A Spoonful

At the time of taking our call, Grinspoon vocalist Phil Jamieson is debating whether to buy an iPhone 5 and relaying his obsession with a new mobile game whereby the player prepares tacos for virtual customers. Perhaps discussing such fixations is fitting, given the Lismore-born rockers have named their seventh album after the Cockney slang term for bad habits: Black Rabbits. Also, as far as Australian rock bands go, Grinspoon are more readily associated with that phrase than most. The question is posed whether spending too much time on said activities is one of his bad habits. “I'm not sure, but my worst habit is probably that I'm too clean. Just constantly cleaning… That's a joke, obviously. I don't really know what my bad habits are. I like saying that I'm really clean, I'm always following other people around and cleaning up after them, but that's not entirely true.”

Perhaps it was trying to avoid some well-established working tendencies or songwriting proclivities that motivated the band to visit Los Angeles to lay down the new material. They were guided by producer Dave Schiffman (Weezer, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club). However, Jamieson found he had to acclimatise to the producer being a creature of, well, habit. “With the dollar the way it was, we were like millionaires in America; that was an attractive proposition. I guess there's also an argument for making a record away from home, so we can focus more. LA was a lot of fun. We were there a relatively short time, so it was heads down, bums up in the studio. There wasn't any long lunches. It just suited the record and made sense to do it there.”

The record features guest spots from Tim Rogers (You Am I), Chris Cheney (The Living End) and Scott Russo (Unwritten Law). How was the experience of working with Schiffman though? “It was good, he's quite a friendly chap, has got some good ideas. I think sonically the record is of a really high standard. He was pretty strict, he had a lot of rules, which I didn't like,” Jamieson says, before bursting into uproarious laughter for the first of many times during our conversation. “So I hated them, but I didn't do anything that I wasn't allowed to do. We've been around the block, so we already had a pretty good idea of how to make records and the way he wanted to make it suited us. He was a really nice guy actually; we really enjoyed working with him. I'm more of a hard taskmaster on myself; I just hate all the rules. The task in front of me, of singing 14 songs or whatever it was that we tracked, I like that stuff. The tasks are easy; well, it wasn't easy, but I'm used to that. It was just the rules he put in place,” he laughs. “They were somewhat difficult to follow, but I did follow them anyway. I tracked the vocals relatively quickly, which was good. I was really happy with the way it came out.

“He just wanted to get the best performances out of us, as did we. We wanted to make sure the songs we wrote were good. So we were both aiming for the same goal; he just had some really common sense rules,” he laughs again. “But as people may or may not know, I don't have a lot of common sense. Common sense is sometimes overrated in my opinion.” We reference a high school English teacher who said that given its apparent short supply, common sense is inaccurately named. “There you go, that's very true,” he exclaims, cracking up again. “So we got there, we met him and got along like a house on fire.”

The US is hardly new territory for the quartet, who played their first American tour with Anthrax, Life Of Agony and Vision Of Disorder more than a decade ago. Another “standout” of early overseas jaunts was a stint opening for Vanilla Ice during a regrettable period in heavy music history. “I've kinda blocked it from my memory. I don't know whether it was good or bad, but it wasn't something that I wanted to remember. We were stuck in the Midwest for what seemed like a year, but it was probably only 90 days. We were touring with Godsmack and really horrible bands. I think Vanilla Ice was going through kind of heavy metal phase... nu metal. It was a very exciting time for music, nu metal,” he adds, setting off sarcasm detectors everywhere. “What a horrible genre. So we were kind of kicking about, just trying to find gigs. We were in a shitty Suburban that we bought in Los Angeles, a 1984 Chevy Suburban, which I think blew up and we left it in Philadelphia. I don't know if it was bad or not, but I don't really have fond memories of it. I don't think they're overly negative, I kinda choose not to remember it.”

Hazy recollections aside, Jamieson plans to make Grinspoon's upcoming national Big Day Out run and a tentatively scheduled Australian tour in March/April far more memorable than roughing it with has-been rappers. Jamieson is asked if he is mindful of not playing too much early material for fear or becoming a legacy or heritage act.

“I don't think about it like that really. I think that's such a weird… That's like a journalist thing to say. As a musician I don't really consider anything to be heritage or legacy, especially referring to my own stuff. Eskimo Joe don't play Sweater anymore – does that make them not a heritage act? I feel that we'll just pick the songs that are the best songs,” he laughs. “That would make the most sense to me, regardless of when they were written. [It's] just a balance thing; I'm not sure if the legacy or heritage thing applies to us just yet. I'm only 35, fuck,” he says, vigorously chuckling again.

In wrapping our chat, the question is posed as to whether 17 years into the band's career, more than 450,000 records sold, countless national tours, major festival slots and an ARIA Award in the can, are there any goals they haven't achieved? “That's a good question. I didn't really think it was a race or anything; I wasn't trying to prove anything when we started it. We were just trying to have fun. I don't think in the first place we were one of those types of acts that set out to conquer, prove, succeed or die. I don't think that was ever our modus operandi, we just existed. Luckily, and also I think we actually wrote some good tunes along the way, but somewhere in the '90s, and even in the mid-'00s, we struck a chord with people with some albums we released and luckily, since then people have kinda grown with us. I don't know about proving stuff; it was never really the 'be all end all'. We were gonna do it regardless.”