Is there anything more cliched than the rock and roll break-up? Secret meetings in dark alleys. The guitarist that suddenly pops up on other people’s records. The singer who doesn’t return their calls. You either see it coming a mile away, or it creeps up on you like old age. It happens to the best and it happens to the worst, and eventually it will happen to them all. Piss and moan about it all you like, but what’s done is done. The latest induction to the rock and roll hall of “fuck this shit for a laugh” are Webcuts’ favourite punk sons, The Scare.

Having triumphed against expectation (honest opinion of The Scare circa 2005 – “exciting live, less so on record”) with their second album Oozevoodoo (which received a 9.5/10 on this site), The Scare finally evolved into the band that at least this writer had hoped for them to become — a sharp, hip-shaking incendiary rock and roll outfit.  Oozevoodoo was a true lock up your daughters, lock up your liquor cabinet, tie down the television record. It was The Scare ascending to the rock realm of The Stooges and The Birthday Party on their own terms.

Denied access to shove Oozevoodoo down the throats of the ROW where a greater return lie in wait, The Scare inevitably succumbed to the caged circuit of traveling back and forth around Australia, calling both “bullshit” and “time”. Regular readers of Webcuts will know we’ve carried a torch for these rock and roll orphans. We’ve featured them twice over the past 4 years and witnessed the transformation firsthand from shouty emo-punks to their own bad Bad Seed selves.

On the eve of their final ever Sydney show, Webcuts’ man of the airwaves, Chris Berkley, invited a couple soon-to-be Ex-The Scare band members to come down to FBI Studios in Newtown to speak about their impending farewell and to reminisce over the good times/bad times.

We’re joined in the studio by Wade and Sam from The Scare. Gentlemen, welcome in. This is a big, momentous, night for you guys. The last ever Sydney show for The Scare.

Sam: This is a momentous occasion of being the last ever Scare interview (laughs).

There’s also some Brisbane shows to come so if people for some reason…

Wade: Yeah, but we’re not doing interviews up there though…

Sam: It’s a new band. That’s the launch of the new band up there. This is the last Scare show and we’re changing the name. NME doesn’t like us anymore, so we’re trying to keep it fresh.

You need to reinvent yourselves, do you?

Sam: Exactly.

Wade, is there a 25 words or less story about why The Scare are breaking up?

Wade: Shiiiiiit. That’s it. (laughs)

One word?

Sam: Yeah, it’s quite an ambiguous thing. But you know, it’s been a long run, eight years. We’re kind of, I guess, restarting our lives, probably how they should’ve been started, when we were 18. Kiss is applying for Uni.

Oh really? You’re getting on track with your lives? The Scare has just been a diversion all this time?

Sam: Yeah, exactly. It’s like an alcohol and drug binge that’s coming to an end, I guess.

Not a lot of bands break up after two albums though. Was it better to burn out than fade away, Wade?

Wade: I don’t know. We were ready for another one and it’s just not going to happen now and the world will never know.

Do you feel like you’re going out on a high or have you been winding down for a while?

Wade: I feel like we’ll be going out at probably the highest point of our career, which is like us shooting Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes into the desert. Like we’ve died and this is the last hurrah tonight.

Sam: And it probably hasn’t really kicked in, in a sense, yet. But it will. It has been a long time. It’s weird thinking about something that we all, collectively, cared about so much, coming to an end. It’s kinda like, even though there’s a possibility of some Queensland stuff, this night tonight was always going to be the end for the band. I’m actually nervous. Excited, but nervous.

Wade: Potentially everything could go wrong tonight and we’re just hoping to get through it.

This could be the way that people remember The Scare, Wade, the final show.

Wade: Yeah, that’s right.

(Sam and Wade are invited to program three songs).

First song – Suicide – “Ghost Rider“

Is this because of the MIA song that’s just ripped it off?

Sam: It’s because Brock’s a redhead and the MIA video kind of…

Gave you some ideas?

Sam: Gave us some ideas, yeah.

Wade: When we met Alan Vega and Marty Rev, I remember Liam saying to Marty Rev, “Hey man, we’re big fans”, and he just looked at us and went “I get that all the time” and just walked away.

Don’t meet your idols, that’s the story, Wade.

