like making art and talking to people too. I like sharing things that I find exciting, like we do with Gimmie.

AS: Are you like me? Where unfortunately for my friends and my partner, I’m a bit of a Punisher when it comes to things I’m excited about? I have that feeling when I might be overseas or somewhere, and see something that moves me in a way, and I wish that I could transport a specific person that I’m thinking about to be there right next to me. So you can hold them and have them experience the thing that you’re experiencing.

Totally! That gave me goosebumps.

AS: Then it can transcend into something that’s a little bit more like punishing, where it’s like, ‘Have you heard this band?! You’re showing a band to someone and you’re listening to a song and you’re like, ‘This bit, ready?’ And then, ‘Isn’t this the greatest thing ever?’

Yeah, and then you rewind it, so they can hear it again!

AS: Oh, my god, yes! It’s like I have all of this stuff inside me right now, and it’s too much for me to bear on my own and I just want to give some of it to you [laughs].

All that stuff that you and Jhonny are doing, it’s obviously coming from a place of an emotional connection. That you guys are creating with the things that you consume and love and are wanting to actually permeate that emotion out into the world. That’s really cool!

Awww, thank you! That means a lot that you can see that. Well, I’m so excited about your new record. And it’s so cool that you’ve found a home on Relapse Records. I love when cool stuff happens for other people, especially when they work hard like you guys have. Like you were saying, the record is an amalgamation of all the things that you believe in that you have been working towards.

AS: Yeah. Bands always want to try and create the perfect package that will give someone all of the information that they possibly need to understand what you’re trying to do. I reckon we have done this on this record. But having said that, by the time the next record comes along, that could be completely different. We always threaten each other that the next record is going to be the ‘make it’ record, where I’m going to start singing-singing [laughs].

Yes! I’d buy that.

AS: It’s kind of like, okay, we’ve done the record that we wanted. Now, let’s just be really silly about it. I don’t think we’ll ever do it, but you never know.

It’s a really good feeling when you record, and it comes out exactly how you want it to be. Seldom does it ever happen. There’s a lot of accepting that maybe you didn’t get the best takes on something or maybe you didn’t spend enough time on mixing—you have to be happy with whatever it is. This album is the closest we’ve been to whatever the hell was in our heads.

That’s cool! Is there anything at the moment that you’ve been super into or excited about?

AS: I have started boxing and I am training for a fight now. The biggest thing that’s not music in my life right now, aside from my partner and all my loved ones, is, I am all the way into boxing.

My grandfather boxed, in an amateur sense. When I was young, he sat me down in front of the Lennox Lewis/Mike Tyson fight ,and I have followed boxing and MMA ever since. I’ve actually been training with one of my mates, Kristy Harris, she was a bronze medalist at the Commonwealth Games.

She’s great! She plays in a band called Eyeroll too.

AS: Yeah. That’s who’s been training me. I got to know her because she bought some Geld stuff and we got talking. She’s close buds with Emily from Straitjacket [Nation], who also boxes.

Boxing, like learning the steps, is like learning a guitar riff. It’s body mechanics. Learning those body mechanics was my way of being like, ‘Okay, I’m into this, so I don’t have to worry about the fitness thing because I want to do it. Totally.

When you started playing music, you started playing guitar?

AS: I’ve been a guitar player mostly. I write a lot of the Geld songs. Well, everyone everyone writes a lot of the Geld songs now. The demo was mostly me. As the records have kept going its changed; I only have three songs on the new record.

What was your first band?

AS: Going back to high school, I was in a metal band called Trench Warfare. I played in a garage punk band called, Bad Aches. Then I played in a band called Gentlemen with Tom.

Recently, I’ve been playing bass in The Vacant Lot; it’s been great—obviously I’m a real massive nerd about Australian first wave punk. I can’t wait to record with them because it’ll be like the smallest part of me being involved in history of Australian punk. Obviously, Australia as a fucking massive colony fucking sucks. And having any kind of nation pride or civic pride is pretty fucking hard to do at times. But the one thing that I was speaking to Pip, my partner the other day, the one thing I actually am quite patriotic about is the particular brand of punk that Australia has created. It actually sounds like Australian, and it does sound like there is something unique to it. And that’s something that I’ve thought about quite a lot. There’s not much to be proud about about our country.

You did the band Rabid Dogs too?

AS: Yeah, I did that with Kate and Kirk. Yeah, I did rabid dogs with Kate [Curtis] and Kirk [Scotcher]. That was awesome. I was living with Lee [Parker] at the time, and we were listening to The Damned a lot, and we wanted to do a band like that. I don’t think it ended up sounding like The Damned. Then Kate moved to New York, and shortly after that, Kirk and I started The Neuros.

That’s my favourite band you’ve done. The 7 inch is amazing!

AS: We basically have an LP together now.

I can’t wait! That news makes me super excited! Anything else you wanted to talk about?

AS: Sometimes the most liberating thing is to say to someone, ‘Hey, I actually really care about this,’ and being excited about that, and excited about what you are, and what something actually means to you. There’s no shame in being excited about something. I’m excited about lots of things all day long. Who doesn’t want to wake up and be excited about something? Again, like when I was talking about getting out of the pandemic and people being excited to go to shows again, that people had previously taken for granted. Not realising what a fucking gift it is to be able to pay $15 and have an evening’s worth of entertainment that is literally world-class. It’s bananas!

I didn’t say it outright earlier, but a big thing for me about lyrical content and presence of being a singer in Geld, is understanding, like not wanting to make everything inward focusing when it comes to content. Because I am essentially, as an existential form, checking my privilege or trying to check my privilege. Because it’s difficult to complain from such a comfy seat that I have. I deal with my own problems, but at the same time, from a societal systemic angle, I got it pretty good. I’m privileged enough to not have to deal with experiences like that. And that’s terrible.

Again, I never want Geld to come off like I am…[pauses and thinks] I don’t have a plight. There’s no plight in me. I’m lucky, and I don’t want to take that for granted when I’m expressing myself because there are people that I know, that deal with things from a societal standpoint that are much more serious. I never want to minimise that by being too loud about issues that I don’t really feel like I have the right to stand up on a soapbox and talk about. Does that make any sense?

It does.

AS: People that know me or people that know Geld understand our politics, and I don’t want to use our platform for that. I have thought about doing a call to Country (Acknowledgement of Country) at the start of our sets and decided I don’t want to do it, because when I see a lot of white people doing it, speaking as a white person, I don’t want to claim any cachet from anyone else, from First Nations pain. Does that make sense?

Yeah, and I respect that.

AS: Doing an Acknowledgement of Country in the community that we exist within, it’s not exactly an outrageous thing to do. But it’s just being conscious of the space I’m taking up and thinking about, why am I actually doing it to a whole bunch of people that already want a treaty? What is the subtext of me doing it?Am I doing it because I feel like I should? Or, am I doing it because I think that people will think higher of me for doing it? I know where my politics lie and it feels disingenuous, to me, personally.

I find it interesting that people talk about caring about mob and our struggles, and acknowledge they’re on our Country, but then how many of those people actually engage with us and actively support what we do or make. How many Indigenous people does the average person in hardcore know?

Yeah. For me, hardly any. I have a couple of friends that are mob, but what does that really mean? Nothing. Obviously I’m an ally, and I’m someone that cares about this stuff from a personal standpoint. But I never want my band to be a soapbox, or I never want my presence as a singer to be a soapbox for issues that ultimately have to do with me in terms of my responsibility, but also have absolutely nothing to do with me. Sometimes I can feel like it’s people taking up space.

Speaking honestly about myself, if I’m making an Acknowledgement of Country, I don’t feel like I am doing enough in my personal life to warrant that, because a lot of the time when someone does that, what are you doing aside from that?

That’s what I always think—what are you doing outside of mouthing some words. I appreciate words but I appreciate action in the day to day more.

AS: People can always do more than what they’re doing. If other white folks want to do, do it. I don’t think it’s problematic or anything. I think it’s cool, but for me personally, I just feel a little uncomfortable about it. I apologise if this is too intense of conversation for a Sunday [laughs].

No, not at all. I love these kinds of conversations, they’re important to have and I don’t see enough of them happening in the punk and hardcore.

AS: Totally. I really enjoyed chatting with you, seriously, though, it’s been actually really cool conversation.

Follow @geldhc and check out geld.com.au

Phil and the Tiles’ Reef Williams: ‘I just want people to create something beautiful in their life.’

