They're Back

You often hear about bands being done over by the vagaries of the music industry, and the case of Melbourne power-pop trio the Spazzys is a perfect example. Their 2004 debut album Aloha! Go Bananas – combined with a fierce work ethic – had garnered them a massive Australian following, and they were starting to build the same overseas when a massive dispute with their label/management almost derailed the band completely, so much so that the follow-up album that they recorded in 2006, Dumb Is Forever, is only now seeing the light of day (the legal disputes were finally resolved in the band's favour).

“It's a bit dated for us – we've been sitting on those songs for years obviously – so it's not to say that we don't like them, but they're not much of a surprise at the moment,” smiles vocalist/guitarist Kat Spazzy. “We find in our sets we're playing mainly 'new' new songs – post that album – and they're the ones we love.”

Luckily the Spazzys were always mining a pretty timeless sound, so the contents of Dumb Is Forever don't seem dated.

“We'd moved on pretty significantly from our first record, Aloha! Go Bananas,” Spazzy recalls. “There was a pretty big change in the Spazzys at the time – it was our second album, so hopefully you want to develop your sound a bit at that stage of your career, and I think we did that. Dumb Is Forever is a lot more like we're sounding now in 2012 with our 'new' new songs. It was 2006 so we'd already been in the band for six years, and we'd already started to develop our own original sound at that stage.

“The early Ramones influence was really natural. I mean we loved the Ramones and we couldn't play our instruments, so it was perfect – three chords and down-stroking, how could you go wrong? So of course that was an influence along with other pop stuff, but on Aloha! Go Bananas even though we were influenced by the Ramones we didn't sound anything like them. Even when we tried to sound like the Ramones we still sounded like the Spazzys. There was a lot of other stuff in there like '60s girls groups and the harmonies and all of that, and I think we've really harnessed that sound and grabbed that and ran with it.”

You'd think it would have at least been a good experience going over to LA to record with Charles Fisher (Hoodoo Gurus), but that seems to be where the problems started.

“No, it was really shit,” Spazzy bemoans. “It was really badly organised. We didn't want to go to LA, we were tricked into going to LA – I think our managers thought it would be a cool thing to do, because we were kind of up-and-coming and there was a bit of attention around us, and I think they wanted us to record there, which is the daggiest most '80s thing in the fucking world to do. It was a waste of time – we could have done it at home in a week with our own gear, it was a dumb thing to do and we'd never do it again.

“That whole time was too much – it was really, really difficult. We couldn't put out our second record when it was time and obviously that disadvantaged us significantly. It was really hard to keep going as a band, and it wasn't until we all went off and started doing other things that that pressure was relieved. When we started having other lives the Spazzys started to feel fun again.”