Twerps
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Twerps

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Speaking days after their overdue Meredith debut, lead singer Marty Frawley rationalises the differing audiences on both sides of the Pacific. “Usually people are more drunk here. And the audience is a lot younger in America, maybe that’s just the market of people that dig us there. But I feel like after going to America twice, people in Australia started thinking, ‘Maybe we should take notice of this band’. We’d have our friends and fans come say hello, but the age difference here is a lot different to the age difference overseas.”

The fact that Australian audiences aren’t as young as their US counterparts suggests a lack of presence on the national youth broadcaster, a factor that Twerps have navigated deftly. “I would think that ‘triple j success’ would not probably bring the people that I like to shows. You could probably sell out bigger shows. I don’t know what I’m trying to say, I guess we have been played on triple j and that has brought a few more people to our realm, but it’s nothing that we’ve aimed for. I feel like the best thing that can happen in Australia is get Triple R’s album of the week. They’re the listeners, it’s not background music for some dudes labouring, with them thinking, ‘This song’s sick, maybe I’ll see it at Parklife’. People would look at triple j as some sort of benchmark of success. But I don’t agree with anything triple j are doing. I think they’ve really lost the plot a bit,” Marty states.

Released in 2011, the band’s debut album was a long time coming – following on from attention-garnering lo-fi releases and sporadic live performances. As Marty recounts, the long gestation paid off. “Yeah I felt really special, I felt really proud of us all, and I felt nervous as fuck. When we put out our record, maybe people liked it because it was a different path for us or something, that we’d stepped it up, tried to make it a bit more lush, a bit more nicer. It was really exciting when people took notice and really liked it. We’re all incredibly proud of it, it’s been wonderful. I guess the first tape and the seven-inch we did were supposed to be demos, we got our friend Mikey to do them. Then he decided to mix them, and we sat on them for six months and gave them to [Chapter Music’s] Guy Blackman, who said, ‘Why didn’t you give these to me earlier?’. Then we were kind of pigeonholed into what our sound was. Then we recorded a bit more, and evidently we were making these garage sounds because we were a young band not knowing what we wanted to be. When we did the record I was listening to a lot of Lennon records, and we all love The Go-Betweens. I was talking to Jack [Farley, producer] about it, asking him why a certain Lennon song sounded like it did, or Go-Betweens. And he would say stuff like, ‘Well they’ve got a 12-string behind it’, or piano, orchestra. We just had fun mucking around with that. We didn’t take into account if people liked our ‘lo-fi’ sound, we just wanted it to sound cool. We had the best time just experimenting. I don’t think we’ll step it up again. We’re right into Yo La Tengo at the moment. So they have their lush records and their not-so-lush records. We’re just gonna try to make it sound like Yo La Tengo,” Marty laughs.

As well as drawing on The Go-Betweens for sonic inspiration, Twerps touch on thematic elements exuded by the iconic Queensland outfit – be it bringing Velvet Underground’s New York cool to the suburbs, or that ill-forewarned transition into adulthood. “I wouldn’t say that we’re a cool band, but it’s worked in our favour that ‘suburban’ bands have become cool. The only reason that I sing about what I sing about is because it’s my life. A lot of people would say that we’re cool because we’re on Pitchfork or something, or that I wear New Balance sometimes, or Pat [O’Neill, drums] has a hipster beard. But I don’t know if we’re cool. Maybe we’re cool. Maybe it’s cool not to be cool. So I’m gonna go with yeah, we’re super cool,” Marty beams wryly. “I would definitely not consider myself an adult at all. I lost my dad a few years ago so I felt like I had to step up, and that was a pretty big eye-opener in terms of looking after myself and that you do develop and have to become a man. Now I’m engaged, I’ve got a dog, and I’d like to have a family I guess. But I feel like a child. I saw an ad for that Girls show, and he goes, ‘You can’t consider yourself an adult if your parents pay your phone bill’. So I think I’m an adult. I would like to make the next record not about my day-to-day, exposing the little things in my life that people don’t need to know about.”

Twerps are very much at the crux of a palpable happening within Melbourne’s music community, and while it’s impossible to forecast the current climate’s legacy, Marty is excited by the prospect. “When that UV Race movie [Autonomy & Deliberation] came out, we were in a van in America just thinking, ‘This is fucking crazy.’ They’ve made a movie that’s going in the vault. I’m hoping that in 20 years people will be looking back saying, ‘Remember that band UV Race? Eddy Current?’ Maybe if we even got a small mention in that, it would be incredible. But it’s not anything that we’re aspiring to have happen.”

BY LACHLAN KANONIUK