"We’re The ‘Unproduceable’ Band"

Hang on a minute, where’s the beers?

This is The Music’s first face-to-face interview with British India that’s not in a pub. Clad in all black, frontman Declan Melia is running late and appears frazzled. “You wouldn’t think it’d take half an hour to get a taxi on a Thursday morning, but it did,” he says in trademark, rapidfire fashion. Guitarist Nic Wilson is also seated at a boardroom table inside Mushroom HQ. On British India’s longevity, Melia casts his mind back and then works out that, since they formed in Year 12, they’ve existed as a band for 12 years. 

“I met some women who were probably in their mid-30s, but they seemed really old at the time, who gave me a bong upstairs… "

British India are renowned for gigging hard in all corners of our Great Southern Land and, when asked what the smallest capacity rural venue would be that they’ve ever played, Melia estimates, “200? Like, remember Chilli Lounge in Wyong? That was really small.” Wilson remembers it, alright: “Yeah, that was a bikie bar. We were young enough and loud enough to sort of work in all those places.”

“I met some women who were probably in their mid-30s, but they seemed really old at the time, who gave me a bong upstairs… They were like, ‘Oh, do you want some spin [tobacco] in it?’ I thought they meant speed and I’m like, ‘I don’t want any crack,’ so I said no and then they just gave me a pure thing.” Wilson illuminates, “A straight bong.”   

“I was 18,” Melia says. “I was, like, fucked outta my head. [Makes a descending, whistling sound].” When it’s pointed out that Melia is lucky he didn’t wake up missing a kidney, he admits, “I was missing a T-shirt, which is even worse.”

In British India’s experience, playing outback shows can be a gamble; one would assume that considering so few bands pass through that the entire town population would turn up. “Then you go to a place and it’s Roger’s fuckin’ 18th birthday and it’s like, ‘How fuckin’ small is this town?’” Wilson opines. “It’s incredible, there can be two pubs in town and if you pick the wrong pub, no one’s fuckin’ going. If you pick the right one, you’re gonna have a fuckin’ ball.”

"There can be two pubs in town and if you pick the wrong pub, no one’s fuckin’ going."

The band spent some time recording album number five, Nothing Touches Me, in Berlin and the fact that producer Simon Berckelman (aka Berkfinger from Philadelphia Grand Jury) has a studio there proved a drawcard. “We admired his stuff with Art Vs Science and Velociraptor –
they’re really well produced [albums] – but then we heard something that he’d done for a lesser-known band, Red Ink, who were kind of from where we’re from [sonically],” Melia explains. Although a lot of the material was rerecorded locally at Sing Sing Recording Studios, he says British India’s time in Berlin “was still instrumental to the whole process”. “We went over to Berlin with a very different record than we came home with, you know. It really kinda galvanised how we wanted the record to be.” As hard as the band try to stay away from Sing Sing, Melia ruminates, “It just seems to work there. It just hit the spot in a way that it didn’t – I’m not sure, we’re the ‘unproduceable’ band perhaps.”

On Berlin, he gushes, “It was just a breeze. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that that was one of, like, the golden periods of my life [laughs]. I just loved it. A lotta love between the four of us, you know, really locking in. And also, and I said this at the time: it felt for the first time like British India were exactly where they need to be at exactly the right time in a way that probably we hadn’t felt since we recorded the first album [Guillotine] in Sydney with Harry Vanda. Every album since then, the recording process has felt like a compromise but that there, it just felt great. Granted, as I said, and I’ll repeat that a lot of what you hear on the record was redone.”

“We like to think of it as; the album was so good that we recorded it twice,” Wilson laughs and Melia joins in, “Yeah, ha ha, but something kinda happened over there [in Berlin] that made the album better as far as I’m concerned… When we came back from there we saw how the album could be – you know, how much better it could be. It was kinda like, ‘We’re here [marks a spot in the air with one hand], but we can get to here’ [defines another point in space with his other hand]. And so there was a matter of, once we were back, just making that happen.”
“And also because of the time it took to realise that it was all wrong, and to reorganise the recording, a lot more songs got written,” Wilson adds. “So you kibosh, you know, and it just made [the album] stronger.”