Second song – Hot Chip – “Boy From School”

Sam: We got given a bunch of CDs from three labels when we were in England when we first arrived there. I remember my iPod broke, so I was living off these records in a sense. Our van didn’t have an iPod connector, so we had to listen to records on our van trips because we were touring so much. Brock sat in the front seat. That was his assigned position and he played “Boy From School” from Hot Chip so many times and it was at a point where we were all really young, around 19 to 20, and that song, I remember lying in the back seat, feeling hungry, missing whoever and wondering why were we in the middle of Leicester playing to three people.

Wade: Hearing it just then, really took me back to that cold van.

It’s funny how it’s the weirdest songs of all that soundtrack those moments, even years later. Have you told Hot Chip this, then? They’re here this week. So Suicide will remind you, because you said at the start Wade, you had that brief encounter.

Wade: We supported them and that was one of the highlights of my downward spiral. That was a very funny incident. Alan Vega and Marty Rev — just the baddest old guys in the world.

And couldn’t even care less who you guys were…

Wade: Just didn’t even look at us.

Sam: The best thing about the whole experience was we kinda did the off-shoot show for their tour with Grinderman in England and with Grinderman we saw the night after and they played for an hour and 20 minutes, but for their own show, it was a tiny venue called the Buffalo Bar is Islington and it was just Suicide and The Scare and there were 300 people lined up to get into a 100 capacity venue (Webcuts was there, fact fans) and they played for 10 minutes (slight exaggeration there, Sammy…) and walked off, saying “I wanna go home. Where’s our van? Where’s our van?”.

Punk as all hell.

Sam: Yeah, more punk than The Scare.

It’s a good thing to have on your resume to say that you supported Suicide.

Wade: Absolutely.

Sam: We should’ve ended then!

Third Song – Mick Harvey – “Harley Davidson”

So speaking of Grinderman and all those guys, the Mick Harvey connection, Wade.

Wade: It’s funny just because we saw Mick on the weekend while we were doing our last Melbourne shows and he sort of had a few drunken kind words to say to us about moving on, and if anyone knows anything about moving on from an ego-fronted man, from the ego of the century, then it’s Mick Harvey.

Sam: Was he in The Stooges? (laughs)

So is it a purely musical decision then, the end of The Scare? Had you done everything musically with this band that you could do, Sam?

Sam: I’d like to look back on it as a really positive growing up experience. I think every band could potentially move on to greener pastures, or just continue progressing. What I do like about The Scare is we never had to write a record that really compromised what we wanted to do. We were around great people, in a label sense, producers and whatnot that kind of let us be creative, and I’d hate the fact that if we went in again, hypothetically, and had to do a record to try and cater to sell more records and be a tad more successful than we were. So that’s my final note on The Scare.

You’re all, already, moving on pretty quickly. Wade, you’re about to go do some shows with Wolf & Cub overseas…

Wade: Yep. You just realise that I am a musician first and foremost, and when your band breaks up, it doesn’t end there. You’ve gotta move on and find something else.

Liam’s already got another band called Myth & Tropics, Kiss has just done vocals on the Itch-E & Scratch-E record, and Sam, you’re joining The Amity Affliction?

Sam: (laughs) Yeah, Trad and I are doing a solo record, or duo, together. Sort of in the vein of Savage Garden.

Wade: No keyboards though because neither of them know how to play them.

Sam: It’s a little bit less gay than Savage Garden, but we’re trying to get there.

The Scare play their final ever shows ever on August 13/14 in Brisbane. Hopefully the Webcuts Brisbane chapter will be in attendance to document the sorry occasion. Filmed June of last year on the day Michael Jackson died, this is how we prefer to remember The Scare — getting loose on stage in Melbourne while psychically instructing the ladies in the front row to get loose too. As you can see, it worked.

Less a seething juggernaut full of sharp teeth, no sleep and clenched fists baying at a fearful crowd, The Scare’s howl these days is more precise and directed, a volley of basslines and drum fills, guitar strings clenched like arrows in a bow, the loose-limbed puppet stance of vocalist Kiss Reid, is now arched and focussed, his once wild shoulder length hair cropped short to now resemble a young Michael Hutchence, minus Hutchence’s charismatic draw. Once the weakest link, he’s become their greatest asset. The rest of the band themselves are almost unrecognisable these days. In England, they had an air of ‘ASBO’s with guitars’ about them, but back home in Australia, 18 months later and it’s like watching an entirely different band spring to life. Not so much reborn, but revived.

