A Winning Formula

For a while there at the turn of the millennium, Brisbane four-piece Giants Of Science had the hard rock world at their feet, having forged a large following for their deceptively intricate brand of heavy rock’n’roll on the back of a hectic touring schedule and a stream of well-received releases. They did the entire Aussie festival circuit, played with bands like MC5, Mudhoney, Foo Fighters, Future Of The Left, Rollins Band, Swervedriver, Mclusky, Radio Birdman, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and even toured alongside acts like Powderfinger and A Perfect Circle with whom they had little in common musically — and then, for all intents and purposes, they just disappeared.

Life took over from the musical dreams that they’d once shared and the band became a more sporadic concern, popping up occasionally to play with bands they felt were worth their time. Now, however, they’re back, armed with a new EP, What’s Wrong With You And Why, and (just maybe) shit’s about to start getting real again.

“Basically, trying to get anything done in the Giants Of Science camp is a much more involved process than it was ten years ago, due to people being married and having children and real jobs — all of the others have chickened out on me and got real jobs,” laughs frontman Ben Salter. “I’ve been trying to spur them into action and saying, ‘Look, if you want stuff done then I’m always available, but you’ll need to organise some of it yourselves’. Somehow, we’ve finally got around to releasing the EP — it’s sort of good, we’ve already had lots of people saying, ‘When are you coming to here?’ or ‘When are you coming to here?’, it’s good.

“I guess for a while there with Giants it was starting to become a bit of a drag, and then when after we had a bit of a break the difference when we play is that I love it — I love doing the heavier stuff because I don’t get to do it very much. And I guess I do realise how good we are, when I think before I wasn’t totally aware of just what good players Steve [Lynagh, drums] and Matt [Tanner, bass] and Tuity [guitarist/vocalist Ben Tuite] are. It is a bit of a different perspective because we’re all a bit older, but it’s a lot of fun these days.”

When Salter posits that playing in Giants became a ‘bit of a drag’, is he referring to the age-old Aussie band conundrum of eventually playing the same places to the same faces for what seems like an eternity?

“Yeah, and I guess we were just on that treadmill of trying to get a little bit bigger and people’s hearts weren’t really in it,” he tells. “There were lots of things — we were probably sick of being in a van with each other and stuff, but now there’s not that pressure — that stupid music industry shit of trying to be a bit bigger than you were before — now we just do it because we like it, and it’s just so much more fun. Hopefully other people still come along and remember as well.”

The Giants released Live At The Troubadour in 2009, but essentially the EP represents their first new studio tracks for nearly a decade — did they set out an agenda for what they wanted it to sound like?

“We went and recorded about 20 songs up at the farm [near Rockhampton] about five years ago when we first got back together and did that live album and stuff,” Salter recalls. “So we’ve been working on these songs for ages and ages and ages — and we obviously released that one new song on the live album, WFRC — but when we decided to go back and record again we just picked the four songs that we thought were the most ‘rock’. We went through a phase when we were into the more rock stuff rather than the ‘stoner-y’ stuff, and we wanted more upbeat tracks so we just ended up picking those. It’s sort of weird, it just ends up happening fairly arbitrarily — not a lot of thought goes into it, we just go, ‘Oh well, we’ll do that one’ and that’s the one that ends up on the EP. We don’t sit around talking about it too much. But there are so many other songs that we’ve got that we worked all of the way up to being finished and then recorded, but we never released the recordings for whatever reason, so we’re really keen to go back and look at all of those songs and see what we can do as far as doing another EP or an album or something.”

We were never really into that stoner image, like bro dudes high-fiving each other and driving muscle cars and all of that shit

Early on, Giants Of Science were lumped in the whole ‘stoner rock’ genre that was bursting out at the time — partly because they were on Brisbane indie Rhythm Ace Records alongside actual stoner bands like Rollerball and Fort — but the label was never particularly accurate.

“I guess we were pretty obsessed with those sorts of band when we started out — stuff like Kyuss and Queens Of The Stone Age — and then we went down that path of listening to all those stoner bands like Fu Manchu,” Salter remembers. “And we really liked Budd, who aren’t really stoner either but have that dirty dirt-bike sound. But we were never really into that stoner image, like bro dudes high-fiving each other and driving muscle cars and all of that shit, we weren't into cars or anything, it was more about Built To Spill and Swervedriver (although they were into cars pretty heavily).

