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Doing Things The Hard Way.

Sometimes, just sometimes in Luxembourg you find yourself left with an impossible dilemma. On a bright sunny day at the end of May, such a dilemma occurred.

What to do when one of the most talked about bands in years comes to play in your neck-of-the-woods, and your head is telling you that you may never get the chance to see them in such an intimate venue again, or what your heart is telling you, and you know to be true, to go to see the other lot who you already know are the real deal.

Rarer still, in such situations, was my decision to follow my head. Predictably enough, it was a decision I lived to regret. The bands in question were, of course, The Arctic Monkeys and The Drones. One playing in the sold out Atelier (LU) and the other in, as it turned out, an embarrassingly empty Kulturfabrik (LU). When I spoke to Drones front man Gareth Liddiard, after an early sound check, he seemed resigned, and a bit pissed off, to have had the bad luck to be involved in such a fixture clash.

To take his mind of things, we started by talking about his time in that remote part of Australia, Perth, where The Drones story began in 2001.
Perth is in the middle of no-where and it’s kinda got a pop thing, a really saccharine kinda pop thing, and we really didn’t fit in at all. It was hard to get gigs, there was nowhere to play. To tour Australia from Perth is really expensive; it’s cheaper to go to Bali. So we decided to get out of there and Melbourne is where it’s at in Australia today. They have two community radio stations and a big national station there. There are tons of venues, tons of bands. Perth is just a desert, there’s nothing there really except University of Western Australia, but that’s the only claim to fame, I think! Most of the people that I knew, that played in bands, have since moved to Melbourne as well.

Remote, as it is, from the rest of Australia one might imagine that growing up there, in itself, might have shaped the band in some way.
Yeah it did. There’s a sort of ’no rush’ policy. You’ve got all the time in the world. We’ve had so many line-ups that have come and gone over three or four years. There was never any stress. If someone left it was never in a bad way it was always very relaxed, nothing was happening anyway… You get to figure out what you want to do, and all you think about is the music. I mean, by the time we had any measure of success I would have been 27. I was, I wouldn’t say a fully grown man, but my ideas about success was pretty much set then, and that was just to play good music, do the best you can and it had nothing to do with playing to big crowds or selling lots of records. I don’t rate success like that. We don’t have to ‘work’ now, we tour the world. We haven’t had jobs for a few years, and that for me is success.     

Having escaped the parochial and remote restrictions of life in Perth, Liddiard and guitarist Rui Pereira set off via Sydney and a stint living in the back of a van, to set up sticks in a caravan park in Victoria. I’d guessed it might have sounded more romantic and bohemian than it actually was, in truth, according to Liddiard’s description, it seemed more like a scene from Mad Max.
It was really bad. It was the only caravan park that would have dogs. We’d brought our dogs with us. It was a nightmare. It was a big round area, and everyone’s caravan was in a circle, overlooking this sort of common area where they had washing lines and barbeques and crap like that. It was on a par with somewhere like Newcastle in England, a really rough place. Just depressing and horrible, really industrial, really barren. Everybody was sort of facing each other all the time, so there was always tension. There was a bunch of old bikers and people who’d just got out of prison and whenever they got drunk they’d just kick the shit out of each other, in the middle, in full view of everybody. There was a big row of caravans for guys who were on probation. They probably had no family, nowhere to go and they’d stick them in there. All they could do was drink because they can’t get in fights or stuff like that, but they would certainly encourage the violence because it gave them something to watch. Just before we got there there’d been a drive-by so the main fence at the front was all shot up, someone got stabbed while we were there, it was just a fucking horrible situation.

We were applying for (house) rentals all the time and when we finally got the call that our application had gone through, it was like, one of the best days of my life, it was like winning the lotto.

Having survived the experience and having, no doubt, picked up source material for a sack load of future songs, Liddiard and Pereira recruited bass player Fiona Kitschin, and drummer, Christian Strybosch, got into the studio and recorded their debut ‘Here Come The Lies’, which was released to not much acclaim in 2002.

Second album, the pithily titled ‘Wait Long By The River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By’, was a different story. Recorded in 2004, the albums release was delayed for a year due to legal problems which were only resolved when influential Australian indie label, In-fidelity, stepped in and agreed to put the album out. It finally saw the light of day in 2005 and was greeted by enthusiastic reviews which saw it nominated for the Triple J Radio station’s J Award for Australian album of the year, (which was finally won by Wolfmother, but more of them later). As you might expect, Liddiard, while grateful, is pretty unimpressed about the value of such awards.
Yeah, they just had an awards thing and they nominated us for that. Wolfmother won that. They’re just another shit award system really. The more records you sell the more likely you are to win it. It certainly helped us. Every week they’d announce a new nominee and stuff like that with a lot of hoopla on the station, and a lot of promotion.

