From 'Young Adults' To 'Jaded Wankers'

In front of a bowl of wedges, sipping glasses of beer and signing Man It Feels Like Space Again album covers, Ryan and Watson chat to each other quietly. Ryan is wearing jewel-encrusted black sunglasses (a hangover?), and complaining about the price of coke and beer on the plane, while Watson is all charm, the “responsible one” who makes and keeps eye contact, speaks in pull quotes, picking up the conversation and steering it on course when it descends into jokes and British accents. They’ve come up to Sydney for press, but instead of flying out in the evening they’ll be staying on to catch King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard playing The Roller Den. “We’re pretty serious guys,” says Watson.

“No mucking around now, Jay. Serious answers,” Ryan cajoles.

They draw on cigarette packets while the others speak, colouring in the letters so they spell out something other than ‘Smoking causes lung cancer’, some nonsense, drawing on the face of the woman who suffered from a stroke, the man attached to a ventilator.

Watson admits it was probably a bad idea to do interviews at the pub.

"I’m Obi-Wan. He’s Ewan McGregor." "You’re bloody Anakin or some shit. You’re Luke.”

POND have recently released their latest single and accompanying video for Sitting Up On Our Crane, and have been posting pictures on Facebook behind-the-scenes of the clip for Zond, which is currently in production. “The crane one is a friend of ours from New York, Alejandro [Crawford]; he kind of makes video games. It’s all kind of made from scratch,” says Watson.

“He does visuals for MGMT and happened to teach me everything I know about live VJing,” says Ryan.

Watson explains: “Joe does the visuals for Tame Impala, so he’s kind of his mentor, his Obi-Wan.”

“He’s your man, I’m Obi-Wan. He’s Ewan McGregor, no, that other bloke.”

“No, Obi-Wan’s the one that teaches. You’re bloody Anakin or some shit. You’re Luke.”

Ryan pauses to consider, but disagrees: “Who’s that bloke who played Michael Collins, yeah the Irish fellow, he was in the first one, The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon Jinn.” Liam Neeson? “He’s Liam Neeson, and I’m that bloke from Trainspotting. Anyway, good bloke, so he’s doing the video clip.”

Zond, on the other hand, is just POND “covered in inflatable pool toys in front of a green screen”.  “And we’re old people on a couch flying through space,” adds Watson. Zond was made by Johnny Mackay (of Children Collide and Fascinator).

Ryan talks about the “weird” clip: “He had me in fishnet stockings with hot dogs like all in my midriff. And this girl who was pretty cute reaching around behind me playing them. That’s the end of that story.”

“No more interviews at the pub,” Watson intones.

“Where else are we gonna do them?”

Watson and Ryan rattle off their favourite Australian bands, Total Control, Gunns, The Laurels, and Scott & Charlene’s Wedding among them.

“Hate Tame Impala, hate The Growl,” Ryan jokes. “Don’t listen to me. He’s been telling me off for saying weird shit all day.”

“I just knew we shouldn’t do interviews at the pub. Anyway, if he’s getting drunk, I’m getting drunk.”

“Yeah, we should get another drink!”

Their publicist doesn’t buy them another drink, saying that they should wait until Allbrook arrives. “You’re cut off. I told her to cut you off,” says Watson. “I just knew it would descend into nonsensical garbage very, very quickly.”

“He had me in fishnet stockings with hot dogs like all in my midriff."

“Alright, I’ll try to do it right from now on.” He then describes the record as “four young men going from young adults to jaded wankers” (the fourth young adult being The Growl’s Cam Avery). “It’s just honest. I think the songwriting’s probably matured a little bit, but in the same sense as a lot of other records it just feels honest, I think that’s a big thing, whatever it is.”

When Allbrook arrives he’s all intensity, his eyes this white-blue, you can barely see the pupils. He talks rapidly and with conviction, all strange concepts, fear of death, but with a wry humour lingering below the surface. We ask about his influences and what he was writing about. “Very disparate influences. Sometimes going from completely naff kind of whimsical things that I’m feeling that day that are fun and dumb and stupid to a lot of apocalyptic entropic-al – what’s the plural for entropy? – I guess thinking and realising that we’re all kind of burning gradually…” He pauses. “You have an animal in your [hair] – a really beautiful animal.” Allbrook touches my face, brushing a moth out of my hair, before continuing. “Realising that we’re all burning quite quickly and having to think about having a good time and feeling comfortable and happy with it, accepting that we’re gonna die collectively.”

