Webcuts Music

Were you tempted at all to re-record 10,000 People/Landspeed etc, or were conscious to not repeat yourselves?

Messenger: With three songwriters it was always a case of “How many of my 10 new songs will make it into the live set, and which three or four might get onto an album?”, so there was never any thought of re-recording old stuff.

Connolly: There was also no thought of rerecording previous tracks – nobody did that then (except maybe Ratcat). It seems that concept has come more into vogue in the last few years.

I can’t remember the reception that the album got when it was released. I can’t imagine it was negative as there are a good half-dozen classic-Welcome Mat tracks present (Flying End/Everyone’s Gone/All or Nothing/Play Me) but it didn’t seem to take you to the ‘next level’ as expected. Can you recall what happened and want to expand on the feeling in the band at the time?

Messenger: We always got surprisingly good reviews (with a few glaring exceptions: my friend Barry Divola, the Who Weekly critic, felt it was a conflict of interest to review it, so he passed it on to a subordinate who ended up trashing it). Overall it got the standard 3½ star reviews that every Australian band except You Am I always got.

It did actually take us to the next level, but the problem was that the level wasn’t high enough for the record company. Up to the Spare E.P., everything had sold 1000 copies more than the previous release. Spare sold around 3000 copies (which would probably get us into the charts today), but Martin Fabinyi was convinced that Gram was going to sell well over 30,000 copies. When it topped out at 6000 we were thrilled that we’d doubled our audience, but Regular was naturally mightily disappointed.

Connolly: The launch was really exciting but I think I remember feeling slightly deserted by the indie press. John Tingwell said to me “well it’s kind of like you don’t need our help now”. There was a perception that we were in a different realm all of a sudden. Maybe the turning point was when we shot a disastrous EPK including a staged press conference – everyone started to see more problems than easy money!

Do you think the focus of the music scene in Australia changed during the time of Gram‘s release? It seemed like many of the old guard from the Sydney scene (Hummingbirds/Falling Joys/Clouds etc) were breaking up/releasing second albums to dwindling audiences and getting frustrated.

Messenger: I don’t think I saw it that way at the time. Ratcat and grunge were still fresh enough in the minds of record companies that they were prepared to at least keep signing bands and trying to market them. But the Hummingbirds were having serious record company troubles at rooArt, we got bogged down in about 18 months of record company “difficulties,” and I think The Clouds never recovered from having their big Elektra deal in the US fall apart. In the early 1990s,Tim Freedman once said “The Sydney scene is full of 27 year-olds desperately trying to give it one last shot.” We all know how that turned out.

But if you’re looking for some sort of overarching cause, how about JJJ going national? For years Sydney bands had benefited from having a strong local radio station supporting us, but when they began the national roll-out, we not only all found ourselves with more competition from interstate bands for airplay, but JJJ became very wary of being seen to show any Sydney bias. Gram couldn’t even get a lousy ‘Album of the Week’ slot because we couldn’t afford to tour to all the country towns that triple J now required you to. I remember that part clearly: if you wanted Album of the Week, you had to show them a tour schedule that covered enough of their new markets.

Connolly: The dwindling Sydney scene was really just because of the frustration of all of us bands log-jammed at the nexus between indie and mainstream in the pre-BDO days. It was really the BDO that changed everything and made it easier for bands to quickly reach a large young audience without any commercial radio play. We were first band on at the first BDO and we played to a large crowd early the second year but this was before it went national.

You toured the album fairly extensively, but appeared to drop out of view for quite a long time. The follow-up album took a further three years to come out. Is there any story behind the band’s demise or is it just another case of ‘pushed it as far as it would go’?

Here’s where it gets complicated. First off, this idea that we disappeared (or even broke up, according to that useless Australian Encyclopedia of Rock) is wrong. We were playing just as much, and released the Headset EP the following year on Summershine, but some big changes had taken place after Gram. First, we came off a horrible Died Pretty tour pretty disheartened: we’d done a previous Died Pretty tour which was great, but with this one they decided that they needed to pad out the line-up and added Kim Salmon at the last minute. All our slots then got put forward an hour and shortened; we had to play as soon as the doors opened, and of course no one was there yet.

The day after that debacle finished, our manager Brett Oaten quit. Brett was the crucial fifth member of the band, and quite frankly all the heart immediately went out of it for me. I felt, if Brett doesn’t see any future in this, then there mustn’t be any. I decided to quit too, but Wayne was already on his way to the US, and I didn’t want to quit over the phone. After a few weeks, Wayne called to say he’d been in contact with Michael McMarten, the Hoodoo Guru’s manager, who was interested in managing us. So rather than quit, I thought, oh, maybe it’s not as hopeless as I thought. If it’s not going to be a “gang of best friends” REM-type thing, then maybe I should just see it as my cool job and get on with it.

So, we met Michael McMarten, and the first thing he says is, “You’ve got to get away from Regular.” We were open to the idea, because it had become obvious that Regular, far from being the autonomous entity they’d first led us to believe, couldn’t actually make a move without the permission of Festival Records, their distributor. There had apparently been a meeting in which Festival had heard the demos for the next record, and their only feedback was, “Let’s get them to record a cover version.”

What we hadn’t realized was that McMarten and Fabinyi hated each other, and there was no way they could work together. McMarten wanted to sign us to Mushroom, and they were very keen until they found out that McMarten had just signed our publishing to EMI; that’s the bit they actually wanted. So then we were forced to take the publishing advance that we were going to live off and use it to make the second album, which we recorded in mid-1995. We shopped it around, and id/Mercury picked it up, but by the time it was released in 1996, no one remembered us.

Lest it seem like I’m blaming others for all the band’s woes, I should add that none of this would have mattered if the band had been unified, motivated, and quite frankly, still friends. This had not been the case for some time, and not-altogether untrue rumours began to fly around that Wayne and I hadn’t spoken to each other in over a year.

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