“If you don’t like it, then go home. I remember thinking, ‘This is really cool’. But at the same time, I remember we were trying new things, and us thinking we didn’t know what this is. It’s all pretty hazy back then,” said Gareth Liddiard.
Wait Long By The River And The Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By, The Drones’ second studio album, opens with what is potentially the greatest Australian song of all time
‘Shark Fin Blues’ is a brutal stab of Australian rock, with Gareth Liddiard’s bruised and bruising vocals scraping every high and low, amidst a backdrop of crashing guitars and cymbals. It opens with a foreboding prophecy that feels suitable for the album that would launch the Drones’ career:
“Standing on the deck watching my shadow stretch.”
Ten years on and it’s still a landmark Australian release, though front man Gareth Liddiard remembers things quite differently.
“You could have something that you think is the best thing ever, it doesn’t mean anyone’s gonna like it. Or you could have the worst piece of shit, and it’ll make you a million dollars. So yeah, I didn’t see it coming,” he said.
“It’s kinda weird that it’s ten years old, but it’s cool that people still like it or get it.”
“When I listen to stuff we’ve done, I like a lot of it, but a lot of it too, I go ‘Yeah, fuck, could’ve done that better’, you know? Just a lot of mistakes. Like we’re not reinventing the wheel, but we’re pretty weird. And when you’re weird, and looking for the weird angle, sometimes you wander past it, and you’ve gotta double back.”
Given that the Drones are reissuing their entire back catalogue, Liddiard has also been spending a lot of time with old releases, while the Drones are also due to release a new album before the end of the year.
“In hindsight you can see what you’re capable of, but we didn’t have that back then”
“I like the really old ones, the mid-2000s ones, like listening to them I can’t remember what I was going for, and that’s good. It’s good for me, because I can actually listen and enjoy it for what it actually is. With the more recent stuff, I can still remember what I was trying to do, so I can hear every time I overshoot or undershoot. It’s not as much fun.”
“In hindsight you can see what you’re capable of, but we didn’t have that back then. We were pushing into the unknown, and now you see, what we were capable of, what are the limits, what we should be concentrating on. We’re not gonna become a jazz-fusion band anytime soon, because that’s beyond our capabilities,” he said.
“The way we see the world hasn’t really changed. Nothing really changes, except you don’t fly off the handle as much, and you just know your limits.”
While the re-issue of their back catalogue, including Wait Long…, is being handled by the Drones and their record label, Tropical Fuck Storm (TFS), its initial release was delayed by over a year due to a legal dispute with their original label, Spooky Records. Liddiard has always been vocal in his disdain for the music industry, and obviously their history played a role in their decision to begin handling their own material.
“Record labels are still real cunts, because now everybody is desperate for money. Even the ‘indies’ aren’t really indie anymore. We’ve been backed into a corner, really. They’re just making music to make money, so it’s all bad, and it’s a conservative time, it’s something like the 1950s I reckon, in a different sense,” he said.
“In the 1950s there was heaps of money, so they were just doing the most banal crap ever, because it would sell, whereas now there’s no money, and it’s the mirror image, you’ve got the same problem. Just because everyone’s really desperate to sell something. They’ll wrap something up as ‘indie’ and ‘alternative’ and ‘fresh’ but there’s so much retro going on. What could be more conservative than taking something as based on ‘fresh’ and basing it on retro?”
“Like new rock n roll, and I’m only taking about rock n roll, but new rock n roll died around the early, mid 2000’s. Now everything you do, you have to pretend you’re in the 60s or the 70s or the 80s, because any of those eras, if you’re copying them, you’re not copying them. Like the 80s, whatever it was, was really fucking original, there had never been an 80s before, and we’ve lost that. That’s been lost.”