Watson picks up the conversation: “There’s always kind of nonsensical songs about nothing, fun throwaway songs, that kind of have points to them within it. And then there’s always songs that are really kind of overtly heartfelt. The mix is what makes it interesting I think. I don’t think I can be bothered with any albums anymore that are all one or the other. I think one of the most common themes with music that I like is that it’s all over the place, y’know. This album, we’ve probably made one or two like this before, but this album is really good at being all over the place but maybe hopefully have some sort of common thing.”

“The stupidity and the nonsensical is just as important as the heavy and morose,” says Allbrook. “You’ve got to have some elements of enjoyment in your life now that we’re all dying so quickly. Having light-heartedness and fun is just as important as crying into your Fitpack [a container for syringes].”

“Hate Tame Impala, hate The Growl.”

Watson summarises: “The way I see it is no one spends their whole day all the time – I mean some people do unfortunately – being kind of sad and depressed. And no one spends the whole time having a party without feeling sad and depressed at some point. If we made really morose music I wouldn’t feel very honest because a lot of the time we’re just having a blast. And if we made just party music I wouldn’t feel very honest either because a lot of the time we are being a bit more, as everyone else on the planet is, introspective and melancholic or whatever. It only makes sense to have party songs and depressing songs all on the same album.”

They’re each capable of writing all different types of songs, the party and the melancholic, and they choose whether or not the track will be a POND or a solo song based off what they’re working on at the time. There are songs that are almost interchangeable, that could have gone on Shiny Joe Ryan’s record, or on Gum’s, or on a POND record. Ryan admits he offers most songs to POND first, and if it’s not going to work he keeps it for himself.

“The stupidity and the nonsensical is just as important as the heavy and morose.”

“Often the party ones are the ones we’ve written as a combination,” says Watson. “You know it’s like bros broing out or whatever and having fun. And then a lot of the time the more serious or melancholy or defeatist ones are like one of us. Or the love songs are one of us. Beatles is a terrible comparison because they’re legends and we’re not, but I think it’s one of the things that I like and that a lot of people like about them is that there’ll be a song about pigs, and there’ll be a song about John Lennon as a junkie, and then there’ll be a song about Paul’s mum, then there’ll be another song about someone’s birthday [Ryan laughs out loud], and it makes it kind of cartoony. That’s what I love about the cover so much, it’s kind of cartoony, and it’s a cartoony album in parts.”

They say that the cover “perfectly matches” the music. “[Ben Montero’s] art, he’s a perfect visual representation of our music: like artifice and a mix of like stupid and self-defacing,” says Allbrook.

“Because it’s goofy and it’s epic and it’s not serious but it’s also really serious and a lot of time went into it and it’s very colourful but if you look closely a lot of it’s kind of dark or sad, and then some of it is just dumb, like the guy farting. I think we struggle, or anyone would struggle again, to have such a perfect match of the cover to the music. I’m really impressed, proud, of how much he nailed it,” Watson concludes.

They didn’t tell Montero exactly what to do when he was designing the record. “We kind of told him what each song was about, and all the titles are pretty self-explanatory. Some of the titles he just did literal cartoons, like the Elvis one, Sitting Up On Our Crane is me on a crane. I really like the Man It Feels Like Space Again one where it’s like a hippie sitting by the river with all these pink dinosaurs or whatever and then it’s really futuristic and it’s like waste. Like The Matrix where it’s like machines, everyone’s dead, the bones of the hippies, and it’s all post-industrial slum. It’s really good, I think from a distance it kind of just looks like whimsical fun, but on record or whatever, people that have it, it’s like a diecut sleeve so you slide it off and the inner sleeve is like Some Girls by Rolling Stones how there’s holes in it and you slide it off and it matches up. It’s pretty cool, it’s like we’re hidden in there like Where’s Wally? It’s the sort of game my ten-year-old cousin would like.”

“Or me,” says Ryan.

“Or a 60-year-old prog-stoner,” says Watson.