“It was the music scene that brought us here,” says drummer John Milton, on the line from his Melbourne home. “There’s a bit of a complex in Canberra; people think the city doesn’t get a lot of music. So nobody will go out to see music, because they assume there isn’t any there. Obviously though, there’s the perception and the understanding that there is lots of great music here in Melbourne.”
And Scaramouche are focused on contributing to Melbourne’s already well-established music community.
With the release of Access Denied, their debut EP, Scaramouche quickly figured out the best way for them to gain footing in their new city. And soon, this approach became an indelible element of their overall aesthetic: make consistent gigging top priority.“There are some bands that play less shows, in order to make the few shows they play more of an event. And that’s got its merits. But at the moment, we’re trying to get our name out there by playing a lot. And we’re just trying to get better. Sometimes the only way to get better is by gigging as much as we can.”
“Recently we’ve been trying to book some regional shows,” continues Milton, when asked about the pressures of bringing their sound to a national audience. “I mean, it makes sense for a lot of bands to book shows in bigger cities, Brisbane, Perth, Sydney, etc. But there’s a lot of energy to the music we play. We love pub rock bands. So we thought, let’s bring this energy, this music we play into pubs. And maybe play to audiences that wouldn’t normally get our kind of sound.”
After all, with five members in Scarmouche, all with equally diverse tastes and influences, the band refuses to leave anything to chance. There is a healthy variety of sounds on Access Denied, from funk to hints of psychedelia.
“There are a lot of bands that really love to recreate a certain sound or a certain era. Maybe you have a few influences and you’re really passionate about recreating that vibe. We just want to bring our own individuality to it. And of course, there are influences. Bands like Queens of the Stone Age, Tool, Nine Inch Nails, Kings of Leon. But we all just want to see if we can bring all of our influences to the table and try to make it work.”
With Access Denied in the bag, the band will now take to the road. Work on their debut LP has begun, and Milton insists Scarmouche may still have a few tricks up their sleeves. “We’ve done some demos and pre-production. We’ve been sculpting it for the last year and a half. With the EP, we knew we’d only get six or seven songs, so we had to pick some of the punchiest tunes we had. But we left some longer ones off the EP. We had some more intricate arrangements that were influenced by progressive rock that weren’t typical verse-chorus-verse songs. In my mind, while the EP has some cool tunes, if you listen to it as a whole, it doesn’t have a cohesive flow. The LP will have more flow and more songs of the 11-minute variety.”
BY JOSHUA KLOKE