"But you can’t have your cake and eat it too — it was all well and good when we were happy to be lumped in with that stuff, then when it didn’t suit us we were, like, ‘We’re not fucking stoner rock!’ It’s just like any other label that gets put on rock bands; sometimes it can be annoying, but the people in the know know you for what you are and anyone else doesn’t matter. We’re not really worried about marketing ourselves, and the stoner tag was a tad annoying seeing as most of the band don’t smoke weed — they were probably more annoyed about it than I was! But whether it’s a bad term or a good term is subjective anyway — I still love all those bands like Kyuss and old Queens. We always had stoner tendencies, but I heard some of the first EP [2001’s Blueprint For Courageous Action] the other day and I immediately thought, ‘This isn’t stoner rock’, and there’s more than just stoner happening on the albums as well.”

Has the creative process within the Giants ranks changed much over time?

“If anything, it’s even more of Steve’s stuff, I guess, although we haven’t written for a while,” Salter reveals. “For a while there when I was still living in Brisbane we were jamming fairly regularly and working on a bunch of songs, but it’s pretty much the same [creatively] — we’ll go into the studio and Steve will start playing guitar and I’ll start playing drums and we work out riffs and stuff like that, then Tuity and Matt will sort of chip in. I’ll chip in mainly with arrangements and that, not so much with the riffs — Steve just seems to be a riff-writing machine, so there’s always plenty to work with given what he brings to the table.

“It’s always been a really cool process. And we all communicate a lot better now, because we’re a bit older, and everybody knows what they like and don’t like. We’ve just got a better way of communicating, not that we ever used to really have arguments or anything. It was always heaps of fun writing songs for Giants, and it’s just as much fun — if not more fun — now.”

What was Salter thinking about lyrically when he penned the words for new EP track Tower of Toowong, in terms of name-checking the beautifully-mirrored shopping complex that exists near his old stomping ground?

 I’m throwing down to Bernard Fanning about who’s the most inner-west-representing motherfucker! Tell him I’ll meet him out the front of the tower and we’ll settle this mano-a-mano, as they say in Spain!

“It’s keeping with my thing from the last couple of years — and I know that this sounds like a tremendous wank — but I think it’s important to try and immotralise and mythologise the place that you live in,” he offers. “I’m sick to fucking earballs of hearing another shitty Americana band singing about Texas or Alabama or something — you don’t live there, it’s not where you’re from, it’s not your culture. And I know that when you’re starting our creatively you sort of mimic stuff and you ape stuff, and I’m probably making it sound more sanctimonious that it actually was — I just had some lyrics and that was in the lyrics. And as you know I’ve always had a real soft spot for the tower of Toowong, so I just thought, ‘Why not the Tower Of Toowong?’ Then, of course, Bernard Fanning released a song called [Departures (Blue Toowong Skies)] and beat us to the chase, which I wasn’t very happy about, but I’m pretty sure that we recorded the EP before he released that album. I’m throwing down to Bernard Fanning about who’s the most inner-west-representing motherfucker! Tell him I’ll meet him out the front of the tower and we’ll settle this mano-a-mano, as they say in Spain!”

Salter further explains that the lyrics have never been much of a focal point when writing Giants Of Science material.

“Some of these lyrics have been floating around for ten years, it’s always the way with Giants stuff,” he continues. “I regurgitated some of the words for Tower Of Toowong in this country song that I wrote with Catherine Britt — they just sort of all get regurgitated in my typical fashion, which is probably why they all don’t seem to make very much sense. I really get self-conscious about some of the old Giants lyrics these days, they just seem wrong — I guess it’s like reading through your old diaries or something. But with the new ones I didn’t really put much more effort in — it’s funny, you just sort of go, ‘Oh, if I think about it too much I’ll end up never writing anything because whatever I write people will think it’s stupid’, so I just make myself do it. Occasionally I’ll have moments of clarity or moments of drunkenness where I’ll go, ‘That’s great!’, but mostly I just try not to think about it.”

Especially in their early years, Giants Of Science were noted for being something of a “musicians’ band”, and any crowd would usually be littered with folk from other rock bands. They got hand-picked by Maynard James Keenan (Tool) to open on the national A Perfect Circle tour, Dave Grohl chose them to support Foo Fighters at the Brisbane Flood Benefit and Henry Rollins spoke extremely high of them in one of his books after they opened for him at Arena in Brisbane — why does Salter think Giants were so popular with other musos?

