Bittersweet Debauchery

Melbourne ensemble Wagons recently re-emerged from the musical wilderness armed with their sixth long-player, Acid Rain And Sugar Cane, having decamped to frontman Henry Wagons' Mornington Peninsula studio and availed themselves of the masses of vintage equipment he'd stockpiled for this very purpose.

It's a grandiose collection of songs, which finds '70s classic rock colliding at full gallop with the Americana-tinged country that's always been their stock-in-trade, but still replete with plenty of their trademark humour and Henry Wagons' inimitable worldview.

“I feel like we're finally figuring out how to make good records,” the singer smiles. “We've definitely made records in the past that we've been really happy with, but none more so than this one. We had such a good time making this one, and we devoted all of our time and energies into working with people that we respect and admire and also creating a really comfortable environment to record in at my studio, which was more or less set up for this album. It was just a really, really sweet process where we could all express our wildest desires on record in a kind of more live way then we've ever done it before which I think is important to us.
“We had the bonus of an extra member – Mick Harvey produced and he was amazing. He's not a 'behind the mixing desk' kind of guy with his production, and from what I can tell when he approaches a project he thinks, 'Well what is it that I can offer here? Where do I fit in?'... He just slotted in as an extra member, and that's a pretty weird talent because he was pretty seamless and in his own relatively quiet way he had a big impact on how the record sounds as well.”

Acid Rain And Sugar Cane continues the ongoing evolution of Wagons' sound. “I think we're definitely less country than we were, and I think that reflects everyone's musical tastes – we've slowly been drifting away from that,” Henry ponders. “When Wagons first started I was right into the Johnny Cash Rick Rubin recordings, and I'd discovered my Dad's Marty Robbins collection and Mum took me to a Neil Diamond concert and I'd just seen Dead Man at the cinema – all of these things with a trippy Wild West aspect really inspired me starting the project. I feel that this record is still pretty trippy Wild West, but maybe we've headed more in a psychedelic Lee Hazelwood direction as opposed to the Johnny Cash direction, but it's all channeling a similar kind of thing.

“When I think back to the records we were making in the early 2000s as compared to now there's a pretty big difference, but I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily. It's just a great privilege to have people interested in listening to us explore our musical passions – everyone's got strange random chaotic choices and timings which lead to different sounds, and given that there six guys on the album everyone's going through their own different stages in their diary and musical development, and the combination of all those different factors in the studio at once leads to different permutations in sound. As the person guiding the ship I just hope that we never produce an acid fusion record.”

And with many of the new songs dealing with drinking and debauchery, Wagons concedes that they're all based on weird real life experiences.

“These songs were culled together at the end of a lot of North American touring, which involves a lot of drinking; a lot of it's drowning homesickness, so there's a lot of drinking songs,” Wagons chuckles. “It's kind of a behind the scenes retrospective of all of the weird places that we've been taken to after the stage lights go out – all the weird places that people take us after gigs. You'll never imagine the strange corridors and hessian tapestries and weird scents and so on that we actually get dragged into post-1.30am – you look around and go, 'Where the fuck is this? Where am I?' That time between striking the last chord on the stage and then about 2pm the following day – that kind of drunk, hungover but also strange, weird party time – I think all of the songs happen between those hours.”