REVOLUTION PARTY

in Sydney. It seems we talked a lot more than actual performance time. Davey reminded me that all my vocal takes and guitar takes were first or second takes. I was in and out of there pretty quick. Rusty and I like to work fast but Davey and Andy like to take a bit of time. “Andy’s playing incredibly well. His countenance is very assured, he’s methodical in the way that I’m impulsive. I never tell that guy what to play, haven’t since 1996. Russ creatively is a massive part of what we do and his record collection is our education and his intelligence is our education and his drumming, there’s no one who plays like Russ. And, well, everyone’s in love with Davey, as they should be.” The first thing you notice is the sonic qualities, as if the musicians have unleashed their inner arena rock predilections. There have been hints of it in the past but this one in particular has a huge drum sound. “I think a large part of that was Russ being in command of his own domain really. When we were making records in the States we were instructed by record companies to straighten up. I think Russ felt he was being brow-beaten because he can be a marvellously contained, straight drummer who is right on top of everything but when we’re in a band we get excited and egg each other on. Russ had his own time and own agenda and could play the uber-Hopkinson. Then when we gave the tapes to Paul McKercher, he’s such an old friend of ours, he just knows us inside and out, he worked his magic. I don’t think it’s an accident that it sounds so great and alive, because that spirit is inside us. “For ‘Rubbish Day’ I had an idea of how I wanted it to be and I told Russ the way I thought the beat should be. He didn’t tell me but he disagreed and did the inverse of what I suggested. So, him doing that it’s a far better idea by a million percent. And that inspired

Davey to play the way he did. Davey’s and my original demo for that was nothing like the song came out; maybe there was a hint of it. So, Russ’ musical knowledge is so far beyond mine. We do have an intuition with each other; I guess that’s 3000 shows playing together. After 30 years we’ve worked out what our relationship is in a lot of ways. When >>> we’re playing in the same room, we have conversations but ironically we figured each other out by not seeing each other.” Hopkinson’s presence is a major force behind the album. When I spoke to him in Sydney, he explained: “Tim and Davey had sent us a bunch of guitar and vocal things, the bare bones of songs. Andy and I went into Forbes Street studios and we played through those for a couple of days. We ended up doing nine rhythms tracks there. I took the drum tracks home and did some editing or whatever, chose the best takes, all that pre-production stuff. Knocked them into shape, sent them down to Davey. Andy did the same with his bass parts. Davey and Tim just jumped on top of them and fleshed them out. Quite a few songs weren’t at all what Tim was expecting, so it ended up being quite a lot of fun. “Then I had to move to Perth for the summer, for family reasons, so I found Tone City Studios there with Sam Ford, a good engineer. We just sat there for a few days and I did some drums and percussion and finished everything off and Paul McKercher mixed it in Sydney. He had this system set up where he could stream what he was mixing in real time. I was in Perth walking around the streets with headphones on, listening to tracks. I’d pull out my phone and text Paul, ‘can you EQ the kick drum like this’. It was a weird collaborative but not collaborative approach. Not by our design, there was no way to get together. In

“I scored a goal but I missed the point.”

– Tim Rogers

“It’d been the longest I’ve gone without playing gigs since I was about 16, and that was 40 years ago.”

– Rusty Hopkinson

the middle of the year we realised that couldn’t happen, so it came together by just passing it around. It’s been really good, a testament to the understanding of how we play that we could do that. I think it does sound like a band. “When we recorded Porridge & Hot Sauce it was at a place called the House of Soul in New York, owned by Daptone Records, with this little 8-track machine set up in a house. Just like, I imagine, how people would have recorded at Chess in 1957 and we were all elbow to elbow in a room playing. That was a different way of recording. In some ways that was more difficult because you can’t be loud, you have to respect the process and the playing. There were other times where we’ve recorded in a piecemeal fashion.” Another part of the process that informed the album’s sound was Hopkinson’s listening habits. “Yeah, I don’t listen to much music that was recorded after about 1972,” he reveals. “I said to Paul I want it to sound like ‘Send Me A Postcard’ by Shocking Blue which is arena rock before there was such a thing, 1969. I just wanted to make it like a big rock thing, it’s what some of the songs deserved. I collect a lot of psychedelic records, and when I heard ‘DRB Hudson’ I’d been listening to things like The Moving Sidewalks’ version of The Beatles’ ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ a heavy rock version, so that inspired me. “I was also inspired by a lot of different drum fills. John’s Children’s ‘Remember Thomas A Beckett’ has those big rolling drum fills, so I wanted to keep things lively and exciting. Other tracks then had a different feel to them, taking on other influences. With ‘Rubbish Day’, I’d been listening to a Mexican band called La Revolución de Emiliano Zapata. They’re like Santana on bad drugs. They have one song called ‘Shit City’ and another called ‘Nasty Sex’ and they’re super wild. I just wanted that wigged-out sense, like why is it all of a sudden going Latin. I was saying we’ll do that and everyone’s hitting stuff, it was fun. There’s that searing guitar line that Davey does in the percussion breakdown part. He was saying that’s the closest we’re ever gonna come to sounding like Parachute era Pretty Things.”

GOOD ADVICE

Obviously, Rogers’ song writing is a big part of the band’s makeup. You just have to think back on the likes of ‘Berlin Chair’, ‘Purple Sneakers’, ‘Mr. Milk’, ‘Good Mornin’’, ‘What I Don’t Know ’Bout You’, ‘Heavy Heart’, ‘Kick A Hole In The Sky’, ‘Good Advice’ etc, to know that his songs are instantly catchy and indelible. Rogers learned his craft via his love of the likes of The Kinks, The Who, The Move, The Pretty Things, Rush, The Replacements etc., and he’s never shied away from acknowledging that. The irony is that on this album you get all that but there’s little in the way of traditional song structures. He keeps the listener guessing. “I think it’s because my songs all started out as folk songs,” he explains. “I had the lyrics done and they dictated a lot of the way the structure of the songs came out. I had to do a little bit of shoe-horning but for once I wanted the lyrics to dictate where the songs went. No one’s asked me about that before; we talked about it with the band obviously, but I guess a lot of people don’t notice those things like you have. I kind of enjoy that, it can be a little irritating for the listener. I think again after those years when we were with the American companies, they hammered home the structure to me so much. If it was a dozen times it was 12 hundred times. “It was just maddening because we’d record songs how we heard them and then we’d go back in next day to the studio and it had been chopped up and rearranged by an engineer because whatever record company of the 600 we’ve been on said, ‘no, this is the way a song should be structured’. That destroyed my confidence for about a decade but now it makes me not want to let traditional song structures be the predictor. If you just feel that this is where the bridge should come in, just do it because no one’s gonna tell us otherwise. There’s no reason to change arrangements just to make it a radio song.”

The Tim Rogers wordplay is alive and well too. He gets to throw out such intriguing lines as: “I scored a goal but I missed the point / Statement made I left the joint” (‘Manliness’); “Geddy

Lee on a crutch in a hell of a Rush / I’m goin’ nowhere and he’s got somewhere to be” (‘Lookalikes’); and “Edinburgh, Galway,

Nashville, Ulladulla breakin’ my heart in four places” (‘The Waterboy’). >>>

“Someone like Paul or Don and Mickey Thomas would use Australian geography and I thought I want to own this.”