Rock'N'Roll Away

The Audreys are hitting the road to support new album, 'Til My Tears Roll Away. Last time Coates chatted to The Music her musical efforts were bookended by chats about more general life stuff in and around the album rather than squarely on the task at hand. This one was similar, starting with a celebration (and justification, of sorts) of how The Boss has crept into the band's consciousness. 

“We always do a cover in our sets, and the first night I think we did something like Highway Patrolmen, something really sad and beautiful; it was a really amazing moment and we didn't feel that we could play that song again the next night,” Coates begins by way of explanation. “So we were trying to think of something else that could be that, and we thought of another Bruce song, then we'd done two Bruce songs and we thought 'fuck, we're on a roll,' so we ended up doing a different Bruce song every night. Some of them were '80s Bruce – they weren't all serious, some were stupid – so in the middle of Dancing In The Dark there was some interpretative dance, some serious bum dancing.”

Despite an ability to deliver a killer acoustic set with angelic precision, The Audreys are really quite wicked. It's a spark that makes their shows always just a little unpredictable, and has seen interpretative dance iPad and ukulele solos just as likely to appear as big ballads and sweeping tear-jerker moments.

“With the ukulele, I only started because I wanted to have something I could play standing up; I didn't want to have to sit behind a piano. So I picked up a guitar and thought, 'six strings, too hard,' so then there was a ukulele and it was, 'four strings, I can deal with that,'” Coates suggests with the modest mild dismissiveness only someone who only knows music stuff can. Anyone near a primary school knows the ukulele is very easy to play badly. Her slightly childlike love of just finding new noises is infectious, though, and a scope that has made their latest offering, album number four, an impressive addition to their collection.

When it comes to taking 'Til My Tears Roll Away on the road, Coates is pretty clear about just going with the flow of the moment, rather than what it was in the studio or in a review months or years back. “It's just whatever you feel. And once you've been doing it for a while people will come back – there are those that want things to stay the same to a degree, which they do, but they also want variety… You just can't think about what people's expectations are about what you do, you can't let them limit your ideas and creativity, you know what I mean? If I'm mucking around on an app and find a really great sound that's fun then I'll play it on stage; I'm not going to stop and think, 'oh, it's a folkie crowd,' – I'm not going to care about that.

“We once had someone call a venue really quite upset because we'd had been drinking on stage and we swore. And when we got the call from the venue we were just like, 'Dude, it's rock and roll!'” Coates laughs. “But that audience member sounds like a hoot, I hope they come back!” It seems the band's drinking and potty mouths aren't the only thing that can get them in trouble, with those expecting spelling to match their personal preference in danger of significant disappointment.

“We've also had someone complain on Facebook about the way we spelt our album title 'Til My Tears Roll Away with one 'L' rather than two. Well it was a public message on Facebook and I left it there, but at first I said, 'We're using the word in a different way. It's not the word 'till', I know what that is, we're using it in a slang way.' I thought we had a perfectly reasonable explanation rather than sending a diatribe with links to dictionaries and all that. But then [the protester] signed off with, 'I was going to buy your album until I realised you couldn't spell, how embarrassing for you.'” Such 'strange' audience exchanges once only happened at the bar late after a gig or occasionally with a renegade fan letter. Is this type of 24-hour feedback something that gets Coates' goat? Without missing a beat, she channels her best 'angry ABC viewer complaint' voice. “See, I find that exchange deeply amusing,” she deadpans. Take that, musical media watchers.