Hoodoo Review

The history of the Hoodoo Gurus' career could be said to consist of three stages: formation, hiatus and re-formation. The first began at the very beginning of the 1980s, when the band was formed, and then continues through their rise to fame and popularity around the middle of that decade, right up to when Dave Faulkner decided to call it quits in 1997.

The '80s, when everything started, was an odd time for music, according to Faulkner.

“It was at the tail end of a very creative time in music, certainly in rock'n'roll,” he reflects. “The '50s was what it was, and then the '60s was a whole new explosion of influences, and then the '70s we've got all the hard rock and then glam rock and all that sort of stuff, and punk rock. And then that led to what the '80s were: I guess it was hip hop and electronica.”

Hoodoo Gurus, of course, had very little to do with those genres of music, so they always felt a little out of place.

“We were out of our time, really,” continues Faulkner. “We never felt like we really belonged in the '80s. We still don't belong in the era we're in. We didn't feel like we belonged in a previous era, but we just didn't relate to what was around us. We were kind of our own little universe. And we still feel like that.”

Luckily, this gave them plenty of space to define their own boundaries and create something of their very own. In a sense, they had a section of the music scene all to themselves, where nobody else was able to muscle in on their turf. “We kind of thrived because of our independence and lack of kowtowing to what was predominant ideology,” Faulkner says.

This stage of their career ended around the end of the '90s, when Faulkner decided enough was enough: that it was time to quit while they were ahead.

“At the end of '97 or something like that, I said to the band, 'Look, I don't wanna do another album',” Faulkner explains. “We had just released an album I was really proud of called Blue Cave in '96, and we were touring that, and I just thought, you know, 'I think that's enough'.”

So next came their five-year hiatus, when side-projects such as Antenna came into being, and everyone got a bit confused about how broken up they actually were after the four former members of the Hoodoo Gurus formed a new band called The Persian Rugs.

“It was not some sort of de facto reunion of Hoodoo Gurus,” insists Faulkner, however. “It just happened to be that the same musicians were working together.”

He says The Persian Rugs came about fairly naturally.

“The Gurus were always accused of being a '60s band, and it's not true. I mean, we do have a strong grounding of that music but there's a whole lot of other stuff that comes into the flavour... So I decided – in a bit of a fickle sort of thing – I was gonna show them what a '60s band would be like, you know, with my songs. So I wrote all these songs in a '60s style, and ended up using the same musicians.”

However, even though the band members made a conscious effort to separate The Persian Rugs from Hoodoo Gurus, sometimes the line got a little grey around the edges.

“When I was writing songs for The Persian Rugs, there were these other songs sort of coming out,” Faulkner says. “Because you can't always decide how the songs are going to be when you're writing, you just have to write them. And there was one song called When You Get To California I wrote, which was designed to be kinda like a '60s sort of folk-rock thing, a bit sort of like Mamas And Papas or something, late-'60s California sound, is what I thought when I was writing it. But when those musicians played it – ex-Hoodoo Gurus – it sounded like Hoodoo Gurus a hundred percent. And I actually was halfway through the rehearsal, we were doing it, and I said, 'Look, we can't do this – this is wrong. It just sounds like Hoodoo Gurus and that's not what this band is about'.

“So there was this song there, and there were other songs I had written as well that were... I couldn't find a home for them and they just didn't belong to anyone.”

This brings us to the third stage of their career, four or five years after the break-up, when thoughts of re-formation began floating around. “We did the Homebake festival, which was the first thing that thawed my iceberg of resistance,” Faulkner admits.

He says the years of separation taught him a lot about Hoodoo Gurus. Not only did he learn to distinguish the specific Hoodoo Gurus sound (and then try to avoid playing that way with The Persian Rugs), but his work with his other side-project, Antenna, taught him what it was to be a band.

“We recorded this album over a period of about nearly eight months,” he says, referring to Antenna's 1998 album Installation. “But about halfway through, it stopped being four separate individuals and became more of this united kind of melded mind, where even though four of us had individual things we were bringing to the table and would suggest for the song, we kind of all knew without having to actually discuss it as to whether the particular idea was going to work or not... And it was this kind of strange, as I say, 'unified dynamic' that had always been Hoodoo Gurus but I hadn't known it, because I'd been in it so long. And when I saw it come to life in another band, I was kinda like, 'So that's what a band is like...'”

When Hoodoo Gurus came out of retirement to play Homebake in 2001, it was as if they had just played their last gig the day before. It was easy and real and not like going through the motions or trying to remember how it was done.

“Hoodoo Gurus actually were alive and well. Even though I said, 'It's broken up, it's gone,' the soul was still there in the four of us,” Faulkner admits. From there, re-formation was obvious.

Which brings us to the present day, when the band is still going strong, headlining gigs all over the shop and touring regularly. In mid-November, they're set to play a concert at the Wanneroo showgrounds for the Beach To Bush Festival.

“And it's free!” Faulkner says. “We love those ones. Guilt-free for us – we can go out and have fun. We don't have to worry about a promoter losing his shirt.”

Hoodoo Gurus will be playing the following shows:

Saturday 10 November - Bimbadgen Winery, Hunter Valley, NSW
Saturday 17 November - Beach To Bush Festival, Wanneroo Showgrounds, Perth WA
Saturday 24 November - Rochford Wines, Yarra Valley, VIC
Saturday 1 December - Peter Lehmann Wines, Barossa Valley, SA
Saturday 8 December - Josef Chromy Wines, Launceston, TAS