Living With Our Ghost

Everclear's inaugural tour to Australia back in 1998 should have been a triumph, but was instead an unmitigated disaster. At the tail end of a hectic world tour promoting their 1997 third album So Much For The Afterglow – and only a couple of years since their 1995 sophomore effort Sparkle And Fade had become a huge hit in Australia on the back of ubiquitous radio singles Heroin Girl and Santa Monica – the Portland trio's Australian shows were plagued with bad luck from the outset: frontman Art Alexakis was hit by a shoe in Wollongong and cracked some teeth, a 'fan' disrupted the Melbourne show by letting off explosives onstage, gear was stolen at the Gold Coast and eventually – amid much in-fighting and acrimony – the tour was cancelled so that the band could limp back home to lick their wounds and recuperate.

The Everclear returning to Australia this month for the first time since that tumultuous experience are a new outfit – only Alexakis remains, former bassist Craig Montoya and drummer Greg Eklund having since been replaced by a seemingly fluid roster of musicians – and should be unsullied by the prior experience, the songwriter explaining that he's really excited about the opportunity to atone and hopefully put the band's best foot forward.

“It was crazy, we were touring so much, and there were certain members of the band drinking and drugging too much, and just the travel caught up with us as well,” he reflects of their previous Australian sojourn. “We kind of bumped heads and people went home and everyone made a big deal about it – I knew it was just a temporary thing. Two weeks later everything was fine. Unfortunately we haven't been back to Australia for 14 years, and that might have had something to do with it.

“For a few years we did really well [in Australia] – the first time we came down there was like 500 people waiting at the airport, I was like, 'So this is what it's like!' It wasn't quite like The Beatles, but for us it was pretty close. It was totally cool and we had a blast, I'm really looking forward to coming back down, it was so much fun. I've wanted to come back. We just needed to put out the right record, and now's the right time.”

The record he's referring to is Everclear's seventh studio effort, Invisible Stars. In the six years since their last studio effort Welcome To The Drama Club the band have released two 'best of' collections and a covers album, making this something of a return to form with its reliance on loud guitars and '70s-sounding synths.

“Musically I wanted it to be a rock record,” Alexakis admits. “I was writing rock songs and I wanted to have an added touch to it, but I didn't want to go to the organ or use the soft strings that I'd been using recently – that really doesn't work well with heavy guitars, it kind of softens everything and waters it down. I've always been a fan of old analogue-sounding '70s and '80s synthesisers like The Cars and Devo and bands like that used, so I started screwing around with those sounds, and I made my keyboard player get into it [and] listen to a lot of that old stuff. One of my favourite bands is Split Enz – a New Zealand band from back in those days – and they did some great, great things with synthesisers. That's kind of how the sound came about.

“I didn't really write a lot for a long time – just a few songs here or there – but I hadn't been in the mood to write a record until about two years ago, and I just started writing, mostly on electric guitar, and I think that helped shape what I was writing and put a certain edge on it. Lyrically it's still the same old me – a little bit older and hopefully a little bit wiser – plus I moved back to LA with my wife and my youngest daughter about a year-and-a-half ago after living in Portland for 20 years, and I don't know what it was but I got the fire in my belly again. I'm not hungry like I used to be physically but emotionally I am, and I think the record shows that. There's a hunger there, and I feel empowered again and excited to play music. Anything gets old after a while – I feel bad for porn stars, if you're doing that every day where's the fun in it?” he guffaws. “I guess, I don't know...”

Having harked back to Everclear's glory days, Alexakis reflects on Sparkle And Fade – he didn't know at the time that he was writing a special batch of songs, but once they'd done the job in the studio he was pretty convinced that they'd constructed something out of the ordinary.

“I didn't know that [it was special] per se, but I knew that I had made the best record that I could make, and I knew that it was a better record than a lot of people gave us credit for making,” he reminisces. “I remember the night we mastered it with Bob Ludwig – who'd worked with U2 and Springsteen, and he was so helpful, he worked with me all day and was so patient – and going to my hotel room and popping the mastered CD, all sequenced and sounding like the record, into my Discman and listening through headphones and it just sounded like a rock'n'roll record, like a big label rock record. I just remember my heart pounding and calling the guys in the band, and we were all freaking out and screaming over the phone while I'm playing it over the phone in the hotel – it was like an epiphany, a real exciting moment.

“And then of course three months later I play it to the president of Capitol, and he'd barely listened to the record and didn't really remember who I was, and I was, like, 'Man, is this going to work? Did I make a mistake?', but despite the upper crust at Capitol it just kept going and going, people just championed the record and it finally broke. It took about a year-and-a-half and it finally broke. It went worldwide, all the way down to you guys – it broke big in Australia and New Zealand. English-speaking countries really seemed to latch onto it. I know it sounds clichéd saying it but I was really just writing from the heart – some stuff was autobiographical, some of it was an outside perspective, but it's all real and it's all me and my voice. To this day people tell me how much that record and ...Afterglow connected with them, and it's really cool. I feel really flattered and blessed that I've been able to be a part of something like that, it's really cool.”