So Long And Thanks For The Fish

24 March 2012 | 9:20 am | Staff Writer

More Children Collide More Children Collide

Children Collide have caused a ruckus the office recently. They've announced a Sword To A Gunfight tour, the April 20 release of their third album Monument and the departure of drummer Ryan Caesar. As forthright as ever, the announcement went like this: “The relationship between band members Ryan and Johnny has over the years disintegrated.” You can imagine the barrage of questions frontman Johnny Mackay has been facing since.

“I've been tap dancing around that all week. It's okay, I expected to talk about it. It's not like he's a bad guy or a bad drummer. Ninety percent of it was really good and just ten per cent was really hard and got harder and harder for everyone else around us. We both like getting the job done and we're both very focussed on the band in our own different way. Our collective vision for the band held us together, but it got worse over the years. It grew and grew. We tried different things, we had meetings, we had talks, we tried to work with each other but it just didn't work. It's like any kind of relationship, sometimes they have an expiry date. Especially one where you're not attracted to the person, we couldn't really have make-up sex. That was the one thing we didn't try.”

When probed for Caesar's potential replacement, Mackay chortled at the idea of a reality show search. “We're going to get all of the singers that INXS have rejected and see if they can play drums.” More seriously, it's something the boys are trying to push from their minds as they prepare to hit the road together one final time. “As far as we're concerned, Ryan's in the band for this tour and after that we'll think about it.”

While their label describes their third album Monument as “a band striving for, and achieving, their ideal musical form,” Mackay describes a more relaxed approach. “It was us trying and not trying, just experimenting,” he says. “Most of it was written over a Brunswick autumn and winter in my bedroom. There was one period where I went around the world, kind of in the middle of that. I went to Turkey and set up a mini studio apartment in Istanbul for a few days there, but most of it was written in Brunswick. I'd bring in the demos I'd done. We'd pump out the multi-tracks and then everyone would work on their own parts in turn. So we were never really all in the same room at the same time.

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“All of the long shots they ended up liking, all the ones I thought would get laughed out of the studio everyone ended up liking. Woody [Annison] has done a great job producing the record and I really love how it goes song to song. It's got a bit of a wall of sound going on.”

The layering of guitars and effects is definitely turned up a notch on Monument compared to their past albums featuring guitar riffs and post-punk stomp. Fans still get the unmistakeably Children Collide sound with Mackay's vocal acrobatics and Heath Crawley's melodic bass, but there's more than a few features that show the band is maturing. Such as the intricate bass work on the next single Cherries.

“The bass line's written in fifteen, which is why it sounds interesting to my ears, every four it kicks over in a different way. It's one of the only two new ones we're playing live on the tour. It's funny, I put that in the same basket as Prussian Blue, but I think I hear the songs differently to everyone else. I don't think anyone else is going to link those two together as much as I do.

Prussian Blue I'm quite proud of. There's something about that song. The second I wrote it I was jumping up and down in my chair. It's got that krautrock thing going on with the same bass line running the whole way along and everything moving around that. It's got a few jokes in the lyrics, but it's actually about going crazy, about losing your mind. I wrote it around the time that Fukushima was happening and that's why I called it Prussian Blue. It's the dye they use to flush radioactive toxins out of the body.”

Oddly, the track that best illustrates the band's growing maturity is an older number that Mackay dusted off while ensconced in his aforementioned Brunswick bedroom, the gentler album coda Tired Eyes.

“I really like Tired Eyes. I actually started it years ago, as a really slow synth thing. Then ages after I pulled it up and wrote some words to it, then I tried playing some guitar around it and I thought hang on a second, maybe I should take this to the band – and they liked it. It's meant to be a lullaby, but it kind of ended up being about euthanasia. It's written from the point of view of one half of an older loving couple and the other half has some sort of terminal disease. The one in the song is helping them commit euthanasia.”

Such heavy themes litter the album's lyrics, pointing to religion, the cosmos and in a classic case of life imitating art, finality. However the group haven't lost their playfulness, with the vocal distortion effects on Smooth Gown reflecting the absurdity of the lyrics. “There's one really ridiculous song on there about my dressing gown. A dressing gown I got for five bucks in Bunbury. I wrote this song about wearing it and half of it ended up about the dressing gown going out and solving crime. But the chorus ended up getting chopped out of it, so it's just about me getting around in my dressing gown.”

With the celebratory freedom that comes from the knowledge of it being Caesar's last tour with the band, plus being on the road with a group of friends, you can definitely expect killer shows and shenanigans. “It's going to be a great tour. I've only seen the Deep Sea Arcade guys and love their songs. Palms are old friends. Alex and Tom from Palms I've known them for years. We did a tour with them five or six years ago supporting them when they were Red Riders. Years later they did a tour supporting us. I actually went camping with the two of them only a few weeks ago, so we're in for lots of fun times. It's always fun to go on tour with bands you're friends with. I reckon I'll end up in their bands half the time.”

The fans will have to be ready for mischief too, as the phallic nature of the cover of Monument causes Mackay to giggle. “It was definitely not intentional. If anyone asks me to sign anything and they've got one of those shirts, I'll turn it into a cock 'n' balls. They'll never be able to wear it in front of their mother!”