Spiralling Downwards

In a Melbourne café, The Murlocs' Ambrose Kenny-Smith's a little worse for wear following night two of a five-night run with one of his bands, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. He's also moving house – poor bastard. He looks a bit pasty, but okay. Then he takes his first sip of orange juice, spilling it in his lap. “Fuck it,” he says, when offered a napkin.

Kenny-Smith's other band The Murlocs have got their debut album Loopholes launching this month. They started around the same time as KG&TLW, who are already up to album number four, but lost three-quarters of the debut on a stolen laptop. It was a devastating blow but not without silver linings. “It was kind of a blessing because we got to change all the songs around,” he says. “Space Cadet was the only song that we'd had mixed and mastered so we put that out as a single. That was probably the most fully complete song that we'd been playing live and shit anyway.”

The son of renowned Australian songwriter Broderick Smith (The Dingoes), Kenny-Smith grew up on a diet of blues. The Nuggets compilations were big for him in his teens, so it was a big thrill to be invited to cover Count Five's Psychotic Reaction for the Antipodean Interpolations release of 2012. On Loopholes, Kenny-Smith's voice channels Janis Joplin or even Aretha Franklin at times and his harmonica sparkles through clouds of guitars.

Kenny-Smith first picked up the harmonica as a six- or seven-year-old kid. Back in those primary school days Kenny-Smith and fellow Murloc Matt Blach featured as members of another band, Blu Tak. “I came up with the name,” says Kenny-Smith. “It was the band that was supposed to stick together but stopped after, like, Grade Five or Six. Matt was playing drums and he was in another band with one of the other dudes, called The Rustys. He'll probably kill me for mentioning it, but they used to be the surf coast indie-pop idols whereas me and Sam [Cooper] were in Sambrose Automobile and [were] trying to play, like, blues-rock stuff. We were like the ugly ducklings of our high school while The Rustys were like the pride and joy.”

Around now, Kenny-Smith's sandwich arrives. He'll need the sustenance to help him through the next three nights of Gizzard shows, upcoming Murlocs release shows and a tour of the USA, which includes Austin's Psych Fest. He's busy now but it's still hard to measure the present against those heady, high school days. “We did one gig at the Queenscliff Retirement Village with one mic on while we decided to cover Hey Ya by Outkast,” he says. “I don't think they were moving too much. It was pretty weird, as you can imagine. It's all spiralled downwards from there.”