The band then won the more prestigious Australian Music Prize in 2006.
That was pretty good. We were away when we got nominated for that. We were touring in Europe and too busy to give a fuck about what it was. We never heard of it, it was new, the first year so we didn’t even inquire (about it), and then we won it. The prize money was A$25,000, which is pretty good. So you also get A$25,000 extra in promo, which is pretty fucking cool. It’s based on the Mercury awards, but what are the English gonna think (about it), I mean we’re a fucking colony, it’s not gonna affect their view of us. They’re not gonna go, “Oh you won The Australian Music Prize”. If anything they’ll just go “It must mean you suck even more than everybody else in Australia”.

With the latest album ‘Gala Mill‘ the band again shirked recording in the conventional studio setting, opting instead for a farm in remote Tasmania. The album was said to resonate with a sense of the place where it was recorded.
We had nothing to do and Mike (Noga), our drummer, had just joined. We wanted to show him a good time. I had about ten songs that were just half-finished, just chords and words. So we figured fuck it, lets make a holiday and recording session in one, and if it’s bad, if the recording session comes out bad, we’ll shelve it, not worry about it, put it down to demos. So we made the decision to go and four days later we were there, it happened really fast. So it flew together too quick to have any preconceived idea. When we got there, it was really more a happy accident. It did suit. If we’d gone to record in a big city, if we’d gone to record in New York, the album would sound completely different; it would be faster, heavier. Tasmania is like Ireland, like Europe, big rolling hills with that sense of space and a relaxed feeling.

‘Gala Mill’ was again lauded by critics, with some now describing The Drones as the most important band in Australia.
What’s that? What does that mean? Australia has a real poor sense of itself, it doesn’t really have a grasp of what it is. It’s only been around for 270 years, and it’s confusing as hell. If you read the short history of it, the European history, it’s just a bunch of crazy Irishmen, the beginning of the IRA and all that just getting shipped out, and that’s pretty much it. Then there’s the little chimney sweep who stole a loaf of bread, that’s another myth. There’s the genocide of the Aborigines. So is it a European country, or is it the indigenous peoples, is their history the valid history? No-one has a clue who they are, or what they are, or what they’re meant to be doing in Australia.

I mention the referendums about independence.
Yeah, most people just go shopping and try and forget about that. I guess in a cultural sense it’s gotta be helpful if we make something, it’s an Australian album, which isn’t necessarily a deliberate thing on our part. Australians try to be everybody else and not themselves.

Gala Mill features two songs which could almost be described as folk songs, at least in theme. ‘Words from the Executioner to Alexander Pearce’, deals with the cannibalism by said Pearce of his fellow convicts, whilst on the run in Tasmania in the early 19th Century. ‘Sixteen Straws’ draws on the tradition of Australian storytelling, taking the first verse from an old traditional song ‘Moreton Bay’, which told the story of a suicide pact amongst a group of convicts. One journalist had said of ‘Gala Mill’, that the great thing about the album was that it said, ‘This is who we are’. Were The Drones therefore setting out to claim or furnish their identity, their Australian identity?
I think we just don’t avoid it, that’s it. There’s no, sort of grand plan. All that stuff, that history is there. It’s just interesting, blood-curdling stuff. On a juvenile level it’s fascinating. In school they didn’t teach you about that stuff, so a lot of people were just disinterested in history. They just taught you about fucking politicians, which is a valid thing, but it’s not the whole story. I mean, the rest, people were killing each other and eating each other, that’s pretty cool. I mean if they taught you that…

There’d be a lot more kids in history class.
Exactly! I mean take Flann O’Brien, the Irish writer, one of my favourites it’s the most ridiculous, hilarious stuff. If they started you off on that rather than Shakespeare, you’d read a lot more, you know.

Finally, playing the devils advocate, I wondered if he might be hanging around town to have a beer with compatriots Wolfmother, when they hit town a couple of days later.
No, eh, no, no. I don’t know those guys. There’s a thing, one of the main problems with being a musician, if you ask anybody who’s been in the industry for a long time, they’ll all say, you get the odd band that pops up, that’s shit. You say “Oh that is fucking shit, listen to that. That is the worst shit you’ve ever heard.”, then you meet them, and they’re just sweethearts, you know what I mean. Then it becomes really hard, so when the next record comes out, you go, “It’s pretty cool”, because you know ’em, and you like ‘em. But with Wolfmother I’ve heard no-one would have any problems disliking their stuff because apparently the singer is just the biggest tosser …ever. I wouldn’t hang and watch Wolfmother, I don’t think. I mean that guy takes it seriously. I don’t mind somebody ripping off Black Sabbath ’cause it’s fun to play, but this guy takes it so seriously and actually thinks he’s a wizard.

It’s not the real world mate. There are no wizards, there are no unicorns.

More info: www.thedrones.com.au

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