Special Delivery

"Wham! was the first-ever band I saw live,” admits Conrad Standish. “In 1985, at Festival Hall. I went with my dad. I left halfway through because – get this – I thought it was too loud. There's a scoop for you, Inpress. A big fucking scoop.”

Standish is talking about Wham! because his latest band, Standish/Carlyon, are a duo, and he's all too aware of operating within the history of partnerships. Though their name is a little more Hall & Oates than Lightning Bolt, Standish/Carlyon hew to the darker side of musicological dyads: “Suicide are number one,” Standish states, with surety.

Standish/Carlyon finds him reuniting with Tom Carlyon; the pair long-time collaborateurs, previously, in Devastations – an expat art-rock trio who divided their time between Berlin and London, releasing three LPs. Standish/Carlyon maintains that sense of mystery, but trade in layers of echo, swanning '80s synths and dub production.

“It's referencing certain kinds of pop ideals, in a Brian Ferry kind of way; this cartoony kind of referencing of pop modernity, with plenty of absurdity,” says Standish of the project, who've just released their debut LP, Deleted Scenes. “It's body music, but there are surreal aspects to it, and enough detail to keep the mind interested.”

The pair have now returned to Melbourne, and they're settling in. When Standish offers Inpress that “big fucking scoop”, he's doing so on the night before starting a new job as a postman. “I'm nervous, really,” he confesses. “I have no idea what I've gotten myself into.”

Growing up in suburban Melbourne, Standish looked on with envy at mail-carriers and their motorcycles – admittedly harbouring bigger postman dreams than rock'n'roll ones. “My first band was thrust upon me,” he recalls. “When I was seventeen I used to hang out with, well, a bunch of arseholes. We used to take a lot of drugs, hang out and listen to records all day every day. They had a band, and one day they fired their bass player, and informed me that I was the bass player.”

Years on and Standish is no longer navigating the rock band format, Standish/Carlyon's co-billed partnership feeling more like a relationship. “It was always handy when we were fighting, to have that other person to step in and diffuse the situation,” he says. “The group dynamic is a real thing, and sometimes it can make your life so much easier.”

Initially, the pair had “never any thought [they] were going to do a new thing after Devastations” but slowly they began swapping musical ideas, and ended up recording Deleted Scenes before they'd committed to being an actual band. Then another Australian art-rock expat came calling.

“Liars were curating [Sonic City] festival in Belgium, and I had sent Angus [Andrew] a couple of our songs, because we're old friends,” says Standish. “And he asked us if that would be our first show. We hadn't really thought whether this would be a live thing at all. But playing this festival was too hard to pass up, especially because it gave us a deadline to get our shit together.”