In celebration of the release of their second album Oozevoodoo and their forthcoming headline tour throughout Australia in October, we rifle through the Webcuts June diaries to when we jumped in the backseat of The Scare tour van and rode shotgun as they hit the road to play a bunch of shows south of the border in support of Adelaide funk stoners Wolf & Cub. Interspersed within this piece are excerpts from an unpublished interview conducted with bassist Wade Keighran shortly after the recording of Oozevoodoo which talks about the state of the band after they returned from living in England and how they pulled themselves together from the proverbial brink of disaster.

“When we got home we landed with a thud, as always, but we got the blues that time pretty bad. It’s been rumoured that we nearly called time of death at Christmas 2007 and for a while there we just didn’t see each other. Our record had only come out in Oct/November. This was a record that to us was finished in January of that year and had been well and truly exorcised from our systems through a year of touring hard through England, Europe and the States before the fucking thing had even come out. We weren’t sick of it, we just felt the whole thing really anti-climactic. Nothing ever happened. It came out. We had already done the tours and that was it.”

It’s still dark when the van pulls up. Half of the band are already inside, barely conscious, barely moving. Kiss gets in, rugged up to the neck in black wool coat and looking ill. Bassist Wade Keighran looks even worse and the spectre of swine flu (then at its height) has everybody uncomfortable and wary of sitting too close. Seemingly prone to illness, Kiss is forced to ride shotgun up the front and the long 14 hour drive to Warrnambool, roughly 1200 km away begins. Everybody seems to burrow down into their pillows in their corner of the van and close their eyes. It’s just too damn early in the morning for anything else.  The first three hours are empty of mention, until a roadside piss break in the New South Wales countryside, where the band stand side by side like broken black fence posts encased in Cheap Monday jeans, precludes the van getting stuck axle deep in mud from a recent bout of rain that we could not shake free from.

“We did a rather unsuccessful national Australian tour in which we lost money and then went on an unscheduled hiatus just to remember why we are making music in the first place. We didn’t consciously decide to. We just cooled off in a big way. A total reassessment of priorities. It was the worst thing in the world to me at the time and we didn’t want it to happen, but it just died organically and then we weren’t a band for some time. We worked crappy jobs and played music on the side which is not something we were used to. For two and a half years all we did was tour and tour and play and play. We were burned, totally cooked.”

It’s the radio the entire way to Melbourne. The radio being the only thing that the band seem to agree on, only to deride the majority of what is heard. Jealousies and resentments are aired over the playlist. The coveted spot of ‘Album of the Week’ on Triple J is discussed. Currently this honour is bestowed to Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest which after hearing the album in near entirety during the 14 hour drive, has yet to win me over. “Peaches” by The Stranglers elicits a “we should cover this” from Wade, which given the song’s identifiable chugging bassline seems like something a bass player would say. The Scare aren’t known  to add cover songs in their set, (apparently it has been done in the past), but the thought of them strangling The Stranglers most offensive track seems gleefully appropriate. The Stranglers strangling Grizzly Bear sounds even better.

“So from about December to March we didn’t really see each other as a band. We would hang out socially but it felt like the band was giving up the ghost so to speak. In March we did a tour supporting the Mess Hall which we thought would re-ignite some of the erection and change the face of our band and all that but we just played so badly that whole tour that we knew something had to give. I was freaking out, all that hard work, all that slow death on tour, the back breaking desperation of living on nothing but getting 25 mins a night to live the dream. All that man. It was just leaving us without saying goodbye. And we just couldn’t give a fuck even if we tried. It was daunting you dig?”

Half the van empties outside the hotel while the rest continue on to check out The Loft, a small nightclub-type venue that doubles as a live space. Things look grim when the first support band, Pets with Pets throw a tantrum about the sound, yet manage to leave everyone with ‘what the fuck was that’ looks on their faces. How we would come to love this band. To cut a short story even shorter, The Scare play a total of two songs at Warnnambool. After “Cyber Love”, a sleezy little ditty that didn’t make the cut for Oozevoodoo, Kiss mumbles into the microphone “Sorry, that’s it. My voice has gone” and walks off stage. The rest of the band look at each other, stunned. Wade offers anyone in the audience to come up and sing, but since it’s all new songs, I’m surprised if anyone but Kiss knows the words. Surprisingly, he comes back out for one more song, and then it’s over. 14 hours, 1200 kilometres, 2 songs. Thank you and good night.

