Living On The Edge

With most of those dreads still firmly knotted in place and that charming yet wry wit graciously intact, there's little that seems to have changed for Jay Whalley since the inception of '90s punk four-piece Frenzal Rhomb. At least, that's before you look at some of the situations Whalley has found himself in over the past year. Firstly, a close shave, literally, with death. The lofty vegan picked up an extra souvenir on a trip to South America, one he didn't expect, and one which only presented itself after some odd symptoms, as in a seizure, were finally diagnosed.

“The tapeworm! I was dead for seven months! That's the longest anyone's ever been dead, and then not dead,” he surmises dryly. “It was a heavy time, in all seriousness. It was recently the anniversary, on Valentine's Day, of the removal of a pig parasite from my brain. It was romantic.”

Considering how bad things could have been when doctors began using words like “tumour” and “cancer”, a tapeworm was oddly a good outcome. But one of the saddest things from the whole ordeal for Jay was losing one of his trademark dreads. “One of them had to go, one of the worst offenders, and upon seeing it, it really should've gone a few years before,” he reasons. “It was put into one of those yellow biohazard bags and probably taken out to the middle of the desert to be buried.”

The incident, as well as a recent one in which he found himself in the middle of Bangkok's civil unrest while on holiday – “It was actually a pretty exciting time to be there but I wasn't entirely sure who to root for. It was a mystery deal and the mystery was that the hotel was right next to all the sandbags and the truck tyres” – made him walk away with renewed vigour for life, albeit with the same at-ease grace in which he approaches his musical projects.

“I think taking things for granted seems to be part of the human condition,” he contemplates. “I do slap myself from time to time and say, 'Come on man, you've dodged the bullet here'. I think the last thing the neurosurgeon said was, 'Resume normal life', so part of that is getting onstage and swearing at people.”

Now, Whalley has found time away from his other band Chinese Burns Unit, and with no wish to join Lindsay 'The Doctor' McDougall on the triple j airwaves again, Frenzal Rhomb are getting ready to embark on a bunch of shows, somewhat older but with the same potential for mischief and a manly fondness of each other. “It's even more fun [these days] as we don't get to do it as much as we used to, especially at the moment because we're right into the writing phase of the record and probably shouldn't be touring at all. But it is so gosh darn fun. And they're a very nice bunch of fellas at the end of the day.”

The album they should be writing will be their ninth, following on from 2011's lauded Smoko At The Pet Food Factory. With Whalley's aforementioned setbacks a delay was to be expected, but on top of the band living and breathing very separate lives, Whalley admits hesitation at a timeframe for when the new Frenzal album may drop.

“Slowly but surely,” he says. “We have quite a high cull rate, so we will write a lot of songs and then put them in the bin. There's a lot of rubbish, but we're getting there I think. We started demoing about three years ago – no it can't be that long – let's say two years, and if everything goes right we should have the new record out by 2023. ”

Fans can at least look forward to perhaps hearing a couple of new tracks alongside old Frenzal favourites like Never Had So Much Fun and You Are Not My Friend when the band drops into town. While most visitors are keen to soak up the sun, Whalley's fascination with our fair state is more a morbid curiosity.

“I don't think we've been to Queensland since it became illegal to have a tattoo,” he muses. “We know for a fact that Campbell Newman is a massive Frenzal Rhomb fan. I'm expecting him to be there, just to monitor proceedings. I'm looking forward to half our crowd being arrested – it should've been done a long time ago really, but at least this time it will be amongst lots of friends.”