Soundtracking A Burning Club Near You

“It’s a bit of a dark song, actually,” Brisbane band Hey Geronimo’s bass player Will Bingley begins, explaining their new single, Finale. “We played a gig in Sydney last year, I can’t remember what venue it was but we were upstairs in the Green Room, and there was a panel where you could see out over the dance floor and everyone was dancing and the fire alarm went off. It was only upstairs but we thought it was the whole place and everyone just kept dancing and I thought they couldn’t hear the alarm, so I was just looking out thinking, ‘Oh my God, all these people are going to die! Holy crap!’

“And the song is kind of about that, dancing in a nightclub when it’s on fire and not realising. And I wanted the song to sound like a song that would be played in a nightclub,” he laughs. “Like a dance song, ‘cause we haven’t done much of that.”

Hey Geronimo grew out of a bunch of indie Brisbane bands coming together a couple of years ago for a Beatles tribute night and realising, “hang on, these songs are awesome – let’s play music like this”. So, inevitably, they draw heavily on the great pop acts of the ‘60s – The Kinks, The Hollies and so on – as well as The Beatles, and of course The Beach Boys.

“And the song is kind of about that, dancing in a nightclub when it’s on fire and not realising"

“Pete [Kilroy, lead vocals/guitar], I dunno, his voice kind of reminds me of that California sound as well. It’s a bit nasally and sits in the mix in the way that some of those harmonies work. The Beach Boys have amazing harmonies – you could listen and dissect them for hours and hours,” he chuckles.

“And also, on some of the songs which we’ve written and recorded which haven’t come out yet, there’s more of that dark side of The Beach Boys, kind of comparable to the Smile and later era stuff, which we really like.”

Stepping up to produce Finale was Steve Schram, best known for his work with Little Birdy, The Cat Empire and San Cisco.

“We’ve had him mixing some of our previous recordings before and he’s always really changed how they turned out. He almost deconstructs the top half, which is good ‘cause we tend to pile so much stuff over the top. He’s very much, ‘I’ll just take the drums out in this bit’. He changes the songs quite a lot, so he’s good – got a lot done very quickly, which is really cool. He’s very energetic, kind of like us.

“We do have too many songs for the album,” Bingley laughs again. “It’s quite interesting that it works ‘cause we’ve got four songwriters in the band, and it’s all pretty evenly distributed. I’m kind of amazed that it doesn’t clash! There’s not a whole lot of ego involved, which is really good, and we all want the same kind of end product, which is melodic, so I think that helps a lot.”