“On the Mess Hall tour we played in Newcastle and instead of driving back to Sydney we decided to stay at Daniel Johns’ house and take a few days. Just to either totally relax or totally get our minds lost. Daniel’s house was perfect for that and for us at that time because he has a spare bedroom for each of us and a great vibe. I think the tour was over by that stage anyway so we didn’t have to be anywhere. We planned to stay a night or two and ended up staying for a week, Kiss stayed even longer. After the first few nights of just classic Scare debauchery, all that stuff you can think of, every bar we could crawl to, every shot we could chug, every anxiety in our minds slowly dissolved in our stomachs. All that dumb shit, we went off in a big way just to forget we’d been pushing death around.”

The 10am checkout is brutal, but we all pile back into the van and head off in search for breakfast. Warrnambool is beautiful in the daylight, blues skies and bright blue ocean. Pulling into the café, driver/right hand man Stevvy angles the van in too sharply and scrapes the car beside him. Everybody in the van starts screaming and further attempts to extract the van from the tight squeeze ends up in a loud scraping of metal on metal. People from the café come to investigate as the van door opens and The Scare spill out onto the street, empty beer trailing them, rattling into the gutter, Wade laughing “oh, this just gets better and better”. The cops quickly arrive on the scene and then disperse and The Scare shattered quiet is resumed. By the early afternoon, we’re in the fancy Vibe Hotel in Carlton with a few hours to kill before the show. Wade and I wander the streets, looking for something to eat, listening to him talk with envy about the studio work they did with Wendy James, ex-of Transvision Vamp. You couldn’t dream up such a pairing, but a Wendy James-fronted Scare doing Transvision Vamp songs is as close to Christmas to me than I care to admit.

“Come off it now, what were you thinking?”

After one listen to Oozevoodoo you’d be confident in thinking that Chivalry, The Scare‘s debut album of 2007 was a bad dream best forgotten. Having spent a good year and change roughing it in Birmingham before heading back to Australia older and wiser, but tails firmly between their legs, Chivalry was a shambolic snapshot of a band seemingly at odds with themselves. A Shakespearean analogy dressed in black denim, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing, Oozevoodoo is the album Chivalry should’ve been, but for The Scare to get where they are now, the trials and tribulations of the previous years were necessary to make the album everybody knew they were capable of.

A fortuitous meeting with Daniel Johns of Silverchair set the ball in motion, with Johns waving a minimalist wand, recording the band as live and clean sounding as possible. Here the songs have room to breathe, with vocalist Kiss Reid finally learning the meaning of restraint and the rock solid rhythm section of Samuel Pearton and Wade Keighran getting pushed to the front in what is very much a percussive, vibrant beast. Split into two sides, the first half of Oozevoodoo is sheer perfection. Razor-sharp pop songs rubbing shoulders with each other, from the jittery, strung out vibes of  “Could Be Bad” smack into the anthemic dole queue chant of “No Money”.

The sonic strength of first barrage of tracks gives the impression they’ve loaded the deck with the big hitters, but rolling straight into the boy-ish bravado of  “She Can’t Say No” and the snotty squeal of “I’m Desperate”, most of the tracks quickly love you and leave you, barely touching the 3 minute mark before the next tune rolls in like a slap in the face. One noticeable breakthrough on Oozevoodoo is the guitar mix, where instead of playing on top of each other like a pair of siamese guitarists, Brock Alexander and Liam O’Brien now strum noticeably different parts that drive the track, rather than demolish it. Be it down to Johns and engineer Chris Townend calling the shots or the band picking up their game, but The Scare themselves have never played or sounded better.

“As He Walks” is Oozevoodoo‘s hidden weapon. A slow-burning track straight out of the Bad Seeds swampland that would have Nick Cave wishing he could still write. Keighran’s stalking bassline weaving through the track like a snake in the grass. It’s only Kiss Reid’s no-battery-mobile-phone-blues (or whatever the fuck it’s about) on “Charger” that doesn’t hit the mark. For those lucky to have heard an earlier version of the record, we say “where’s Cyber Love?”, but rounding out with the loping swagger of “I Saw Destruction” and the shakedown chant of “Cry” with its self-fulfilling chorus “Who told you not to believe in yourself?”, The Scare sit down to eat a 5 course meal out of their own words and they do it in style.

It’s hard to be impartial when I love these guys. I couldn’t tell them I hated their first album, just like you can’t tell some proud parents their kid is gonna have a hard time making friends, but with Oozevoodoo, they’ve beaten the odds, beaten the doubters, grew a pair of balls and made a great fucking record. Now go out there and do something with it, ladies.