21st Feb 202421st Feb 2024 | gimmiezine

Phil and the Tiles are masters of the happy-sad song, the bounce of the music often belying the sentiment underneath. Like lightning in a bottle they’ve captured the human spirit feeling many emotions all at once in song. The writing on their debut fill-length Double Happiness is sophisticated, each member adding their stamp to make their unique, fresh sound. They’re not trying to be anything but themselves; a collective of outstanding individuals. Candid moments give a playfulness and brings levity on this destined for classic Australian punk album status. Lewis Hodgson from CIVIC said the band is, ‘For fans of the true shit, Germs, Sardine V, UV Race, Institute, Zounds, Crass and of course The Snakes.’ Don’t sleep on this album. Double Happiness brings us untold happiness.

Gimmie chatted with vocalist Reef Williams while on holiday in Vietnam. He explored the album with us: dedicated to dear friend Benaiah Fiu (from Sex Drive and Strange Motel) who recently passed. Reef also shared stories about growing up with hippie parents on the festival circuit, his time in the Byron Bay punk hardcore community as a teen, his first time singing live at a guerrilla gig in a drain with hundreds of punks, of living in a tent in a Berlin park alone for months during winter, and a job that inspired song lyrics referencing being splashed with human waste.

REEF: I’m in the hotel kicking back. I’m in Vietnam with my partner Erin, and Reilly [Gaynor], who plays guitar in Phil and the Tiles. Our drummer, Andre [Piciocchi], is here as well. We saw really cheap flights a few months ago, so we decided to come over.

We went to a water park yesterday, and have been doing all the tacky stuff, it’s fun! I’ve been here before and done like all the hikes and stuff. We’re just going to go to more water parks throughout the next couple of days. We’ve been to a few museums too.

You were at Vietnam’s #1 waterpark yesterday?

REEF: Yeah! It’s the biggest one. It’s kind of like Wet N Wild—it’s the ultimate amount of fun! We’re going to cruise out to these raves in the bush; it’s quite far inland. Things are really cheap here, the food is great, and everybody’s friendly.

Do you get to travel much?

REEF: I try to get away every six months, if I can swing it with work. I save up money, then travel, and when I get home I’m always starting from zero again. I’m getting to a point, though, where I’ll probably start chilling more and try to actually save money for later.

What do you usually do for work?

REEF: During the festival season, me and Reilly build compost toilets, at the big doofs and festivals. Like, Strawberry Fields. It’s four months of work over the summer festival season, and then in winter I’m doing gardening and landscaping.

You work outdoors a lot.

REEF: Yeah, I love it, It’s hard work, but it’s nice to be able to kick it outside.

How did you first discover music?

REEF: My parents, basically. I grew up like going to festivals with them because they had a market stall. They are kind of hippies. My dad is into stuff like The Clash and Bad Brains. That trickled down to me. Growing up going to festivals, I’d see a lot of live music, so naturally it happens to become my thing. I got to see bands like Violent Femmes.

That’s rad your parents have such great taste in music and you didn’t feel you really needed to rebel against it, as a lot of people do.

REEF: I was lucky. Obviously, when I was a teenager I’d have phases of rebellion. I’d just be a little ratbag. There was always music playing around the house.

What kind of things would you listen to, to rebel?

REEF: Aussie hip-hop! [laughs]. Like older 90s stuff is great. My parents couldn’t stand it. Anything popular, they would hate.

Is there any particular artist you’d listen to?

REEF: There was this rapper that has a really sharp, piercing voice, and it sounds really angry. I didn’t just listen to it to rebel, I liked it. My sisters hated it too.

I like drum and bass. My parents are more into old reggae and country, or rock ’n’ roll; I’d put my earphones.

Going to the festivals with my parents, I knew I always wanted to go to shows. When I was of age, I started going to my own shows. The first ones I went to were hardcore and punk shows around Byron Bay and the Northern Rivers area.

I didn’t know you lived up this way!

REEF: Yeah. I’m from New Zealand originally, I came over here when I was five. I went to primary school in Sydney. Then we moved to Byron and I went to high school there. At the time there were a lot of all ages hardcore shows and shed shows happening. All that really got me into punk. There was a band, Shackles, that had a shed in an industrial estate, around the corner from my parents place. They were a bit older, but they were always encouraging all the young kids to come and have. Everyone really looked after each other. It was a good scene for it for a long time. And then it dropped off, and I moved to Melbourne as soon as I turned 18.

What attracted you to living in Melbourne?

REEF: Do you remember Maggot fest?

Yeah!

REEF: I flew down to Melbourne for it, maybe the 2015 one? I was only 17, I thought, ‘If I go, I’ll get in!’ [laughs]. I stayed with my friend, who was from Byron and had lived there for a year already. It was such a breath of fresh air. I knew that I was 100% coming back. Byron’s view and stuff is beautiful, but it’s as soon as I saw those bands in Melbourne, I knew living in Byron I would never get to see stuff like that live because they’d never tour. I was like—this is the place! I turned 18 the next month and moved; I got a Centrelink payment and moved down and lived in a spare room at my friends’ for a bit. I’ve been here eight years now.

I call Melbourne home. I wouldn’t say I didn’t fit in in Byron, but you know how Byron is, the people are different, it’s a small town. But I just knew I was born to go to punk shows and be in the city. As soon as I got there, I met a bunch of great people.

How did you get into making music yourself?

REEF: This band is my first band. I’ve always wanted to do a band. I’m rubbish at playing instruments. I randomly met our guitarist when he was on Schoolies in Byron. He was a few years older than me; I was 16, he was 18. Then, at 2016 Golden Plains, I was watching Eddy Current Suppression Ring play, I looked over and the guy I met a Schoolies was there! I walked over to him. But we didn’t really hang out for a few years and I kept running into him. We’d be like, ‘Let’s do a band!’ Eventually we started jamming at a friends house in the shed at Moorabbin. We were having so much fun, then things got put on hold because of COVID.

One of the original members, had to go over to America to work. They were away for a year. So Charlotte [Zarb from The Snakes] filled in. And when she came back from America, she got to play second guitar. That’s how we got to six people in the band. Hattie [Gleeson]’s left again, recently, because she’s studying Environmental Science, doing a PhD. She’s like, ‘I’m really sorry. I don’t have the time. I really want to.’ I was like, ‘Dude, don’t be sorry. You’re going to be a scientist! There’ll always be a spot for you in this band regardless of anything. Go do your thing!’ Now we’ve got Freya, on guitar now.

Your new album Double Happiness is about to come out—congratulations! It’s our favourite album we’ve heard so far this year.

REEF: Thank you so much, it means a lot. There’s six people in the band who all have different opinions and ideas, and we put it all into the music somehow, and it works. The genius behind it all is definitely Reilly. There’s no bossiness. Everyone puts in their own weird mixture.

And that’s why it sounds different to anything else. We LOVE it!

REEF: I’m really happy. I never thought I’d be able to hold my own record. When I was 16, 18, 19, I never though it possible and it wasn’t even in my mind. Then you get it, and people actually care about the art we’re all making it’s such a great feeling. It’s a long process to get all done. It’s such a special feeling. I still can’t believe we did it!

I was always a bitch, like so shy, and I never thought I’d be seen in a band but then these guys really brought me on my shell. It was just laughing and jamming. Being a singer has helped me with so much. That positive reinforcement from people around me has been nice.

I’ve always been pretty extroverted and but quite shy at the same time. I wouldn’t say I’ve never really struggled really bad with anxiety and stuff, but singing and the band has helped me. It’s hard to put it into words. It helped me in not really caring about what other people think about me. I’m not trying to impress anyone. In your teens and 20s, you’re always trying to impress people.

When you stop caring about what other people think, you’ve got nothing to lose and that gives you more freedom.

REEF: Yeah, without double guessing yourself. All that stuff is the biggest thing that holds everybody back. They get scared. I know people that do so much great shit but they’re just like, ‘Nah, it’s not good. I don’t want to put it out there to show people.’ I always try to back my friends and encourage them because I’ve felt like that before. I’m so much happier now.

I was so inspired by the bands I’d watch as a teen, I hope we can inspire other people to get into and keep the cycle going. If one person starts playing guitar, that’s something. I just want people to create something beautiful in their life. Music is a really beautiful thing.

You inspire us! We’ve obsessed with Double Happiness. ‘Death Ship’ has become a bit of an anthem around Gimmie HQ.

REEF: It’s got that happy-sad feeling to it. It’s my favourite song on the whole album. He just did it all, at home by himself. When he sent through, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s gonna be great!’ You can interpret the lyrics in many different ways. A lot of it is about being lonely, and COVID and overcoming that. When I read it I thought it could be about love. It’s a special song. It’s a wave of emotion.

That’s a great way to describe it. Phil and the Tiles do that happy-sad dynamic simultaneously, so well!

