They’ve managed to transcend generations – recently supporting Pink on her final Melbourne show – and have cleverly packaged Kram’s guttural rock jabs neatly in between Janet English’s saccharine and schizophrenic pop gems in a way that has left rock dogs and pop teens unwittingly sharing a common bond – their love for Spiderbait.
It’s easy to assume that with their collective years of experience this album is just another album for the band, but that experience is also a swinging pendulum correcting for imbalances. “We play two or three shows a year and then we’ll do a festival like Splendour that’s pretty big, and people go, ‘Wow, why are you doing this? Why haven’t you made a record?’ That’s the easy part for us. It’s easy for us to turn up and we know enough and have played enough to be able to kick arse on stage and have a great time,” he says. “Creating an album is a different story. You have to be able to connect on a different level. You have to be able to connect in that creative space and that takes some time even though we’re best friends. We’d all gone off and done a lot of things in our own lives – Janet’s got one kid, I’ve got two and Damien’s been doing his own thing – it’s easy to separate.
“Gigs kinda kept us together in a way even though we were doing really well in publishing and have been fortunate with that, gigging has always been a great social event for us and it rekindles our belief in each other and the audience; our belief that people want to see us play.”
In true Spiderbait style, it’s come together well. The band’s attitude is probably their greatest skill – they’ve never been trapped up their own arses and as a result continue, almost 25 long years down the road, to deliver. The sound that they were looking for on this album came out of that state of mind.
“Because I’d [gone] solo since our last record, I had a big focus on how we would put it all down,” he says. “In this group there are three individuals, three duos and one trio and that was what we wanted represented. This album is the story of our whole band and we came up with the idea of a self-titled album but we thought it was a bit dull and Frank was like, ‘No, this is like a retrospective coupled with a debut record’. We got to know Frank through Bertie Blackman who I met through the Nick Cave – Straight To You tour.
“I got to know a heap of guys through that. Bert was making her album with Frank at the time and through her I got to meet him and it turned out we already knew from way back in the day. He’s an old school Melbourne cat, and she said that she was really sad at the end when the recording was over and to everyone else it’s just beginning. I don’t usually feel like that with a record but I do with this one. There’s an element of sadness now we’ve stopped recording because it was such a pleasurable experience.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
