Essentially, it’s an upbeat retelling of Lucas’ recent trip to the American West Coast, where he and Joey Bedlam (of Melbourne band DollSquad) got hitched.
There’s a distinct similarity between the two songs, but it’s not as though Lucas is aping a formula Lennon invented. Rather, both songs demonstrate the essence of the folk song tradition.
“Songwriting at its best is simple story telling,” Lucas says. “If you can get the story across and create some kind of emotion, no matter how fleeting, there’s a degree of success.”
A hardcore Beatles-phile will tell you that Lennon penned his classic tune while he and Ono were on honeymoon. Here again, Lucas followed the wry Liverpudlian’s lead: “When I was in the States we went to this second hand guitar shop and I picked up this beautiful Danelectro guitar – all beat up, but it played beautifully well – and the first thing I started to play on it was the basic riff to Living and Loving in the USA.”
This Saturday, Lucas will hit up Cherry Bar to launch the single and its B-side All That I Want (Is You). In a strange turn of events, Lucas’ freshly conceived garage-psych trio The Strawberry Teardrop will fill the post of support act. What’s more, the Strawberry Teardrop are also flogging a new release, the three-song EP Love On the Run.
“I’m like a split personality,” he says. “All That I Want is almost gospel, then you’ve got the ‘70s West Coast sound of Living and Loving, then at home, at the same time, I’m banging out Nuggets-y‘60s garage-pop/psychedelia. I try to honour the music that I loved listening to when I was growing up and that I love to listen to now. I try to be faithful to it.
“I love the urgency of The Strawberry Teardrop stuff,” he adds. “It sounds unrehearsed but it’s not. It took a lot to teach the guys how not to play things. I went back to that early X kind of vibe, where it’s all about the feel and it was just really catching the energy of the moment.”
Both releases will be available for purchase at the show, exclusively on 7” vinyl. Given Lucas’ preference for classic sounds of the ‘60s and ‘70s, it’s no surprise he places high value on spinning discs of wax.
“I thought about doing a mini-album on CD, but no one buys CDs anymore,” he says, “and there’s 20 billion people on iTunes and every other digital thing. I love vinyl, Joey and I have a huge vinyl collection, so I just thought, ‘Bugger it, I’m going to create something that will be a product in the very old-fashioned sense of the word.’ I thought if I do it like that it’s personal, it’s a statement and it’s a nice little physical piece of the present that keeps the past alive in me.”
On the subject of old-fashioned methods, instead of bringing in a producer or sending Love On the Run away to a third party for mixing, Lucas saw to these tasks himself. And it’s something he’s quietly proud of. “Apart from engineering, I did everything,” he says. “I mastered it, I did the artwork. It’s real home made stuff, but it’s not lacking for it. In fact, it’s the most energetic, vibe-y thing I’ve done in ages. When I play it I still can’t believe that I did it.”
It should be noted that Lucas did have some assistance when it came to transforming his home into a studio: “A friend of mine from Ireland, Andy White, had spent some time in the Abbey Road studios – and got to know people like Geoff Emerick that recorded all those Beatles albums – and learnt all those mic-ing tricks. He came round one day and said, ‘You could do an album down here in your garage, it’s great down here. I’ve been taught by the guys how to mic up’.”
Clearly, Lucas isn’t too concerned about obeying prevalent music industry standards. Over the course of almost four decades in the music biz – dating back to the formation of X in the late ‘70s – he’s picked up some very valuable wisdom: “With X-Aspirations we were lucky that we didn’t know what we were doing and that Lobby [Loyde, producer] was there to capitalise on it,” he says. “At Home With You, we were lucky again. Then we got to that horrible X And More thing, when they tried to make X a commercial viability. I learnt more from the fuck ups with doing that session and what followed than I probably learnt in the years leading up to it. It made me very certain of one thing: to have control over your own life and destiny is really important. And if you’re going to rely on other people, they have to be solid.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
