"Just Three Fucking Knobs Getting Pissed And Coming Up With Bad Ad-Libbing"

Banging out dirty rock’n’roll has certainly never been akin to brain surgery, but surely there’s got to be more to it than getting your mates around to your farm, knocking back a few cold ones and yelling some Aussie colloquialisms over dumb, brutal ruffs? Not if you’re a member of Oz rock veterans Cosmic Psychos, whose brand new long-player Cum The Raw Prawn was created in exactly this ad hoc manner, and sounds as fun and vital as anything they’ve put their name to over their long and storied career. This incarnation of the band – founding member Ross “Knighty” Knight (vocals/bass), Dean Muller (drums/vocals) and John “Mad Macca” McKeering (guitar/vocals) – has incredibly been together for nearly a decade now, and have clearly formed a pretty strong bond over loud tunes and beers (and not necessarily in that order).

“Look, it’s just a fucking hoot, that’s all it is,” Knighty offers. “It’s just meant to be a bit of fun, and I think the fun we had recording it came out in the recording really – it’s just three fucking knobs getting pissed and coming up with bad ad-libbing on the spot crap. It was great!

"It’s just three fucking knobs getting pissed and coming up with bad ad-libbing on the spot crap. It was great."

“When Dean turned up and then Mike [Deslandes – engineer] turned up with his boxes with dials on it and leads and stuff, Dean’s doing his line-check for his drums and I thought, ‘Shit, I’d better go into the shed and write some songs!’ Because we were struggling a bit – I had a couple of rough riffs worked out with Dean, but we’d go up there and we’d both be tired because we’d worked all day and we’d just fuck around. So we had these riffs but I didn’t know how they’d go – we’d just make up on the spot and go, ‘Yeah, we’ll do something with that one day’ but then we never did anything with ‘em. So we had to scramble around a bit. Macca had a couple of ideas that were a bit more solid, and Dean had a song more solid, but I didn’t even have any words for what I had going around in me head so we had to work on that pretty quick.”

This time around Knighty even lets his bandmates loose on vocals more than before, and is typically flippant about toning down his personal contribution.

“Yeah, well I get sick and tired of hearing my own voice,” he shrugs. “The other thing is too if you’ve got two blokes who can write songs and are good musos, why not? It’s not all about me, it’s all about us. If they wanted to contribute all of the songs I would have said, ‘Oh, alright then, no worries’. If Macca had said, ‘I’ve got five’ and Dean had said, ‘Well, I’ve got five’, I woulda said, ‘Okay, let’s do that then’. Wouldn’t have mattered to me. I would have sunk a few more cans rather than trying to write songs!”

Of course, Psychos being the Psychos this isn’t their first recording conducted in such a laidback way.

“Yeah, we do that most of the time,” Knight smiles. “The most organised we ever were was when we went over to the States and recorded Blokes You Can Trust with [producer] Butch Vig in the early-‘90s, but even then the night before we flew out to the States the record company bloke from Sydney rang me up and he goes, ‘Oh, how many songs have you got? You’d want to take over at least 20 or 25 songs’, and I’m thinking, ‘Fuck, twenty songs? I think I’ve got one!’ So I had a few beers and decided to come up with some songs. At least they were fresh in my mind, so we sorta had something worked out then. But sometimes it doesn’t work – for [1997 album] Oh What A Lovely Pie I had nothing when we went to the studio, we didn’t have a thing. I told [producer] Lindsay Gravina and everyone else to go for a coffee and leave just the beats going on the desk, and I tried to come up with ten riffs! I did that for about ten minutes and we built the album around that.

“I think the recording process works better when you just do everything off the cuff. You put yourself under a bit of pressure – which we love, because it just means you drink quicker. I like building on top of the basic things, I know how something’s going to sound. As soon as we’ve got the basic riff going, I go, ‘Ooh, we could put something over there, or perhaps Macca’s guitar could sound like this or that’. I probably have a pretty big input as far as producing goes, but songwriting takes the fucking blink of an eye.”

Knighty’s farm near Kyneton in rural Victoria has been a huge part of Psychos lore since the early days of the band – it’s featured prominently in the artwork of many albums, and even their first EP was aptly titled Down On The Farm (1985) – so it seems a natural extension for them to go the whole hog and record an album there.

"Fuck, twenty songs? I think I’ve got one!"

“Mike just turned up with a few boxes and a few leads and a few mics and stuff,” Knighty recalls of the experience. “My bedroom was the main studio and the three of us just dagged about in the lounge. I had one of my amps in one son’s room and Macca had his amp in my other son’s room, and we did the vocals in the laundry. It was pretty easy. I really liked recording at Birdland with Lindsay Gravina – I really, really felt comfortable working with him and he makes a great sound – but it was just put to us, ‘Why don’t we do it at the farm?’ and I just thought, ‘Well why not?’ It just turned out really, really super relaxed. It was great.

“I was sort of concerned [at the prospect], thinking, ‘Fuck, if we’re doing this at the farm we’ll get nothing done – absolutely nothing done’. When you’re forced to go to a studio you go, ‘Well, we’d better do something’, but actually it all fell together pretty quick, and as I said a lot of the vocals just came together at two o’clock in the morning just doing scratch vocals, because we didn’t even have an idea what we were going to sing half the time.”

There’s been some line-up changes in the Psychos over the journey – most recently when Macca got the guitar gig full-time following the tragic passing of long-term member Robbie “Rocket” Watts – and it seems that this current version of the band has forged a strong bond, the boozy camaraderie seeping through the pores of Cum The Raw Prawn.

“Oh look, it’s a great line-up,” Knighty agrees. “Macca’s been in and out of the band since the mid-‘90s – he used to fill in when Robbie was a bit crook and couldn’t make it for one reason or another. Macca I think had played over 60 shows with the Psychos before he was actually in the band, so that was a natural fit for him – I’m glad he said ‘yes’ when I asked him. But having Dean in the band has been amazing. He’s just a bloody great drummer and good bloke, and they don’t come any better than Macca either, so it’s a pretty happy time.”

The new songs sound as if they’ll go down a treat live, although hardly any have yet had the pleasure of being played in front of pissed punters.

“We’ve done Macca’s song Fuckwit City already live and that went down a treat,” Knighty chuckles. “I think we’ll probably throw in Bum For Grubs and Better, Not Bitter live, with a few older ones and stuff. We’ve introduced a few newies, but we’re doing a few songs that we haven’t done for a while as well because we realised that we’ve been playing pretty much the same set for the last three years. So it’ll be old ones that we haven’t done for a long, long time like 74 Seconds, Come On Cunt and a few more like that. It’s ridiculous how many songs we have now – over 120 songs, it’s fucking stupid! And they’re all about the same thing and they all sound exactly the same! I just think, ