The Good Ship is a motley crew of salty mariners hailing from the port of Brisbane, Australia. We play a shabby shanty or two in the style of PoCoFoCa – Porno Country Folk Cabaret. Our next conquests are going to be a new record, more touring in Australia, and another trip across the seas to Canada. World domination optional. Giving up our day jobs is the impossible dream.
Your second album, O’ Exquisite Corpse, was released last year. How has the ship been faring since?
We just got our first payment from our distributor last week, so I guess that means someone’s been buying the record, which is good to know. We don’t have the interwebs when we’re at sea so that downloading thingummybob is a bit hard to manage from a bunk in the hull of this crusty old vessel.
Since the album, our most noteworthy achievement has been to write and perform a stage show, using a combination of songs, narrative and visuals, with an actor poncing around on stage with us. That was something completely different for us – and for our audience. We’re putting that show on again later in the year, and hoping to see it in some festivals next year.
You’ve been in the studio recording a new album. How has that been going?
Fantastic thanks. The new album is the songs from the theatre show – which is called The Seven Seas. We’d rehearsed them a lot for the season, so recording them has been exceptionally easy. We really must do more of that rehearsing caper in the future; it does make things easy!
Can you give us any early hints on what the new material might sound like?
There were about 400 people who saw the show in February who can tell you pretty much exactly what it’s going to sound like! The cool thing about making this record is that it has to follow the script – so we don’t have to fight about what songs to put on or leave off, or even what order they should be in. All that is pre-ordained, so it should only take us half as long as we normally spend. It usually takes twice as long to argue about the details than it does to record them.
The big scoop for you, dear Tone Deaf, is that there isn’t any swearing on it. Isn’t that just plain fucked up?
In March you toured North America, which included spots at Canadian Music Week and SXSW. How was that?
Un-fucking-believable! If you’d told me four years ago that our little side-project drinking band was going to tour overseas, I’d have thought you had rocks (and rolls) in your head. But here we are now, being treated like grown-ups, with a manager and a distributor and agents and publicists and all these people on board who are taking our piss-farting around really seriously. Luckily we haven’t started taking anything seriously yet – we’re still in it for the poo jokes.
Any awesome/crazy travel stories you would like to get off your chest?
We try to keep most of those stories close to our chests. What happens on the road stays on the instagrams. We do, however, welcome audience members trying to become the subject of those future stories.
One such story involved unnamed band members and anonymous audience members exchanging items of clothing in a pub in the wee hours of the morning. All I can say about that sordid affair is that John’s legs are way too hairy to ever be seen in a skirt. This ghastly visual should explain why we try to keep these stories under wraps.
You recently made a video for a cover of The Decemberists. What is it about the Portland band you love so much?
Primarily, we were excited they gave us an opportunity to get hold of all the crappy iphone footage we’ve shot of each other dicking around on the road and in the studio for the last few years, and chop the bits up and stick them back together and call it a video. They are also the only band we have identified that get the unanimous shippers’ seal of approval. Have you ever tried to get eight opinionated people to agree on anything?
And why did you choose to cover ‘The Rake’s Song’ over their other songs?
We started playing it really early on – probably because it only has four chords and it’s about killing your children – and we’ve never managed to let it go. It just hangs around like a cat out the back of a restaurant, purring and rubbing itself up against your legs and begging for scraps. People have asked us to record it for ages and we finally got off our arses and did it. We like to give something away every time we go on tour, and it seemed like a good idea to give away something that never belonged to us in the first place. Although I should add that we do fucking well own it! (That’s a pun for the hipsters right there!)
There are a heap of their songs that we would love to do – and not just cos they are all about death and weirdness and the same stuff that we tend to write about. I think once the ship sinks, we’ll reinvent ourselves as a tribute band. The Octoberists has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
What’s on heavy rotation on your iPod at the moment?
The most played song on my ipod is Tiffany’s version of ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, so rather than answer your question directly, I looked at what was in my CD player, and found these gems:
Sigur Ros – ‘Kveikur’
Mazzy Star – ‘So Tonight That I Might See’
Arcade Fire – ‘The Suburbs’
You Am I’s ‘#4 Record’.
I don’t know that any of those artists inform The Good Ship directly, but if you had them all backstage after a gig I reckon we’d have quite a party.
If you could collaborate with any living Australian artist who would it be?
Rolf Harris would be fun to have on stage with us, painting crooked pictures while we play our crooked music. I would like to take this opportunity to clear up a misconception: dear Uncle Rolf is no relation to our very own Brett Harris. The resemblance is entirely unintentional.
You’re playing shows in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne in late July. What shenanigans can we expect?
The Capital Offensive should be, as the name implies, both Capital and Offensive. Winter means there won’t be as much disrobing as would normally happen, but we’re playing in a few places we haven’t played before so there should be some more bars to climb up onto and new chandeliers to swing from. We take no prisoners.
What are your plans for the rest of 2013?
After the tour in July, we have to finish recording, and then we’ll have to spend a few months paying bribes to get Geoff’s criminal record expunged from Interpol’s system, and our IT department will be working hard to have those compromising photos of the Kats deleted from the google cache, before we try to get visas to get back into Canada. I guess we’ll do another tour before the end of the year to pimp the album – which will be a perfect festive season stocking-filler, available at all good Cashies.
Where we can see you play next, what releases do you have available and where can we get them?
You can go to www.thegoodship.com.au to find all that other stuff.
In closing, dear reader, if you can think of an interesting merch item we could plaster our name over and sell, please make your suggestions on the social media platform of your choice. Searching for “thegoodshipcrew” will take you to most of them. Photos optional. Bribery welcomed.
The Good Ship 2013 Australian Tour Dates
13th July at The Zoo, Brisbane
20th July at The Annandale Hotel, Sydney
27th July at The Evelyn Hotel, Melbourne