REEF: It’s a good thing to aim for. You want it to touch you. That song reminds me of riding a bike at night with my earphones in. Like riding home from work or to someone’s house, or it’s late at night and there’s no one around, there’s just you, and the street lights—and you’re taking in the world.

That’s such a lovely vision. I interpreted the song as existential. That line: Ask yourself, what’s the point of all of this? Pondering life.

REEF: Yeah, in Melbourne when the lockdown was happening, when the song was written, it’s like, ‘What’s the point? When is this going to end?’ And then it’s lifted and bring it back. And then I think that’s what was going through [Matt] Powelly’s mind when he wrote the lyrics. This may sound tough, but it’s about being complacent with death; it’s like, ‘It’s not going to end, I don’t even care.’ It’s not a suicide song, though. It’s about accepting that this is how it is now.

The song ‘Not Today’ (the one before it on the tracklist) pairs really nicely with ‘Death Ship’.

REEF: That was actually the second song we ever wrote. We didn’t put it on the 7-inch. We re-recorded it. I proudly wrote the riff for that one, and everyone came together to add their bits.The lyrics of that song was written after I came back from living in Berlin. I just ran around hitching with my backpack, sleeping bag, and a lightweight camping tent. I ended up staying in a park for seven months. I was standing on my own feet, living in a tent throughout the winter; it was so cold. It was real sad; I was away from my partner. I had mates who would let me shower at their place, but I didn’t want to burden them. I had a gas cooker, so it wasn’t too bad. But I was so lonely. I kind of got stuck there. I was a step above being homeless. It was by choice, though. I overstayed my visa. They didn’t even look closely at my passport when I left, they were happy I was going [laughs]. Who cares if you get a three year ban or whatever. I had so many crazy experiences. I went to crust-punk squats. If they see the situation you’re in, they try to help.

When I got back to Australia, it was summer. I went from being cold and a crazy bit of depression to, ‘I’m back,’ like everything seemed so beautiful to me. The line about the veggie patch—I could walk into the backyard and grab something and make some food. Being able to wake up beside my partner was perfect, I had been at such a low point while away, beside them it felt like life was great again.

It sounds like you had a real period of growth.

REEF: I did. It was nice to come home.

While I was in Berlin, I had a solar power battery charger. I’d use free Wi-Fi to download podcasts, and a movie, then go back to my tent, make dinner. I’d cruise around on my bike a lot. I’d ride 50-80kms out of the city to go to this lake. It was a great experience but then it got really sad, and then it was cold; I missed being in warm Australia.

I wrote ‘Not Today’ the second day I got back. I wrote down notes, then came up with the riff, then we all worked on the song. I jumbled the words, and it was more of a poem kind of thing.

On that first day home, it was nice knowing I could live normally in a house, I could make money properly, I had all my friends around, and it was warm. The line in the song: I don’t want to sit by myself today; it was referring to the weeks before. I was feeling sorry for myself, and wanted to get outside and get amongst it.

Just enjoy the day?

REEF: Yeah!

The album is called Double Happiness, which we love!

REEF: Me, Reilly, and Charlotte were in Sydney sitting around thinking, what would be a good name for the album? That same day someone picked up something from the ground that said Double Happiness. It was an empty pack of cigs, those cheap Chinese important ones. We took it as a sign to call it that [laughs]. It was going to be called And The Plot Thickens, but we thought Double Happiness sounds cooler.

By the way, I just want to say thank you for the amount of effort you guys put into Gimmie. It’s so good, it’s true passion. In my opinion, the best covering this weird little scene of ours.

Awww. Thank you! That means so much. We just cover all the stuff we love.

It’s all so great! The videos you guys put together too.

We love doing the live videos. It’s important to us to document bands in that way. Jhonny grew up in the country and when he was younger, he didn’t have access to shows. Also, with chronic health challenges we can’t always get to shows. So when we come across a live vid of a band we love, or discover a new band through someone’s vid, it means a lot. We also ship a lot of Gimmie print zines to regional places, and often people contact us and say that it helps them feel connected to a scene or they discover new bands from it. That’s what it’s all about, sharing cool stuff. I don’t know if a lot of people stop to think that not everyone has access to everything always. The cost of living also prices people out of being able to afford to go to a gig or buy a new record too.

REEF: Yeah. That’s awesome Gimmie goes to regional places. That in itself will inspire kids to do something, like I was talking about before. If one person picks up a guitar or starts playing music with their friends, that’s cool. I was lucky enough to have shows around, but it sounds quite sad and lonely not having access to that, especially when you want to be a part of it.

My dad grew up in the country, in New Zealand. He would get a tape and magazine once a month in the mail. It could change the whole way he would think! He lived in a really bleak place in New Zealand. Getting that mail was a little bit of hope, in his eyes. That’s what you guys do and it’s beautiful.

Do you know Short Sharp Shock? That guy does a bit of filming.

Yeah, we know his stuff. It’s great.

REEF: He’s really lovely. He’s another person that just documents and puts a lot of effort in.

We found Phil and the Tiles through Short Sharp Shock! We saw the video of the drains show you played!

REEF: That was the final end to all the lockdowns, so everyone was really keen to have fun. It was like my first time ever performing. There was so many people there. Everyone was so happy and in such a good mood. It was quite nice, how positive that show was. That show marked that lockdowns were finally over and that we can get back in the groove of things.

We really love the art on your new album!

REEF: It really captures the sound of the music. It’s real trippy. This guy, Noam Renn did it. He’s a tattooist. I’ve been looking at his Instagram for years. I love his paintings and knew he was the guy to do it. I went to get tattooed at his shop, and then he was like, Yes, I’ll do it.’ He nailed it! He did three different ones; he put a heap of time and effort into it. The one we chose that first that best is very trippy, like a DMT trip but with no colours, if that makes sense?

Totally!

REEF: There’s pathways, weird stuff, and it looks leek a portal. It’s my favourite artwork I have, I’ve got it framed in my house.

Cool! I saw when he posted it on his Insta with the caption: snow falls into military temples.

REEF: He’s very smart and poetic. When I met him he told me about how everything he does is just for the art and the love. You can tell he is very genuine, he’s really lovely to have a conversation with. When he does, he’s actually listening to what you’re saying.

Do you have shows or a tour planned for the album release?

REEF: We have our launch on the 15th of March at the Tote. The next day we’re playing with Drunk Mums and a bunch of other bands down the coast. I think this is the year we’re going to try get on the same page, I want to play to as many different people as we can. Everyone’s got jobs so it’s hard for the six of us to figure out a time we can do it. Everyone is frothing for it. We’ll make it work. I’m excited to get out there and for people to see us. I’m so excited about the record.

You should be—every song is a banger!

REEF: Thank you! It’s a roller coaster, it goes up and down, up and down. There’s harder songs and softer ones. There’s a song that sounds kind of Tom Tom Club, really dance-y.

‘Ode to Phil’ is a fun song.

REEF: Phil was Lewis’ cat. I lived with Lewis [Hodgson, guitarist for CIVIC] all through lockdown. I loved that cat; he died.

Awww no!

REEF: The band is named after him. Lewis, my partner, and I were sitting there on a hot summer day and Phil was laying on the kitchen tiles to cool off. My partner was like, ‘Phil and the tiles – that’s a good band name. It went in the WhatsApp group chat, and then just stuck. He was a good cat. One of those cats that hung out the whole time. He had his own seat when you were drinking and stuff.

The song ‘The Watcher’ is a great one too.

REEF: I really like that song too. The lyrics are quite funny, I mixed two things. Part of it is from when we build the compost toilets at all the raves, after it’s over, we literally have big buckets, like, big wheelie bins of human shit. When you’re moving the compost bins you sometimes get splashed with it; we’ll look at each other and go, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ With the lyrics, I’m not talking about some weird fetish [laughs].

The other part is a couple of our Gold Coast friends Benaiah [Benzy] and Bor worked with this guy at this hat factory, who kept talking about writing a book about voyeurism. He’s cooked, man. The way they’d describe it was so funny. When I was writing that song, I remember that story. There’s always a weird thing happening in our lives, I’m constantly writing down funny lines and then will use them if it makes sense for the song.

Charlotte wrote the riff in that song. It was an old Snakes song she wrote years ago but they didn’t do anything with it. Charlotte always whips out cool stuff. I love that we all work together to make our songs, all six people’s input makes it what it is.

Anything else you’d like to share?

