Yeah... there uhmmm.

What’s going on? Fucking green rooms aye? Enjoy it while you’ve got it!

[laughing] leather couches!

Fucking hell.

Have you asked them what their favourite festival has been in the last six months?

Yeah!

What?! Are you serious? Are you the one I was speaking to on Instagram? I am so fucking sorry! I was meant to offer you the only comp ticket I was going to offer anyone in Australaisa because Stew Mag is literally how I found out about the bands in Australia.

I am sorry if I’m fucking it up and the interview now just reads about this bloke from New Zealand chargin in

Yeah I wanted to do something weirder, make it freer, do whatever. I had mixed the bodies and Wet Kiss records so I had been working with Al and Ruby through that. We already had a good vibe with each other..

We talked a lot about music... I don’t know when the music got so angry. We played our first gig here two years ago. This is almost the anniversary show. Sara had asked bodies to play Leaps and Bounds then, but dan wasn’t in Melbourne, so they couldn’t play, so we were like, ‘well, Andy, Ruby and I have started this stupid jam band’... We got up and played, and I just screamed the whole time. I ranted at the audience about how my landlord was raising my rent, it was just this petty child rant.

The first songs we actually ‘did’ after that were these gentle love songs.

Yeah but that quickly changed.

Yeah two drums and bass was always the core. Ruby and I just showed up to the first practice with drums but with nearly opposite components. It just happened like that. Ruby was on the tom and I was on the snare and that’s just what we wanted to play naturally.

Yeah! That was insane, one of the best pieces of music writing I think I’ve read but that might be selfish [laughs].

I think I had forgotten how much of an influence they were. They sent me down a path away from rock music 10 years ago. Someone asking us to play with them... It was like, ‘woah! yeah, definitely’. I haven’t really thought about them for a while but they definitely changed the way I looked at music.

Yes and no - I feel like we talked about CAN a lot, Al and I listen to hardcore music a lot, and there were different types of dance and rave music we are all into. Even if we don’t set out to explicitly fuse genres, those different influences end up accidentally being complementary.

I guess I came from the Holy Fuck/Four Tet world, but then was really into techno and jungle stuff. But I rediscovered kick drums in this band which was very fun. I had never listened to Psychic TV though and Ruby introduced me to them. I feel like at the beginning we were sending each other a lot of music that the others hadn’t heard, and getting into each others’ taste. There were times at the start where I think Al was like, ‘what is this? we need to figure out what this ‘is’ - I’m glad we didn’t go too far down that.

Yeah we had to pull back. I wanted to write like Animal Collective love songs, we did it and really ran that gauntlet but at the end it was just like, ‘this sucks, this is not it’. Wrong!

But then we started adding dance outros to those songs and realised that was the fun bit. Then it was just like, ‘well what if the whole song was just that’ and that’s how something like ‘Freaky People’ came about which is literally just the same thing for 5 minutes. It just goes up and down like a traditional dance song but without normal dance instrumentation and not a DJ playing it.

I remember watching one of Andy’s gigs just after Tongue Dissolver started. Had gotten this big bag of rack for this rave under the West Gate, and it was just one of the most violent fucking... Andy was playing with Custom Casket, Hextape, Big Leng and Bayan tha Bushranger. The cops were already there and Big Leng and Bayan did a shout out to all criminals everywhere in the world. There was a large contingent of eshays there afterwards also, and after Custom Casket finished all these fights broke out... I had been helping set-up raves with the crew who organised that, doing DIY stuff, but that night was the moment that Freaky People was born - what could the local culture be if we didn’t just fucking fight each other like barbarians?

There is a drug-y element about rave culture that the band world doesn’t have as much. People get really drunk when bands play instead, and I feel like we play to both crowds which mellows out the extremes. The shows we end up playing don’t tend to one audience over another and so they’re just fun.

Totally. I think we like playing with Kisses as much as a DJ, we like lots of different music and the people that come to the shows tend to as well. That’s been really nice.

Well we like to play, sometimes we get tired, but mostly we are just bad at saying no. We’ve had to learn.

But we’ve built a community - that was also one intention from the outset of this band. After COVID there was a lot of death in the Melbourne music scene. A lot of people passed away and it was a sad, heavy time. Before that, it was cancel culture, cunts were just being mean to each other. Obviously some of that was super valid but there was also this mean spiritedness that was around in trying to one-up each other. Coming into this band, it was like, we need a community again, and there’s one way of doing that: playing HEAPS of shows with all the bands and introducing them to each other again. I think we achieved that.

You get to play at every venue and get different crowds to run into each other. It’s made a real difference to our experience of playing, there’s always a great diversity in the crowd. It’s not just a bunch of dudes circle-jerking us on noise shit which has almost happened.

To me... If the ‘scene’ is ‘this’, then it’s the first one that I’ve participated in where folks feel more mindful of relationships and community rather than putting the sound or genre of the music first. The past ten years here, I think that’s what’s largely defined the scenes. There was dolewave, neo-soul... The scenes were always ‘that’. But now there’s so many bands mixing it up! It’s friends first, at least, it feels to me.

This guy [points to Ian] showed me a lot about the ‘scene’. I remember 10 years ago at the Camp A Low Hum before this one, living on the Gold Coast and hearing through 4ZZZ all this stuff about the cool bands who played. And randomly afterwards, all these very different-sounding DIY bands started to turn up in Brissy, and Brisbane couldn’t really hold all these sounds into distinct scenes. You ended up getting these great mixed-bills, with Scraps playing on a line-up with like Multiple Man, Per Purpose, all these random bands stacked together. It felt like it shouldn’t be a scene but it was somehow! What do you think?

Well part of that is like, for example, getting introduced to 00_ by you booking us to play a show with them! That has then become this relationship between bands, Twine as well, on that same bill.

It’s nice, it’s been DIY the entire time as well. We’ve been able to organise it all ourselves.

I do feel like the community in some sense preceded the scene because we all had been playing in bands for a long time before this. There was already the seeds of community, but I guess they were disparate, and this band has allowed them all to flourish together. The shows we are playing this weekend are a good example, playing the Grace tonight with Soft Approach, Guppy, Cutting Room, then tomorrow night, doing Misc’s birthday show, then a queer punk gig at The Tote.

There’s definitely times where community has preceded scene. Like the famous Sex Pistols show where every band in Manchester was at the show and a scene immediately started afterwards. I’ve witnessed a version of that multiple times in New Zealand, where a significant band plays, then friends in that crowd all start bands and they become the next generation - a scene builds from the community. We all witnessed a singular moment and now something has started. I think that happens a lot more than what people give credit for.

It’s always interesting to see what is the sort-of nexus of the scene. Sometimes it revolves around a single venue and it becomes the place that everyone wants to play. It almost doesn’t even matter what you sound like, if you’re playing that venue regularly, you’re a part of that scene. It can be anything though, a record label, a specific sound.

I feel like the scene we’re talking about now doesn’t really have one central spot. I like that. Having a main place can be cool, but it means everyone wants to be there and someone has to be told they can’t play. When the arbiter of the scene isn’t tied to any one thing I think it’s quite freeing. You can be apart of it at any level, really. If you want to start a band, if you have the means to create a space, or participate by going to shows...

There’s so much of the industry that will sell you expectations, but for us, the pressure’s off. We just play live shows and release the music when we feel like it’s ready. That makes a huge difference in alleviating the tension I think a lot of bands feel. It just is what it is for now...