A Scrappy Affair

The Neighbours-touting name aside, the music of Scott & Charlene's Wedding was always an intrinsically Australian affair. Their 2010 debut album Para Vista Social Club – the album title a reference to the Adelaide suburb Para Vista where frontman, songwriter and sole constant member Craig Dermody spent his youth – was a collection of defiantly lo-fi songs firmly rooted in outer-city Melbourne, the tales of disillusionment and despondence grafted onto real life locales and anchoring the album from a geographical perspective (song titles like Footscray Station and Epping Line speaking volumes in this regard).

These vulnerable songs were slacker in vibe but intrinsically personal in content – favouring the clearly factual over the cryptic like many other bands of their ilk – but there's no second guessing where they were based, which is why it was somewhat surprising a couple of years ago when Dermody decamped to the bustling metropolis of New York City. Back in town for a few weeks for a wedding and to catch up with friends and family, Dermody is effusive about his love/hate relationship with his adopted hometown.

“It's good, it's good. It's cold – it's snowing heaps and the weather's shit. No actually, it's shit, it's too cold,” he laughs of the Big Apple. “But other than that the band's good and work's good. It's a nice place to live, but I miss Australia. I was just after a bit of a life change. I'd just done what I was doing, and it was just time for me to go there, I guess – I'd always wanted to. I'd just finished a record and it was time to go. That was two years ago so it's been a while now, but it's going okay.”

You'd imagine that New York would be a music Mecca for an underground musician, but that hasn't been the case to date, in Dermody's experience. “I kind of feel that I get to see more cool bands when I'm in Melbourne, just because on the whole there's just heaps more better bands just living here,” he ponders. “In New York bigger bands will definitely float through – Patti Smith's always playing and Lou Reed's always playing, and you might see Thurston Moore or Kim Gordon floating around. That stuff's really cool, but it still costs a hundred dollars to see those characters play, so I miss them a lot of the time. And there doesn't seem to as many smaller bands that I like compared to [Australia] – there's only a handful that I go out to see on a regular basis in Brooklyn. To me, it's worlds ahead here [in Australia] – there's heaps and heaps of bands and everyone supports it heaps more. It's just tough in general to play in a band in New York – it's so hard to find a band and keep it afloat, keep working, find a rehearsal space, all that stuff. There just seems to be less people doing it. In Australia people just end up doing [a band] because you can and there's not so much fighting you have to do – I think that's why our stuff sounds so easy going.”

Dermody put together a New York version of Scott & Charlene's Wedding, which is starting to get some traction, but it wasn't always an easy ride. “It was really slow going in the beginning – it was really hard actually,” he admits. “In the first year I couldn't really find anyone to play in the band, no bookers would respond to my emails – it was really hard. Then about six months ago I finally got the rest of the band together and we recorded there, and then we started getting a few shows and now it's all up and running – we've got heaps of shows coming up and it's all going well. But it was a slow start, it was really tough in the beginning.”

With an impending UK release – the five tracks from 2011's split album with Peak Twins released over there as a 10” – and a new full-length in the can, Dermody is right now busy trying to train up a new incarnation of Scott & Charlene's Wedding for his current Australian sojourn (featuring members of Bushwalking, Peak Twins and Beaches). “It's getting easier – I've done it so many times now,” he laughs of putting together pick-up versions of the band in different places. “I've probably had somewhere between 40 and 50 people in the band now. I just sort of have it in mind when I write the songs, and think about how simple they are and if they'll get picked up easier [by new band members]. They've heard the songs before around the place, and even our first practice was easy – we played the songs through once and they just got 'em. It'll be a bit of a scrappy affair, but I like that too – that's the Scott & Charlene's Wedding vibe, it's part of the charm.

“Plus I just wrote a record, and that record will be coming out later this year – we recorded it literally just as I left America. There's a whole record of material ready to come out. I think it will be in mid-July, but before that there will be some singles and seven-inches and that kind of stuff. We made a film clip, which should be pretty funny.

“I didn't mean to change the sound, but the sound is different. It's heaps tighter and I don't know why I wrote songs that were heaps faster but it's sort of faster for the most part. We recorded it in a really nice studio as well – some people might think that that's a good thing, and some people might think that's a bad thing. It's heaps different to Para Vista..., but with the same sort of sentiment – it's still just singing about girls, for the most part.”

And do those new lyrics still reflect where he was at that point of time? “Definitely. I don't sing about Footscray Station anymore and I don't work as a furniture removalist like I did; now I work in stupid nightclubs that are totally fucked – I hate it,” Dermody rails. “I'm a security guard or a door person at a VIP Bar, and I'd almost rather be a furniture removalist than that rubbish. There's all of that stuff that I sing about – it's definitely all reflecting the places that I live. Although I still sing about Melbourne a lot because I miss Melbourne so much, but New York's definitely in the record. It's just like a stream of thought – the shit that's going down just comes out, and just shit that's on my mind. So it's autobiographical in lots of ways – I don't really know how to do it any other way.”

Scott & Charlene's Wedding will be playing the following dates:

Sunday 31 March - The Blurst Of Times Festival, Brisbane QLD
Friday 5 April - Liberty Social, Melbourne VIC