REEF: I miss Benzy so much. I’m currently in the works of putting on a fundraiser show for the end of April, to send money to his mum and family. This Phil and the Tiles record is dedicated to him. He was a real beautiful dude. How could anyone know what was going to happen. It’s tragic. There were so many people at the funeral. I was in a bit of a state. It was a beautiful funeral, a mixture of crying, and laughing about Benzy stories that were shared. He lived a fucking beautiful life and touched a lot of people. Rest in peace tonight, man. Literally the last text I ever got from him was: fuck off ‘Death Ship’ man, so good! He was always so positive about anything I did and he really pushed me with this band, and he never put me or anything down. He’d do that with a lot of people, he brings them up.

Phil and the Tiles Double Happiness out tomorrow on one of our favourite labels Legless – GET the album HERE.

Follow @philandthetiles and @leglessrecords

Read our previous interview with Phil and the Tiles and our chat with Legless Records founder Mawson.

CRAFTY CUTS with CHARLOTTE GIGI (It Thing)

19th Feb 2024 | gimmiezine

*Original photo by @martdanza / Handmade collage by B.*

At Gimmie, we’re massive music nerds, and we love geeking out about music with friends. Since our first print issue, we’ve been asking musicians we love to share some of their favourite songs with us. We always get such interesting, surprising, eclectic answers, and we’ve discovered lots of cool stuff as well as been reminded of gems we hadn’t heard in ages. So, we’ve decided to do it more often via our site.

Charlotte Gigi, vocalist for the punk band It Thing, shares her favourite song of all time. She reflects on discovering a band she wasn’t initially ready for, whose vocalist sounds like a squeaky toy. She recounts listening to a song for over 5 hours while sleeping in a tent at a bush doof, and shares some of her favourite silly lyrics. Additionally, she mentions a song that changed the shape of her brain, a punk song about cats, an emcee that never sleeps, and more.

We hope you find a new song or artist to listen to on repeat—over and over and over—as us music fanatics tend to do!

‘The Electrician’ – The Walker Brothers

This is possibly my favourite song of all time. The strings are so lush, and just the most wonderful contrast from the intensity of the intro. I think the song is about a drawn-out torture process, which is really grim. But I love it when he sings, ‘Oh, you mambos!’

‘Medicine Bottle’ – Red House Painters

Once, I fell asleep in a wet tent camping, listening to this song in my headphones next to a bush doof. I kept waking up like every 10 minutes for 5 hours to various moments of this song, and it was the most comforting thing ever. The guitar tone is so rich. The lyrics of this song, although it’s quite long, are so memorable because of how impactful they are.

‘Shut Me Down’ – Rowland S Howard

This song was introduced to me by a beloved friend and housemate one winter. He played it a thousand times a day. I love the lyrics. Everyone who knows this song thinks it’s the best song ever. I don’t need to say much.

‘Dear Diary’ – Divinyls

I love how soft and dynamic Chrissy’s voice is on this track, and how she sings about Preston Annual Fair. This song is so feverish; she talks about having a vivid memory of a certain day, perhaps in childhood, and not being sure why. It’s like a photo.

‘Swamp Thing’ – Chameleons

This band is criminally underrated. I love the lyrics in particular: ‘The storm comes, or is it just another shower?’ The pacing is so great; the mood keeps changing from hopeless to hopeful. This is one of the best things to come out of Manchester, in my opinion, which says a lot.

‘Epizootics’ – Scott Walker

My big brother showed me this song when I was 12, and I was like, ‘What the…’ and totally rejected it, but it stuck with me. By the time I was 16, Scott Walker was one of the most important figures to me, and he still is. This whole album is pretty massively important to me; like, it changed the shape of my brain. And then I listened to Tilt. Anyway, I love the Hawaiian lady with metal teeth, I love the beats, the phases throughout the song. I love Scott Walker’s yawny-operatic baritone. You can dance to this all day.

‘I’ve Seen Footage’ – Death Grips

I’ve been in a little bit of a Death Grips rabbit hole lately. That’s all I’ll say about that. I like how MC Ride is on level 11 like, all the time. I don’t reckon he ever sleeps or sits down.

‘Unravel’ – Bjork

On YouTube, there is a beautiful video of Thom Yorke covering this, who is another one of my favourite musicians. He once said it’s his favourite song. It’s so cool to see your favourite artists being fans of one another. The cover gave me a new appreciation for this track, which is surrounded by huger, far less mellow songs on the album. Makes it hard to choose one to mention. I love the way Björk bursts into gibberish… she really uses her voice as an instrument in a unique way.

‘Strawberry Flower’ – 18cruk

I came across this perfect angsty Korean slow jam on the app Pandora when I was also a very angsty 14-year-old. I couldn’t find anything else on this band, but I’ve come back to it often since then. Recently, this entire album became available on streaming, which has been exciting because I never knew how the band sounded apart from this track, and I kind of love how shrouded in mystery this band has been for me for a decade now. And they’re good! Haha. I wonder what the members are doing now. I read somewhere once they disbanded and became rappers?

‘Ambulance Blues’ – Neil Young

I’m not like a massive Neil fan, but this particular song is really special. The lyrics are so profound, with genius phrases scattered through this almost 9-minute track. His vocals ring out so crystal clear. This song is kind of melancholic in a way that makes you feel nice.

‘Shield Your Eyes, A Beast In The Well Of Your Hand’ – Melt Banana

The first time I heard Melt Banana, I was not ready for them, and I didn’t like it. Then, I listened to them a few years later, and I was so ready, and I loved it. This track was my second introduction to them. Yasuko’s vocals sound like a squeaky toy at times, which is so cool. I really love this band.

‘I Against I’ (Omega Sessions 1980) – Bad Brains

HR’s vocals on this are just on another level. He’s definitely one of the more technically good vocalists in punk music. I like how paranoid and rabid he sounds; it’s so full of raw energy. Dr. Know absolutely shreds; his guitar is perfectly parallel to HR’s vocal through all the phases of this song, but this particular version… it is so good like whaaat.

‘Sunglasses’ (single version)- Black Country New Road

This track mentions Scott Walker, which is a huge win off the bat. The band is a 6-piece with the usual suspects and the additions of saxophone and violin, which are heavily utilised in a genius way on this track. I love the building intensity; it reminds me of Silver Mt. Zion. The lyrics are very unnerving with the guitar riff in the intro, and it used to make me really anxious. But I came around because it’s one of the best songs of the 2010s.

‘Teenage Lobotomy’ – Ramones

I just think it’s really funny. But the Ramones have like 40+ songs that are just as great, but ‘DDT did a job on me, now I’m a real sickie’ is such a silly lyric. The Ramones made making music accessible to so many people because they do genius on basics, and I love them for that.

‘Bocanda’ – Gustavo Cerati

This record is a great departure from his band Soda Stereo, who kind of put Argentina on the map musically. I love the trip-hop elements, his sweeping vocal. This track is so moody and visual; it kind of helps that I don’t speak Spanish and have lyrical insight to distract. A perfect song, like a warm bath on a rainy night.

‘Cat’ – The Sugarcubes

This is such an exciting song about cats! It has amazing energy; I’m not sure why that is. I love how it’s in Icelandic too – what a cool language. That guitar riff, especially on the outro, makes it a perfect punk song; it’s all so exciting! Björk’s voice is so intoxicating; she could sing about anything.

There’s a YouTube playlist with all the songs HERE!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries%3Fsi%3DV1RwEBlzz3jVBAZM%26list%3DPLNEwaW_Ntq2TtUiRm7uh3Sp8FFPV7acoI

Or a Spotify playlist of the songs HERE!

Read a Gimmie It Thing interview with Charlotte HERE.

You can check out IT THING via their bandcamp page HERE.

antenna vocalist shogun: ‘I can look back and laugh at a lot of the shit that happened. A lot of it was so fucking gnarly and sketchy.’

16th Feb 2024 | gimmiezine

Tim ‘Shogun’ Wall is back with new band, Antenna. The Sydney/Gadigal Country native, that somewhat reluctantly rose from the Australian punk underground to worldwide visibility and acclaim with band, Royal Headache, is producing arguably the best music of his roller coaster life.

We’ve listened to the sneak peek of Antenna’s debut EP (which will be released in a month or so on Urge) over and over, and over. We also saw them live at the start of January when they played a random one-off show on the Gold Coast/Yugambeh Country with Strange Motel, and Boiling Hot Politician. The EP is ripe with energy and soul, of a man who’s experienced a lot of shit, and is still here, still working on things, still processing it all through art—it’s an emotional tour de force sparkling with highlights. It contains some of Shogun’s most exciting and heartfelt performances yet. There’s transcendence amidst chaos. All his influences and past projects are swirling around in this collection of songs. Across the album, guitarist Hideki Amasaki’s work soars as its backbone and defiantly provokes us to react. Indifference is not an option when it comes to this release. It’s already one of our top releases of the year, and it’s only February!

