Inciting Enthusiasm

When members of Gay Paris are present, you can almost guarantee no matter how early you start recording it won't be early enough. The irrefutable evidence gained from our time together begins mid-story, frontman Wailin' H Monks and bass player Slim Pickins freshly back from Tasmania, the former nursing a knee-injury – a shocking discovery given their self-appointed status as demi-gods.

“I'm injured by rock'n'roll, terribly so. I did a jump – no! I fell off a guy's back, I was riding a really tall dude in a piggy-back race, because I upgraded from…” says Monks before Pickins interjects. “From a small busty woman to a big large dude, who, you'd think, would be better at carrying someone as small as our friend WH, but, not the case.”

“Two steps and he toppled,” confirms Monks.

At the time, Gay Paris are 11 dates into a 40-date tour (that seems to continue to grow at each count) in support of their long-awaited, crowd-funded second album, The Last Good Party. Collectively, the four-piece rapped, ate cheese excessively, danced to technical math metal while wearing a pink leotard in Pitt St Mall – all this amongst a myriad of other ridiculous tasks – as part of their Pozible-based fundraising efforts for the album. A novel approach, Monks and Pickins say they'd be happy to do it again for album number three, and point out that it didn't take them too far from their comfort zone anyway.

“I think it is the future, people don't want to give record companies money, people want to give the band actual money,” suggests Pickins. “I'd do it again; I think it's exciting. We're idiots anyway, if it takes me dancing in a pink leotard to get another album done, sure.”

By all accounts – hell, even the brief few that follow – the Tasmanian incident is far from an anomaly, and further proof that the antics that enabled the album were hardly a stretch. “The tour has been fantastic, lots of people coming up and buying us drinks, buying us things,” explains Slim.

“Almost unbearably so,” Monks confirms – the two of them work wonders in tandem. “But I can't tell them to quit because I enjoy enthusiasm as much as I enjoy free things. Or straight up give us their money, and I feel gratified when they do. In Canberra, before we were even on stage, some dude just slipped fifty bucks in my pocket and said, 'Here's the money.' I like being pre-empted, because I'm not going to make less effort, but it encourages me when I'm making the effort that I don't need to see results.”

By their own admission, they've been so busy touring and rocking they missed the news that the outlet so frequently turned to for nudity during the brief downtime they're not on stage (and achieving nudity), Snapchat, was in fact retaining their photos. Not that they're fazed. “We're too busy playing rock'n'roll shows and satisfying people with Snapchat to find out about Snapchat. I was always disappointed – people need to keep this,” says Monks, motioning seductively to his torso and beyond. “I want them to have it, but I don't want to give them my number. Well, I give them Blacktooth's number. Have at it people, enjoy the masturbatory aid of the smartphone age, enjoy yourselves people!”

Here, both Pickins and Monks offer to reveal their penises, promising to do so as many as 20 times.

Even armed with a brand new album there are times when it seems as though Gay Paris may be a not-so-thinly-veiled front for a good time; a party juggernaut that Monks, Pickins, guitarist Blacktooth Marks and drummer Six Guns Simpson can captain to ensure the drinks come subsidised and the drugs for free. The band ooze party, demand it from obliging audiences or earn it from fresh ones; a confronting, heady mix of charmingly inebriated class (requests for brandy are not infrequent) and the dirtiest of rock'n'roll swagger. Hell, as we speak one quaffs a glass of red while the other nurses a long neck sheltered in a brown paper bag.

That same mix is evident in the music, a barrage of classic (occasionally verging on zany) rock riffs as the bedrock for pseudo-religious histrionics, Monks sounding and spouting like Cedric Bixler-Zavala were he raised between churches and speakeasies; a lyrical concept that follows the time-travelling devil Future Wolf from their debut record, The Skeleton's Problematic Granddaughter In Disguise As A man, Joseph Hollybone, and an ever-increasing musical theatricality. It's assured, dirty rock in the pursuit of yachts.

Beyond the intoxicating veneer, though, looking past the undeniably enviable tour stories of acclaim, gratitude and free shit, the real ethic of this band is revealed. A 40-date tour that keeps growing not only fuels the band's antics, it makes a mockery of their contemporaries who bemoan the difficulties of stringing a significant run of shows in this bafflingly widespread land of ours.

“I think that we're breaking away from any kind of qualifying paradigm,” declares Monks. “We're saying, 'Well we'll go there and we'll play your fucking venue!' I don't give a damn. We'll go to places where if there are fifteen, twenty people there they'll go, 'Oh man, I can't believe I haven't seen this before,' and they'll have the greatest time ever. If bands are worried about results they have to reconsider what kind of results they desire.”

“Everyone seems to be loving it,” Pickins chimes in, “and that's a guarantee, and I guess that's what we said when we were booking this tour. We said, 'We'll play it, you'll have a great time!' Forty shows, I mean some places we're doing two, but we're breaking ground and playing places that I didn't think would welcome us.” If and when the tour does wrap up there are already tentative plans in place to take it elsewhere; South East Asia, America (there is a harboured desire to see 'real American whores' and people who can 'twerk it' real good expressed), Europe.

For now, though, the tour continues, perhaps indefinitely, as the hedonism of the Last Good Party (the album, the tour, the whole weird art-inspiring-life-inspiring-art amalgam it's become) rolls on. “Now it's definitely at a point where we're saying, 'Can you add more gigs to this thing?'” Monks exclaims excitedly.

“The Last Good Party never stops,” confirms Pickins, and adds, bleakly, “If it does, we're dead.”

“Those are the implications,” says Monks, “the tragic, tragic implications.”

Do you want blood on your hands?