Webcuts Music

A Punk rock Legend once sang “London is drowning, and I live by the river”, and it’s a line on rare occasion that does come to mind, as for the time being, it is and I do. The Thames, snaking its way through London like a dirty drain, is enjoying a brief moment of fulfilment as the banks rise in celebration of one of the wettest summers in memory (my memory, that is). Umbrellas arc the air as the rains fall, washing down the filthy streets, framing the mood and forcing you indoors. It’s drinking weather, but in England this phrase has no meaning. Happy hour is dictated by you, enforced by you, and in regular rock and roll parlance, the question of “what time is it?” is quickly answered with “time for a drink”. This is where I happen to find my old friends, hung-over and holding court in a North London boozer, looking as surly as shit and up for a scrap, the Australian band appropriately known as The Scare.

Boredom can give you the inspiration to create and youthful abandon the wings to take you anywhere, and it took these five angry young men from Brisbane no time at all to realise that continually touring Australia playing to the same audiences is a slow and painful death for a band. There aren’t enough venues and towns to sustain a decent tour and the distances between states, the roads travelled, and the time taken will rarely match the money spent to get there. In American and England, a tour is something that will last at minimum a month and will take you around the country.

In Australia, a tour can be over in a week and you’ll be playing to people who don’t know who you are, nor could care less. There are those out there who are happy to play it safe, hoping to build on turning a few heads along the way, working within what they know, never leaving the country. Then there are the scarce few willing to take a chance outside of the home comforts. For better of worse, The Scare chose the latter, moving to the UK in mid-2006, ignoring the magnetic musical pull of London for Birmingham, the hometown of the mighty Black Sabbath, for the better part of a year while they wrote, toured, drank, and hopefully lived to tell the tale. Formed in Brisbane in 2004, The Scare not so much deliver but thrust blade-first, a raucous, volatile noise, in the tradition of Australian bands of old like The Birthday Party and The Scientists, forging their own dark punk rock sound that marks them an anomaly within their own country but outside of which, inherently Australian.

At first glance they’re a daunting sight. Bassist Wade Keighran looks like a no-nonsense brawler but speaks with a literary heart. He’s the type of guy who’d happily settle a fight on your behalf and think nothing of it. Drummer Samuel Pearton is effusive and charming, his bleach blonde hair designating him as the first fashion plate of the band, while guitarist Liam O’Neill is the other, sunglasses hanging from the lip of his white t-shirt, black braces holding up a pair of rake-thin jeans. Both of these boys fit under the charge of “most likely to steal your girlfriend”, but I’d lay my money on Liam. There’s an air of sardonic cool that hangs around second guitarist Brock Fitzgerald like a second suit and singer Kiss Reid is something else, though this usually depends on the hour of the day, and the day in question.

It’s the afternoon of their final London show before returning to Australia to prepare for the release of their debut album Chivalry and all backline gear for tonight’s show has accidentally been taken to the airport after playing the Leeds leg of the Carling Festival, leaving the band in a last minute mad scramble to find amps to borrow, coming close to cancelling the show twice. It may be something The Scare would take in their stride, but there are limits to the amount of times fate can fuck with you before you start getting your back up and wondering “why us?” Despite their passion and determination, they’re still to get the crucial break here that will open doors and give them the opportunity as a band to grow. It’s something of a sore point for the only unsigned band to play on one of the major stages at 2007′s Carling Festival. The frustration and irony in this shows on the face of Wade Keighran, standing in the bar of the Famous Cock pub in Islington wryly aware that his finances won’t even stretch to afford a beer. When you know how much these boys enjoy drinking (flashbacks to summer in Sydney encamped in the Gaslight Hotel while recording their debut) this is a sad time.

London is the city where anything can happen. It’s home to the overnight sensation, be it fleeting or forever. You can play a show on Friday and be catapulted onto the cover of the NME before you’ve had time to shake the hangover and ditch the girl. No other city in the world works likes this. For The Scare, being touted in the street press, played on Radio 1, their name rolling off the lips of the influential and the impressed, their modest rises and falls have been a humbling experience.

For some bands breaking London as an unknown entity from another country can ultimately be an uphill battle with little ground won, and with the cost of living in England being so high, it’s not a venture that can last indefinitely. Success and notoriety are not mutually exclusive, and the future of any band seeking admittance in the UK market relies on more than a few column inches and some sympathetic radio play.

Mentioning this to Wade, he sighs audibly and gives me a weary look that says more than it needs to. “Breaking London wasn’t a waste of time because playing music is never a waste of time. We never really broke into London and, right back at us they never invited us in. We purposely didn’t go straight to the big smoke for a few reasons. We knew and read about the fact that anywhere outside Australia is over-saturated with bands. Fucking bands everywhere. Awful bands. Serious bands. Semi-serious bands. Bands that come and go. We felt that staying away from major cities and scenes we could forge our own thing. We perpetually do this with almost everything. Some would say it’s pre-emptive self defence and they may be onto something. We’ve always had to defend ourselves and back ourselves a hundred percent so staying away from London and trying to break off a piece there just wasn’t our idea of how we wanted to start, and essentially, we knew that moving to England was starting again.”

Having been paid to record some demos in a studio in France for future record company consumption, it was inevitable for The Scare to be courted by prospective homes with the promise of what could lie ahead if they were willing to compromise on their sound and their approach, something that you’d probably expect from the fame hungry English acts, but less so from a group of stubborn, principled Australians. “We had a few lunches and meetings, you know the stories you’ve heard over the years from countless other hopefuls about extravagant lunches and business shit talk. ”

“I remember one lunch where a label which will remain nameless but starts with F and rhymes with diction came down and threw a Bronx single on the table (he said it was just a random CD he had in his car) and said you guys need to write a record like that. We thought what the hell for? You’ve got a Bronx CD in your car. You’ve probably got a few in your office. What the hell do you want a similar or same record for, you fucking suit?! It got to a point where we just said, let’s go home and do the record and come back and fucking throw it at them and say fucking ha ha. We did the record and came back and just knew that if we were looking for a label and spent and exhausted ourselves looking and shopping around and used all our energy for that then it would detract from the fun of touring and the fun of being ourselves. So we just came back to England and did our own thing. We’re not going near labels. I hope they don’t come near us just yet. Let us become a fucking unstoppable force on our own then come to us and ask what you can do for us, not what we will do for you.”

With this in mind, the Scare continued on unbounded, setting up more shows and gathering support as best as they could. A 7″ single “Bats! Bats! Bats!” was released on indie label Dance to the Radio to favourable reviews and it seemed as if the cards were beginning to turn in their favour. For a band so stridently outsider, The Scare were able to sneak themselves onto the bill at nearly every major English music festival this summer, including Wireless, Download and the Carling Festival.

Continue to page 2 where Wade lets rip about the festival experience, holed up in Hollywood and Chivalry is dissected.

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