Gimmie sat down with Shogun a night last week, to talk about everything. He shared insights into his journey, discussing where he’s been, where he’s headed, and the significance of this year in his life—in some ways a feeling of make or break looms. It’s also a great reminder that us creatives and fans need to remember to look out for each other and support one-another. Life can be hard, but we’re firmly planted on the side of lifting people up, rather than tearing them down.

SHOGUN: I work a 9 to 5. It’s pretty gnarly, I do court transcription. I don’t really like it. When I fell off the Royal Headache bus, I needed to go and get myself a fucking job. My friend goes, ‘Oh, I do this, maybe you can do this?’ I was like, ‘There’s no way someone like me is gonna get that job!’ But a lot of people say that about a lot of jobs, don’t they? They assume there’s an inadequacy. Anyway, somehow I got through. After being there for a few years, they’re like, ‘You can come and do this permanently if you want’ and be a white collar stiff. I’m there in spite of all reason and logic, I’ll probably be there for the foreseeable future.

It’s not a bad thing to work a day job and do creative stuff. I’ve pretty much always had a job and then done creative stuff too. The job pays the bills and then the creative work is fun and I don’t have to ever compromise and do stuff that I don’t want to do.

SHOGUN: Oh, absolutely. I completely agree. I’ll be at a day job forever. Back in the Royal Headache days, I made a good living off music for a couple years, but it didn’t bring out the best in me, really. Looking back, you’re sitting around the universe for one or two whole weeks, just waiting for a gig and a couple of band practices and, you know, what they say about idle hands. I wasn’t the happiest or best version of myself then by any means.

I am very hyper and I do, even to this day, sadly, still get into mischief. I need routine, it’s good for me. It’s calmed me down a lot.

That’s so great to hear.

SHOGUN: I was really missing playing loud music and punk.

The last year has been a real transition. From being someone who felt definitely a little bit apart from the scene, somewhat bitter, sure, to then progressing to feeling included and optimistic. That’s been nice.

Despite contributing to the punk community for the past 30 years, since I was 15, there’s been so many times when I haven’t felt part of the scene too, so I get you.

SHOGUN: There’s different levels and gradient to it. I was a total hardcore zealot as a kid, I was straight edge, and right in there, in the mosh pits, mic grabs and stuff [laughs].

But then I rejected all that. Maybe it’s the sort of personal I am? I was so zealous and involved that I abruptly became really sick of it, or I found something weirder or more aggressive or more crazy. I went more into powerviolence and grindcore. Then was going to see techno parties and things like Passenger Of Shit and all the fucking Bloody Fist [Records] stuff. It was pretty amazing. I’ve always been part of scenes but then the Royal Headache thing, the whole irony was that, the band got so big.

There’s a few ways to get excluded from a punk community. Obviously you can do something really fucking dodgy so you can’t come back and everyone knows that. But what surprised me and what I didn’t know is, if your band gets really popular, it’s almost the same thing. It’s not as horrific, you haven’t hurt anyone, but the treatment is always almost the same.

I tried to form the ultimate punk band with Royal Headache—some Buzzcocks in there, some soul, a tiny bit of hardcore. It’s going to be great! You know, you’re going to love it! But then, something about the magnitude of the Royal Headache sort of fanfare actually alienated me from that community. Even though, that band was supposed to be my final gift to them. It’s nice to come back in and do it on a small and humble scale, not too thirsty to make any big waves. It’s just nice to be around loud guitars and fast drums again.

It was great to see you live on the Gold Coast last month with Strange Motel.

SHOGUN: I hadn’t been up there since I was about 9 years old and I actually really loved it. It’s a beautiful community. I actually didn’t know that part of Australia really existed and it’s not like Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane—it’s really its own energy.

Yeah. I wish more bands came and played here.

SHOGUN: I was having the most beautiful holiday… until what happened [Benaiah Fiu founder of Strange Motel and guitarist for Sex Drive suddenly passed away after the show].

We still can’t believe it. We were talking to him and hugging him at the show only hours before it happened and then he wasn’t here anymore. You and I are a similar age, with the kind of scenes we’re involved in, unfortunately losing people too early, there’s a greater chance of that.

SHOGUN: Every time it happens it’s almost like you shed so much of yourself, you become a completely different person. It’s almost as if I’m taking like 17 fucking hits of acid or something. You feel spun by it.

Loss and death is a theme that has appeared in some of your songs. Like your project Finnogun’s Wake song, ‘Blue Skies’ was written after a friend’s passing.

SHOGUN: It was. Even though it’s not really mentioned in the song. Sometimes the unmentionable central fact informs the energy of the song, but you never explicitly talk about it because there’s no real way to express it.

Benaiah’s passing really reopened that wound. It had almost closed. I almost forgot the feeling of total grief. It was really good to get so close to him. I’ve known him for about 10 years, we got closer in the last few years. We were messaging all the time. We’d send each other lots of music, stuff that’s just coming out now. I was like sending him the Finnogun’s Wake and I asked, ’Is this shit?’ And he’s like, ‘Uh, yeah.’ And then I sent a new mix, and he’s like, ‘Oh, this is way better.’ He had my back and would get me psyched on it. Like myself, he’s a totally music obsessed, it’s always fucking number one. It’s like a quasi-religious thing.

Totally! Benaiah lived over in the next suburb from us. We’d have these really deep chats. He was trying so hard to do better and get away from the things that were brining him down. It makes it even sadder that ultimately, those things took him. He was looking forward to so much, like shows down south.

SHOGUN: Yeah. He was also one of the only people from the punk scene to give Antenna a show. We’ve been around for over a year now. He was one of the first guys to go, ‘Do you want to play with me?’ All the other shows we’ve done are just with randoms. He took a chance on us. I was really looking forward to doing a bunch of shit with him this year. I was hoping that would give him something to look forward to and work towards. He’s got all this amazing Strange Motel stuff getting rolled out.

When I see my younger mates in trouble, without taking on a patronising bigger brother role, you need to give them something to look forward to. It’s all still very raw.

Yeah. It’s the same with us. It can get really heartbreaking when you see people in the scene you love going down a dark path—we get it, because we’ve been there too—and you want to help. Benaiah’s death really hurt.

SHOGUN: I loved the guy. But I’m down here. He’d come down to Sydney and we’d party. That’s what the Sex Drive guys always do. They get fucking loaded. It’s a fun tradition. I wasn’t perceptive enough to the fact that there’d been problems. I wish I’d known more. Only in the last few days I’d heard it was getting kind of serious. It’s heavy stuff.

You’ve dealt with your own heavy stuff, like addiction.

SHOGUN: Nothing too hard. There was always lots of shit around me, but for me, just booze and some other stuff, nothing hardcore. No smack, and no Ice… [pauses] really, not a lot.

We’ve been totally thrashing the new Antenna EP on the home stereo, on the car stereo, on my phone going for a run, and it’s our favourite thing you’ve done.

SHOGUN: Thanks, man. Fuck yeah!

It’s like all the things that you’ve done finally culminating and you’re making the music you always wanted to.

SHOGUN: Totally. I really appreciate that. I’m getting really gassed about it because I’ve had the nicest feedback. I sent to to Trae [Brown, vocalist] from Electric Chair. He’s an interesting, cool guy. He didn’t say anything for a couple of weeks and I’m like, ‘He hates it! That’ll be right. Fuck.’ Then he writes, and tells me, ‘This is fucking sick! I love this! You guys have to get over here’. He’s been thrashing it.

A couple of days ago we confirmed that it’s coming out on Urge Records in a month. It’ll be ready for our trip down to Melbourne mid-March. I’m psyched.

A song that really stood out on the EP is ‘Antenna State’. When did you write that song?

SHOGUN: Last year. I’ve been a little happier, maybe the last six months, but when I was writing those songs. I was completely miserable and really nothing was going right. But then I met these great guys; this amazing guitarist, Hideki Amasaki, he’s an incredible dude, a really killer guitarist. I thought, sometimes it’s a little cringy to go and start a punk band at my age. But I’m actually adequately angry and miserable enough to do this. Shit is actually going wrong enough that I can really throw it at a wall. Those songs were written at that time.

‘Antenna State’, without confessing too much, it’s all true. I don’t make these things up. All the lyrics, that was going on for sure. It’s a list, or like a sandwich or a salad of how many things in your life can go wrong at once.

I was quite mentally sick at the very start of Royal Headache and instead of getting help—serious help is what I needed— I joined a band that started really going, and touring everywhere. It was like putting a bandaid over a fucking shotgun wound.

This is all years ago now. I haven’t experienced anything like that in 9 nine years.

I’m so happy for you!