"The album was so good that we recorded it twice.”

“The process of getting there was less to do with the sound and more to do with the kind of philosophy,” Melia muses. “And I think I’ve been talking to some people today and I realised, or theorised, that I think – certainly me – never before have we been less embarrassed by what British India is. I think if I listen to Avalanche and Thieves and Guillotine, we were kind of – I was maybe more than the others – almost embarrassed to be such a guitar band, to be so rock, you know?” Does Melia suspect this was because of other Australian bands – The Presets, Cut Copy, Midnight Juggernauts – that were popular around that time? “Oh, a big part of it,” he allows. British India’s “breeding ground” was The Duke Of Windsor, the Melbourne pub where Jet also honed their craft. The Vines were also making waves around this time. “Look, I say to this day that we’re far better than both those aforementioned bands, but that’s just me,” Melia declares.  

“This record, and it might be something to do with being in your late 20s where you kinda know who you are, like, ‘This is me, this is it,’” he offers. So I think with this record we were unashamedly British India in a way that – and that happened in Berlin, you know, that was like, ‘Fuck trying to be cool, like, we are cool,’ and that’s why the record, to me, sounds much more confident than any of the others.”

"We’ll be listening to triple j and so you hear what’s coming out and you hear what all the kids are listening to."

When they’re back home in Melbourne, Melia reckons it’s hard not to absorb the music around you. “It’s very in your face. Like, we would drive to the studio – me, Will [Drummond, bass] and Matt [O’Gorman, drums] – and we’ll be listening to triple j and so you hear what’s coming out and you hear what all the kids are listening to. Then, you know, you’ll be on a festival bill and you’ll see that this band is billed above you because they sound a certain way. And then you go to Berlin and you don’t hear any of these records, and you don’t think about these bands – they’re not in your head – and then suddenly you play differently, you know.”

After recovering from the disappointment of The Rolling Stones cancelling their Hanging Rock appearance last year due to lead singer Mick Jagger battling a throat infection (British India were scheduled to support the legends together with The Preatures), both bands were fortunately also booked for The Stones’ regional performance at Hope Estate Winery in the Hunter Valley. And we need stories. “It was cool,” Wilson recalls. “If one of them [The Stones] needed to get from A to B, if they were walking past, it was like boom gates going down. Everyone had to sort of stop and let them pass… Even if you’re a roadie and, like, need to plug something in you just have to stand there and wait until they’re gone and then it’s like, ‘Ok, everybody! Get back to what you were doing!’”

“We got to meet them,” Melia reveals. “We were kinda told during the day, ‘Oh, be here at quarter to nine and you’ll get to meet the guys.” Although he admits to being “just a bit cynical” about the whole thing, Melia quickly clarifies, “I mean, I was obviously gonna do it.”“I was kinda standing there grumpily but then – you know, I don’t consider myself someone who really falls for celebrity – when they walked out I was like, ‘Fuck! It’s them!’ They had a real presence, it was really awesome.”

“And Mick’s a fist bumper, he won’t shake [hands] ‘cause the germs,” Wilson continues.

“But we got a photo and then The Preatures got a photo and I read about how The Preatures talked to them for 15 minutes,” Melia points out. Wilson utters under his breath, “Bullshit,” while Melia continues: “And Mick Jagger said to the girl [Isabella Manfredi], ‘Oh, I really loved your singing,’ or whatever and, yeah! Absolute bullshit. We were there the whole time.”

Acknowledging that they were the only people present who could disprove what he labels an “absolute spin”, Melia then jokes that his band are “bitter fuckheads” for calling The Preatures out. “But it literally takes the amount of time that it takes to take a photograph,” Wilson elaborates. “It’s just like chk-chk-chk, all right, ‘cause they do it on the way to the stage.”
 
“They said, this is the best time for [The Rolling Stones] to do the photo and I just thought, ‘That sounds insane,’” Melia asserts. “Like, you know, on the way to the stage when you’re nervous. But that’s the time when they’re in their makeup and in their gear; that’s when they’re happy to get their photo taken.”