“I guess because we’ve never been even slightly about image or those things that make up a large part of the music business,” he proffers. “We always had people guiding us who were music fans, and they were the people who taught us about rock music — with the people who teach you about culture, you’re only ever going to be as good as the people you’re learning from. We learnt about writing songs from all of these bands that we heard, but we learnt how to be in a band, which is more important. It’s something bigger than just the band, and I think that maybe comes through in the music. Plus we put a lot of thought into the song arrangements — we’re all sort of massive music nerds. We’re never happy unless something’s a bit different in the arrangement or structure — there’s always got to be something to keep us interested — sometimes to our detriment, I think. Maybe that’s what musicians respond to, they hear that we sound like we give a fuck and we’re not going through the motions.”

The artwork on the What’s Wrong With You And Why EP features gig posters from all throughout their career, and it’s fascinating seeing their name alongside bands like Mclusky, Radio Birdman and Mudhoney — does Salter have any fave gig highlights with Giants?

“It was pretty awesome getting to play with Swervedriver after all that time, we never thought we’d get the chance,” he enthuses. “That was pretty cool, but I think the Mclusky and Future Of The Left were possibly the best. There’s been so many. Doing all of those Livids with Rocket From The Crypt and getting to see those guys four times in a row was amazing, and I always loved doing shows with Front End Loader — they’re just the perfect example of a band that a lot of people would sneer at or write off — like, ‘Who the fuck is Front End Loader?’ — and they just blow most bands out of the water. They just don’t give a shit, and they’ve got that whole Sydney, ‘we’re just going to be massive cunts about everything’ sort of vibe, but they’re awesome. And I went to see HITS and Birdman the other night in Melbourne, which was amazing; I’ve always loved playing with both those guys.”

Does he remember why Jon Spencer called them ‘Vaginas Of Science’ when they opened for Blues Explosion and Yeah Yeah Yeahs for a few shows?

“I don’t remember that,” Salter laughs. “Did he call us that from stage? Was it after we drank all their rider or something? It could have been the moment when Steve Lynagh went up to Jon Spencer and said, ‘Excuse me, are you [JSBX guitarist] Judah Bauer?’ in possibly Steve’s greatest-ever moment of comedic brilliance; either that or we were just being cunts. Either way, it’s pretty funny.”

Does Salter think that Giants Of Science are best experienced live or on record?

“I’m the worst person to ask that, because I never listen to our CDs and I’ve never watched one of our shows,” he chuckles. “I love playing live with the guys — it’s heaps of fun — but then I still get heaps of people telling me that they still listen to the first EP and the first album [2002’s History Of Warfare] all the time, and I think all those early releases — and the live album — still hold up really well. So I wouldn’t say Giants are best experienced live, but if you get a chance definitely come and see us because we can definitely hold our own against any of the rock bands doing the rounds at the moment in Brisbane or anywhere else.”

In the short term, is Salter looking forward to some volume again after all of this time playing more laidback fare?

“I can’t wait!” he thunders. “We have so much fun playing live now. I think the last show we did was Devil’s Kitchen at the Transcontinental, but we’ve been getting lots of offers since the new EP was announced. I think we’re going to try and do shows a bit more regularly now, especially in the first half of next year. I’m sort of sick of going to see rock bands and talking to people who know me from The Gin Club or whatever and going, ‘Yeah, but I used to play in a rock band! We can rock out as well, we’re really heavy!’ I’m sick of people looking at me and shaking their heads, so I’m ready to get out and play some heavy stuff again.”

And, excitedly, he’s quite bullish about the prospect of some more new Giants music once the new EP has been properly launched.

“Totally, absolutely,” Salter explains. “It’s just finding time. It’s so weird how when you’re young you think you have all the time in the world, and then as you start getting older… Even with me doing music, which isn’t particularly taxing, I’m still always really busy, and Steve’s got two kids and Tuity’s got a kid and Matt’s married and studying and working, but we still have to keep it going. Maybe EPs are the way forward for us now — albums are great and stuff, but aiming for four songs at a time might be more achievable with me living in Melbourne. And I’ve always liked EPs as a format. But we already have enough songs for an album, it’s just a matter of going back and going through them. The only problem is that every time we go back to them we change the arrangement again — someone’s got to sit us down and go, ‘Right!’ and get us to stop.”

DISCLAIMER: Steve Bell managed Giants Of Science (poorly) between 2000-2006 (these days referred to as ‘The Gory Years’) but no longer has any fiduciary (or other) relationship with the band or its members.