Dutch Courage

"We're probably the only band who have their own Harley-Davidson and can't drive it… I don't have my driver's licence for motorcycles.” Pablo Van De Poe, the vocalist for Dutch psych rock outfit DeWolff says, laughing. “And even if I had, I'm 21 and to drive a bike like that in Holland you have to be 23.”

It's an interesting and certainly unique claim to fame; your band having its own signature motorcycle. And it's one that Van De Poe still seems a little tickled by. “Harley-Davidson were going to release a '70s tribute model, and they were looking for a band to help promote it, we play the '70s rock-style thing… Then it all came together and we got our own Harley.”

DeWolff's head nods to the years of Tom Wolfe's 'Me generation', and the music it helped spawn, makes their pairing with the bike more understandable. Like acts such as The Black Keys and Jack White, DeWolff embody the spirit of ardent retro revivalists.

Their love of yesteryear is captured superbly on their latest long-player DeWolff IV, an album that has as much in the way of old-fashioned rock'n'roll swagger as it does Hammond organ freakouts. Despite sounding like Hawkwind and King Crimson getting together to test the electric kool-aid though, DeWolff surprisingly used computers to help piece the album together. It's something that doesn't hinder the record, but a point Van De Poe is keen to rectify as DeWolff continue ahead.

“We recorded this album like the previous two albums on tape, two-inch 24-track tape, and when we'd finished with all the instruments except for the strings we loaded everything into ProTools and did the strings and put the record together in ProTools,” he tells. “After we recorded DeWolff IV I was reading a lot about analogue recording, and I started my own analogue recording studio. So we're recording a lot of stuff there. We were already pretty analogue-minded, but now we're a lot more analogue-minded, we wouldn't record with ProTools again… In the studio we felt like we needed a separate kick drum mic and a separate overhead mic, but now that we've been recording some demos and hearing how awesome they sound, we know that the next record is going to be all analogue.”

It's that sense of authenticity that Van De Poe, his brother Luka and Robin Pisco bring to their live shows. “We put everything we have into our shows, so it's one hell of a psychedelic rock'n'roll trip.”

The east coast tour is also special for the band because it coincides with the Australian release of all their records, their latest, DeWolff IV, and their first two full-lengths Strange Fruits & Undiscovered Lands and Orchids/Lupine as an Australia-only double disc package.

“It didn't seem useful to release two albums separately, at the same time. Because the first album came out in Holland four years ago, we thought it would be stupid to release that and then tour Australia for it, then release the second album. So we just put them together and then release DeWolff IV separately because it's an up-to-date record.”

However, Van De Poe promises that DeWolff IV won't be the up-to-date record for much longer – they're already working on more of their freaky deaky boogie woogie.

“We've got a couple of songs but they're not finished yet. We've got five or ten songs for the next one, but it's probably not going to be released until mid-2014.”

DeWolff will be playing the following dates:

Sunday 17 March - Transit Bar, Canberra ACT
Wednesday 20 March - Oxford Art Factory, Sydney NSW
Sunday 24 March - Old Manly Boatshed, Manly NSW
Tuesday 26 March - Macquarie Uni Bar, Sydney NSW
Wednesday 27 March - Newcastle Leagues Club, Newcastle NSW