SHOGUN: Sometimes I wonder it’s gonna raise its head and it’s gonna hit again.

I think it’s important to be more understanding of others, you never know what’s going on with someone.

SHOGUN: Yeah. At the show at the Gold Coast you were at, me and a friend were having a chat. He has an Indigenous background, he’s a graffiti writer. He’s saying, ‘Well, fuck, back in the day, we’d have to hide that shit,’ you know, like that you’re mentally ill or if your family’s from a different background. You couldn’t talk about that. Know what I mean?

I do. I’m also Indigenous and have struggled with mental illness, I’ve lived it.

SHOGUN: It’s cool nowadays that people do talk about that stuff more. Sometimes it feels like for us it’s come too late. Imagine if it would have been like that when we were younger. How it’s all out in the open. Maybe I wouldn’t have been in so much trouble. We got into shit having to hide our stuff and not having understanding in our community.

Yep. I would have cried a lot less, especially at school. I used to get picked on all the time. School was a nightmare.

SHOGUN: Yeah, same. Fuck, man, the early-90s, in middle class, suburban Sydney might as well have been the fucking 1940s. If you liked anything but rugby, like you liked music and you were poor, which meant you deserve to be bashed. Like what is this chain of logic here? Especially in my neighbourhood, it’s a real kind of straw man masculinity. It’s all about showing strength on the footy field, but when it comes to standing against something that you can see is obviously wrong, there’s a terror of sticking out. A terror of being being thrown out with the person that you’re defending; being thrown into the same wasteland.

I read somewhere that you said you’ve been singing since you were 5. For fun, obviously. It’s not like you were singing down at the local Italian restaurant or something.

SHOGUN:[Laughs] Yeah. I wasn’t in a little sailor suit doing musicals and stuff—but that would have been great! Like if I was doing Oklahoma or even just being an extra, like a cactus. I always liked singing. My parents used to be like, ‘Just shut the fuck up!’ But also encouraging. Some people have things that they’ve always liked doing. Some people do sport; I sing. I have always been a motormouth and someone who likes to use his voice. It’s got me in shit at times. It’s got me punched in the head a couple of times [laughs]. I like to make up songs.

What kinds of things did you like to sing?

SHOGUN: Definitely pop. I had two sisters and my dad used to work a lot, so it was definitely all about my mum had like Girls Greatest Hits. I’d sing to that, having a pre-pubescent voice with all the octaves and singing to shit like Belinda Carlisle, Whitney Houston, getting deeper into obscurities with stuff like the Eurogliders and Yazoo. I’d dance with my mum and sisters in the lounge room to all this shit and we were singing. Maybe that’s where my singing style came from; singing as a young boy in a female vocal range. Something to think about.

I could see that. Your vocals are really powerful and unique.

SHOGUN: I’m glad that you were able to to grab that out of it. I’ve recorded a few things since Royal Headache like Shogun and the Sheets. But Antenna has caught me at a particular moment, similar to the Headache stuff, I was that little bit more vulnerable and giving a little bit more, because I was hurting more.

It always amazes me when you when you somehow enshrine a piece of yourself or hide a piece of yourself within a recording. You encode it into the sound waves and people, like you, can actually pick that up. it’s always accidental. If you’re really going through something when you do that vocal track, people can hear it. You really mean it.

I believe what you’re singing.

SHOGUN: I believed it that day. I remember doing the vocal for ‘Antenna State’ and I’d been struggling a lot with alcoholism that year, in spite of every promise I made to myself, it was just broken again and again. When I sung that, I was actually really fucking angry. I hadn’t warmed my voice up, I’d been smoking the entire night before. I thought, ‘There’s no way I can sing today,’ but it turned out to be the best one and we just kept it all, one take.

You were angry at yourself?

SHOGUN: Yeah, myself. I don’t like projecting anger onto other people, not anymore, not at my age. I know some young guys and they get so angry at the scene and everyone else and everything is always everyone else’s fault. It’s bullshit man, like you can only ever really be angry at yourself I feel because you put yourself in a situation where you’re vulnerable to get used. I don’t know, maybe it’s not as simple as that but it’s more positive to take responsibility. Because you can change yourself. You can’t change other people.

Sometimes you can’t immediately change the situations or what’s happening, but you can change how you react to things. I’ve learned, if you fight fire with fire, that doesn’t work.

SHOGUN: That’s the whole fundamental philosophical flaw in a lot of hardcore. As much as I’m probably a hardcore kid to the grave, that’s the thing about that kind of anger, especially when it gets really aggressive and beat down hardcore stuff. I’ve been around it as a kid, I was part of it, though, always the gangly weird nerdy kid in that scene.

Now I’ve sort of aged out of it. Hardcore is really changing so fast at the moment. There’s a positive macho scene. Where it’s tough, hard, and crazy and fucked up, but not as toxic. It’s inclusive and it wants to better itself. But it’s still a place for those guys who want to fucking trash shit and do graffiti and go completely wild—that’s really who they are in their blood, and they really need that release. I’ve calmed down. There needs to be a place for those guys, as long as they know that other people should feel welcome there as well.

Your music when younger was a lot darker. Even the new Antenna stuff you’re taking about darker things but it’s like you’ve hit a point where you’re maybe trying to embrace being more joyous. It in your vocal, like the mood of your delivery.

SHOGUN: Yeah, also at my age, learning to have a sense of humour. Antenna’s songs have got a real dark sense of humour. It was present in some of the Royal Headache stuff too. It wasn’t really like, oh, I feel sorry for me. More like, things are going to shit. Kind of in a Punch and Judy way, sort of funny; this burnt out punk singer and his life has gone to shit. In my head, Antenna is like a Netflix series about an ageing local musician. Incredibly entertaining [laughs]. Like you used to listen to that guy’s record and now he doesn’t have his shit together. I find this stuff deeply amusing. I don’t know if that comes through?

I can see/hear that.

SHOGUN: This project has hit a nice balance of—life is hard/life is funny.

I think you nailed that. That’s why it resonates, because it’s fucking real.

SHOGUN: Thank you! Fuck yeah. That gets me psyched. There’s five more songs from that session that we’ve recorded. I think they are good, really good. There’s a funny kind of Judas Priest-style song, about a fictitious serial killer who lives in Marrickville. There’s also some hardcore songs. There’s a song called ‘Hellfest’ about my job; it’s named after that cheesy American hardcore festival. There’s a song called ‘Seed’, which sounds like early Lemonheads, kind of indie punk.

The best thing about Antenna is it’s not really totally my brainchild in any way. All of the lovely melodic music comes from Hideki Amasaki, the guitarist, who had all these amazing riffs written and that’s why I got involved. He’s incredibly gifted. He writes pretty much all of the music.

There’s some really beautiful guitar work on the EP! Between that and your vocals it really makes it something special.

SHOGUN: I love a collaborative creative process, rather than writing from scratch. I did a band called Shogun and the Sheets and had the best fucking musicians to do that with. But I realised the problem was it was inorganic. I was writing the music as well; I was writing the chords and I was arranging everything. It felt like there was something missing. It really lacked the excitement because it’s all just coming from one guy.

Like, it’s… [pauses and thinks]… not asexual, but what’s the word for those plants that reproduce on their own? Doesn’t matter, we can Google it later [laughs]. But it was inorganic and there’s was no sense of fun and surprise.

I used to write all the time, I’ve slowed down a lot. I feel like your brain certainly changes at my age and you lose pain, and you also lose vision, the brightness comes with that and that’s where song comes from. You feel things less intensely, you’re able to control yourself a little more, but you’ve lost that part of yourself, which is where the music comes from. I wanna do everything I can before that door finally closes, ‘cause I can definitely feel it closing.

I know some people make music forever, but let’s be honest, those artists that keep making music after they’re 50, some its’s okay. But most of them, I think we can all agree that after they’re about 40, it goes downhill pretty fucking fast.

Everyone can say, ‘Oh, this guy from the fucking Buzzcocks just put out a record!’ but I’m not gonna run out and listen to that in a hurry.

I like the new OFF! record, Keith is 68!

SHOGUN: OFF! would be a prime example for me. They’re not terrible, but as a big Circle Jerks guy, OFF!’s like… [smirks].

I LOVE Circle Jerks’ Group Sex! Itwas one of my gateway records into punk. So I get it. But I disagree and think it’s possible to make the best thing they’ve done now.

SHOGUN: Group Sex is perfect! Antenna is influenced by Circle Jerks in some ways.

I noticed the ‘Wild In the Streets’reference on the new EP.

SHOGUN: That’s great! I absolutely cannot get enough. I’m such a nerd for Bad Brains, Circle Jerks, Black Flag.