Given that the Drones have maintained a reputation as a progressive and well-respected Australian band, as well as one of the best live acts in the country, it’s not surprising that the tenth anniversary of their breakthrough album would be so highly celebrated. However, in such a “conservative time”, and given that “weirdness” is Liddiard’s professed musical signature, it’s still somewhat of an anomaly within the current music landscape, with our perpetually diminishing attention spans, and whole libraries of music within easy access, that a band as admittedly strange as the Drones could be able to re-issue a back catalogue that started barely over ten years ago.
“We’re not that successful, people seem to think we’re bigger than we are. I mean, we just always thought that there was gonna be a niche, or a gap in the market, for weird music, and weird music played with an Australian accent. Lo and behold.”
[include_post id=”448769″]“We thought you could marry something like The Stooges or Led Zeppelin with something like Bob Dylan or Randy Newman, so you have all this inventive music with inventive lyrics, and we just figured ‘Fuck, there’s gotta be somebody out there who’ll listen to that’,” he said.
“That’s what it’s been forever: surely there are more people like us. We’re not original, but if I wasn’t in the Drones, I would probably buy their records. It’s moved on, and I won’t call it a niche, but we are very strange. Like people say things like ‘pub rock’, but we’re probably the weirdest band in Australia.”
While it’s hard to label The Drones as anything as straightforward as “pub rock”, they’re constantly being mentioned as a candidate for the best live band in Australia, and have been for their whole career. Having just played a very-well received show at the Opera House for Vivid Festival for the tenth anniversary of Wait Long…, the band have expanded this into an entire tour of Australia, after which the band will release their new record.
“We’re probably the weirdest band in Australia.”“It was a bit strange when we were asked to do that, for Vivid. They asked us to come play and all that, but they said ‘You’ll need an angle to play the festival’, so somebody said ‘Wait Long‘s ten years old’, and we thought that’d do- any excuse to play the Opera House.”
“We finished our record, the new one, and then did a few rehearsals for the Wait Long stuff, and I didn’t know what to expect but we were all really surprised. We’d been pulling our hair out, trying to make a new record, so playing the Wait Long stuff was really cool because of it, it just played itself,” he said.
“It was really fresh, paradoxically enough, you know? You’d think playing something that’s ten years old would be as boring as batshit, but it turned out ‘Wow, this is actually quite fresh’. We’d been stuck in that studio for six months, desperately trying to make something weirder than our last bunch of weirdness.”
While “weird” seems to be the watch word for Gareth Liddiard and the Drones, their appeal is undeniable. As a live unit, they are known for their sonic assault, for wrenching their melodies and chords out of each instrument with reckless glee. However, it’s mostly Liddiard’s intense dedication, bordering on physical punishment, which has kept the fans coming back.
“If you’re aware of what you’re doing, you’re not having a good show, that’s the thing. A good show is you’ve played a bunch of shows, and then you’re running on auto-pilot. You kind of don’t think, it’s a very odd thing,” he said.
“It’s a really good feeling. Because I sing and play, and I know drummers know the same thing, I’m doing that ‘patting my head and rubbing my shirt’, doing two things at once. And that’s a really good feeling, because your brain’s ripped in half. So you can be totally shredding away on guitar in one half of your brain, and in the other half, you’re singing words, or ad libbing.”
“It’s really hard to explain. It’s like being on drugs, it’s really good. Then you walk off stage and you have to try to remember bits of it. You can’t remember a good show, because your memory wasn’t engaged, it was just happening. It’s really strange.”
Upcoming Tour Dates
Thursday, 20th August | Darwin Festival, Darwin
Saturday, 22nd August | Rosemount Hotel, Perth
Thursday, 27th August | Factory Theatre, Sydney
Friday, 28th August | Small Ballroom, Newcastle
Saturday, 29th August | Triffid, Brisbane
Friday, 4th September | The Gov, Adelaide
Saturday, 5th September | The Forum, Melbourne
Sunday, 6th September | Theatre Royal, Castlemaine
Tickets at www.thedrones.com.au
