“I used to shy away from associating that word ‘punk’ with us as a band,” Coulter admits. “The only reason I have started referring to us in that sense is for convenience. When people ask you, ‘What sort of music do you play?’, it’s much easier to say ‘punk rock’ than to try and explain that it’s a convergence of all these different elements.
“I wouldn’t say that we’re the most ‘punk’ band in terms of ethos or mentality or anything like that, we’re not trying to be that. But as a general overarching musical description, that’s a fairly convenient pigeonhole. When we say ‘punk rock,’ we probably put more of the emphasis on the rock than the punk,” he laughs.
Whatever label you want to lump upon them, they’re playing Melbourne soon, and you can judge for yourself. When describing the band’s sound and presentation in a live sense, Coulter prefers to give a tongue-in-cheek twist on one of the clichés that bands routinely wheel out when asked this question.
“I would say to the person thinking about coming down and checking us out, that we always give at least 60 per cent to our live show,” he chuckles. “It’s basically three dudes on a stage, we don’t have any pyrotechnics yet, but that’s because we can’t afford it. No fire-breathing, no snakes or go-go dancers or explosions of codpieces at this stage. No pieces of raw meat thrown out into the crowd, a la Blackie Lawless from WASP.”
“Hopefully, when the budget gets a bit bigger, we can afford to do stuff like that, but at this point, it’s three dudes playing simple rock‘n’roll. Maybe when I’ve got a few lawsuits against my name, and a couple of million dollars, we’ll see what we can do.”
The band may be on their way to that first mil, as they have an exceedingly busy time coming up in the next few months, and for the rest of the year.
“Over the next month to a month and a half, we’ve got about 25 shows,” he reveals. “Next weekend, we’re doing a show in Melbourne. Then we start a 16-date tour supporting British India, so we’ll be going all round the country with that. Perth, Tasmania and all those kind of places.
“Then, we’ve got another couple of things on the table,” he continues, “and then we’ll probably try to do another tour of our own, probably a headline tour, in August-ish.”
There’s also the matter of the next Grenadiers release, and follow up to this year’s Summer album, which the band don’t want to take too much time over getting out. “[After touring], hopefully we’ll be able to start work on the next album,” he says. “We want to do it before the end of the year, we really want to have a short gap between this one and the next, since it was such a long gap between this one and the previous one.”
BY ROD WHITFIELD