Where’d the song ‘Don’t Cry’ – with the Circle jerks reference – come from?

SHOGUN: It came from the gut. Having been around different communities of guys, all chaotic, let’s not pull any punches here—lots of hard drug use. Lots of crazy graffiti writing. Lots of total, total disaster. I was surprised when Benaiah’s death hit me so hard because, fuck, it must be death number 10 of a friend related to drugs. There’s been so many drug deaths.

The last thing that really got me was a couple of years beforehand, my friend Alex [Wood], who used to play in my old grind band Dot Do Dot had a brain aneurysm that was drug related. There’s been a really grievous energy with a lot of guys I’ve known. I don’t know, if I’ve had the most positive community around me. It’s always the craziest fucking guys and the most like fucked up dudes; a lot have died, some of them have been like canceled. I don’t know why I’ve been drawn to, and attracted this. Maybe I’m a little extra for like the cool kids. I wind up around these guys, and they’re doing speed, fighting, and doing graffiti. The irony is, I’m not so much like that myself. But I have always felt like that’s where I belong. Around the craziest, most brutal people, I feel comfortable and they’re good to me. They’re my brothers. It’s fucked up, but that’s me.

We really love the song ‘Lost’ on the EP.

SHOGUN: That was an interesting one. That’s not anything too recent. It’s reflecting on a break up that destroyed me so deeply. Much more than it should have. People need to move on and get their shit together. There was a symbolic value I’d inscribed into that relationship. It’s almost like I wasn’t really there for about two and a half years, and all I could do was drink and couldn’t fucking sleep. It wasn’t really about her; we’re still great friends.It’s more what happens when you’re too dependent on a relationship because there’s really something missing profoundly in yourself.

It was pretty bad. I parted ways with this person, this was during the Royal Headache days. That was actually the beginning of the end of Royal Headache. My best friend died of an overdose and then this person left me and it’s like a detonation process happened. It’s like I wasn’t really roadworthy anymore. The next three years is a blur—I don’t think anything good happened.

We also love the hook in ‘English Three’.

SHOGUN: The lyric is actually: Don’t hold me or touch me. I didn’t say it properly cause I was drunk. So it sounds like I’m saying: Don’t hold me, touch me. And it’s kind of really creepy [laughs].

The song reflects on some low points, but the music’s kind of jaunty. I can look back and laugh at a lot of the shit that happened. A lot of it was so fucking gnarly and sketchy, it was pretty fucking off.

You posted in your Instagram stories the other day: 43 and still in it.

SHOGUN: Yeah, I’m still going. The Benzy-thing really shook me like, and there’s been some other dramas. It was realising that life can be an endless downpour of shit.

Some things are better, like I’m financially stable now, which goes a long way. Financial instability, and just not having routine and all that shit is what makes people get into trouble. I’m definitely still going through it in a few in a few ways. But if I keep my head down and stay in and make sure I’m not associating with too many younger cats who are just like completely fucking wild, I’ll get better. From here on in, I need to stay healthy enough to do music, it’s all about damage control and nights in. It’s not really in my character, but since I’m doing music again, rather than responding to it, like I would 10 years ago, by going out and fucking partying because I’m back in music, I think I’ll probably go the opposite way and become a bit of a hermit. That’s the only way I’m gonna stay healthy enough to really get it done and keep on providing quality stuff for people to enjoy. It won’t be trashed. I can’t stand mediocrity in music.

Note: more of this chat will appear in the up coming punk book we’ve been working on – details coming soon!

Follow @antennnnnna.

Optic Nerve’s Gigi: ‘No one will ever make the world that you need other than yourself and your community.’

25th Jan 202425th Jan 2024 | gimmiezine

Optic Nerve from Gadigal Country/Sydney aren’t just a band you listen to, they’re a band your feel. A band that defies the worn out tropes of hardcore punk, and expands its boundaries. Reimagining it, to gave us one of the standout albums of 2023, Angel Numbers. It flew under a lot of people’s radar; if you haven’t checked it out, we recommend you do. They’re a glow-up that uplifts the communities they speak to and care about. Vocalist Gigi is deeply sincere, and claims her power on the record, which is lyrically inspired by a French mystic, anti-trans violence, and exploring signs. We caught up with her, last year just as the album was being released, to talk about it. It was meant to be the cover feature interview for a print issue we had pretty much ready to put out last year – but life happened, and things were rough so we didn’t get it out. Finally, though, we get to share the chat with you.

GIGI: Our record [Angel Numbers] indexes a few moments of really intense transphobic violence. It felt pretty emotional to put out our new record, given the context of the last few weeks. Having it come out while there’s Nazis gathering in Melbourne and in Sydney. And Kimberly McRae [an author and trans sex worker], the man who killed her, didn’t get a murder charge. A bunch of friends have been feeling… [pauses]—it’s been a really bleak time for transsexuals. With everything happening, I sort of forget about the record. I didn’t even realise the single was coming out the other day. It was weird to return to some of the ideas or hopes that the record had in what is a really heavy few weeks.

I’m so sorry that it’s been such a challenging time. The craziness of the world seems to feel overwhelming a lot of the time. It’s been great to see the songs from the record live recently. We saw three Optic Nerve shows in three different states.

GIGI: It always feels like such a privilege to go to a city that you don’t really know and have people care about the music. The Optic shows often have a different energy. At punk shows, it’s mostly bro-y dudes. Often, when we play, those dudes move to the back, and all these younger, more interesting people move to the front. There’s space for that, which is really nice. I actually got really emotional playing Jerk Fest. At the front there was all of these really wonderful young, queer and trans people who were shouting out for songs that hadn’t come out yet.

I know that the Decline of the Western Civilization documentary had a really big impact on you.

GIGI: Definitely. When I was really young, I wanted to be like a lot of the bands, particularly The Bags. I drew a lot of inspiration from her [Alice Bag]. Being so defiantly, an outsider. Also, that music seems way more interesting to me than a lot of super self-serious punk music. I emailed Alice a few times after the first Concrete Lawn demo came out and had this really sweet correspondence. I sent her the band’s demo.

I feel like in a lot of the Optic songs, I always try and channel the Big Boys. They were a Texas hardcore band. They were all skateboarders and drag queens, and really flamboyant leather BDSM guys writing these cheesy love songs and having fun. That feels way more interesting to me than flexing.

Was there anything specific that you wanted to do from the outset with Optic Nerve?

GIGI: I’d always wanted to sing in a hardcore band. The first demo and all of the earlier songs are a lot more straightforward hardcore music. Moving forward, the record is quite a bit more spacey. I would say, not really hardcore at all. The intention is to continue on that trajectory of getting a little bit more studio with it.

Joel, Joe, and John, who was the original guitarist in Optic, they had all moved from Canberra at relatively the same time and all started writing songs together. Then, they just asked if I would sing. So, I came into it with a bunch of the songs already written and did lyrics over the top. It was nice to ease in because at that time, I was playing in three or four other really active bands. To have almost a ‘burner project’ where I could turn up to practice and, I don’t know, be on Twitter on my phone [laughs], and write lyrics. Then, we started to play shows. It’s become a really fab, more creative venture for us all together!

Across the album there’s flute; that’s you, right?

GIGI: Yeah. I played flute as a kid. We were thinking about the flute as this sort of returning-to-childhood thing, which felt really nice. But we were also thinking about the record in parts, in the way you would frame a ballet or a really grand performance. We were thinking about setting up the listener—audience kind of engagement that our shows aim for. We were hoping to use the flute almost as this classical framing device that would bring people in and out of different moments on the record. Loosely there’s flute the beginning, middle and end. It almost provides an emotional structure to the music through flourishes. It was fun. I borrowed my boss’s flute and just winged it. I did it all in one or two takes.

That’s awesome. I love that! The album is playful, like your live show. It’s a cool lighter juxtapose to the heavy themes on the album.

GIGI: That’s it. When we were recording, we set this rule for ourselves that we couldn’t use any synths. We didn’t want to use any digital effects. So a lot of the record was recording a base of the song and then overdubbing things with really fucked up effects on it and then using heaps of tape delays and dubby effects to kind of give things this sort of synth-y ambient flutters throughout.

It’s nice to be playful. With the live shows, I play around and see if I can climb something on stage—like, climb on a speaker. Also, live, it’s worth protecting your energy. If you’re in a crowd full of people who don’t resonate with the kind of violence that the record talks to, it’s only going to be exhausting and exposing to talk about it really explicitly. Leaning into the playfulness of it and trusting that the people who will get it, will get it, was important. I’m glad that you picked up on the playfulness because I think it is.

That’s one reason that I really love your band! It’s hardcore punk but without all the gross stuff—tough guy nonsense, perpetuating traditional gender norms, racism, homophobia etc.

GIGI: Yeah, we’re something else.

Thank you for existing! I love people doing their own thing, standing up for what they believe in.

GIGI: For women and people of colour, anger is a really powerful tool. For boys, I don’t really know if it changes the world very much. There’s a lot of anger and a lot of hatred in the music, but I’m wary that the audiences who engage with it, that’s not necessarily a productive emotion for them to hold on to. Trying to make the shows feel a bit different to that is really important,

From your release Fast Car Waving Goodbye to the new record Angel Numbers, what do you think has been the biggest growth for you?

GIGI: The EP, we were just playing live. It was an assortment of songs; they are all really different from one another, in a nice way, but there’s not much cohesion. This record we wrote it to be a record, it was thought of as being singular, rather than writing music to play shows.

I’m proud of myself because now the music talks more directly to what I want it to be talking about and not just being vague, almost as a protection strategy. That’s how I feel listening to the older Optic stuff.

The newer recording we spent a little more time on. We still mostly recorded it ourselves. It’s a more mature of a record.

It’s one of our favourite albums of 2023! The booklet/zine that comes with it is really interesting and cool. I love that we get more insight into inspiration and thought for the songs. The title Angel Numbers speaks to seeing signs. What influenced that? Did you see signs when writing the album?

GIGI: The title is half a joke and half not [laughs]. I was interested in these practices of divination or magic or whatever that really rely on a kind of politics of faith and really believing in yourself. At the same time, it also thinks that those things are a little bit bullshit. It tries to peddle the fact that no one will ever make the world that you need other than yourself and your community.

I was feeling that at the time the record was made. Maybe I felt a little abandoned, and like people were pinning too much stuff on almost leaving stuff to the stars. It felt like things that were needed in the world were too immediate to pin stuff on hope or fate or the stars. It was like, ‘Oh my god, get your head out of your arse’. But finding structures that can make the world meaningful or powerful to move through, felt really important as well.

A lot of the record is about context and bending the context of the world and social communities that you’re in, or social practices or things to make yourself and other people safe. One of the ways that can happen is creating a structure for yourself that creates meaning in your life. That’s very much what these magical, mystical practices I was looking into kind of do at their core when they’re really successful. They give you a set of structures that can really meaningfully harness your power and bring it to the fore. That’s what the record is talking to in the title.

I picked up on the mysticism—that’s my jam.

GIGI: I was researching Silvia Federici (whom I left out of the citations on the lyric booklet for the album because she’s a massive TERF), this Italian Marxist feminist. She has this really fab book called Caliban and the Witch that talks about the beginning of capitalism coinciding with the mandate for gendered labour, necessarily creating a kind of subjugation of women. That coincided with women who were seen as independent, holders of deep spiritual knowledge, or community leaders being branded as witches.

She writes this really amazing historical overview of the beginnings of capitalism and the witch trials. Thinking about ‘witch’ as this kind of socially condemnable term rather than a cohesive set of magical practices. I found Marguerite Porete, the mystic and author, through that book. I got really obsessed with this idea of this woman totally on her own in the world, trying to make sense of God through her own desire or love or faith.

I got really captivated by this image of her getting burnt at the stake, and she’s just blissful and happy. Her almost giving over to the violence and persecution because it means not compromising yourself. That was a super meaningful image for me to understand. Like, you can never escape the violence or the risk or whatever of this world, particularly thinking about anti-trans violence. You just have to embrace risk and embrace joy in the face of that. It’s the most powerful thing you can do.

Has there been times in your life where you’ve experienced that kind of violence?

GIGI: Yeah. The record speaks to this few-month period where I got jumped four times and was put in the hospital twice. It’s exhausting, so brutal. One thing that I’ve been trying to get into people’s minds, which also feels hard to justify when the record is about a French mystic and angel numbers and all these things, is that there are no metaphors in it, at all. A lot of it is explicitly about the stakes—life or death in a very literal sense.

I am so sorry that happened to you. I can’t even convey words of how much this upsets me to hear.

GIGI: Yeah. It doesn’t feel valuable to list off traumas that anyone has gone through because it does just upset the people who get it, and then the people who don’t get it are just like, ‘Oh, that sucks.’ Instead, honing in on the ways that reverence and grief can exist together and hold each other up is really important to me.

The footnotes in the booklet are great.

GIGI: I thought they would be helpful for younger people to find out more about what I’m singing about. There was a period of time where I really lamented that a lot of the bands that I was getting into as a teenager had the same politics as me, but were really reserved about it. I was thinking that younger transsexual listeners could discover some of the things that are really foundational to my politics, that it would be nice to have a resource for people to go to if they needed to.

Our single ‘Trap Door’ is really powerful to me. It speaks to moments of violence and then moments of going out and having fun afterwards anyway. The other tracks speak a little bit more vaguely about liminal spaces or administrative violence or these kinds of facets that make up the record. ‘Trap Door’ is climatic, it talks about getting jumped. Making the music video was really healing. It was going back to something that has been really hurtful and really violent, and in a way making it beautiful and fun. If that makes sense?

I totally get what you’re saying. I spoke with filmmaker and musician Don Letts a while back. He told me about, how punk was seen as this negative, nihilistic thing, but really, it’s about empowerment and turning negatives into positives. Like what you’re talking about.

GIGI: Yeah. Punk is about empowerment and turning pain into something more joyful that you can share with others. It’s about a commitment to never having to compromise. It’s also very much about community and making a space to feel and process emotion. While songs or bands may not meaningfully change the world that much, they galvanise people to come together, creating a sense of collectivity that is powerful and special. It’s about processing, feeling, and working out what I feel about the world. Allowing that process of feeling emotion to become a chance for connection.

Where are the places you find community now?

GIGI: When I was first getting into punk and hardcore, it would have been at Black Wire Records. Tom [Scott] and Sarah [Baker], who ran that, are like my parents. I used to go there every day after school when I was a teen. It was this DIY record store that put on all-ages shows in Sydney. I saw so many of my favourite bands there, and it really gave me my sense of politics as well as my music taste. After that, Tom and Sarah were running another place called 96 Tears that I was helping out at, doing the bookings.

Sydney is a really interesting city because it doesn’t have much creative infrastructure, so there’s not really many clubs or venues that are safe. I feel really grateful for the continuous structure that practising with Optic has. I know personally, for me, a lot of raves in Sydney or the warehouse parties have really been super informative to that sense of community as well.

But it’s always fleeting. The movements or people that this record is written towards, are never going to be the kind that have consistent, stable access to resources, like a venue or a building, or a place to come together. For me, community is always moving and that’s what makes it really exciting. That’s the real answer and also a poetry answer [laughs].

Poetry rules. In the booklet that comes with the record, it’s interesting to see the form of each of song on the page.

GIGI: Yeah, it was my intention to have them read more like poems than lyrics.

When I read them on stage from my phone, because I’m actually so forgetful, I have line breaks every time I’m supposed to breathe. People think it’s a nerves thing or anxiety. I don’t really get particularly nervous when we play. If I was to write the lyrics out how they’re originally written, it would be annoyingly long to write. Some are one word per line. So it was nice to come back and rewrite them as poems. Poetry is a little more contemplative and lets people in more than just like a didactic lyric sheet. I was hoping that people could read it and come to terms with it however they wanted to.

When I wrote the lyrics for Angel Numbers it was pretty much while we were practising in a little studio in Marrickville. I would just sit there antisocially on my phone and write ideas down. With the last song ‘Leash’ on the record, I finished those lyrics two-minutes before we recorded [laughs]; I was really putting off finishing the lyrics. It was nice because the emotion of the record could be really confined to this space with my friends, where it felt safe.

After recording, mastering, and the art was done, we sat on the record for 18 months. It felt like it came out at the right time though, it felt really serendipitous, given the political tensions of the last few weeks.

What else are you up to?

GIGI: I’m playing solo a fuck tonne in the next few month. Optic are really hoping to go back to Europe. Joe needs knee surgery so we won’t be able to play for a bit because he’ll be healing. Hopefully we’ll be able to write and record more songs. I want to sing more and shout less. But I don’t really know how to do that—I’ll work it out.

With your solo stuff, what can you do that you don’t do with Optic?

GIGI: I can make it in bed [laughs]. It’s the same emotions, but a different mode of address. They dovetail each other. Very inward and very much about my emotions: What does it mean to be angry? Or sad? Happy or horny? What does it mean to feel alive?

Angel Numbers available via Urge Records HERE. Gigi’s insta. GI music.

More Optic Nerve live videos – via the Gimmie YouTube.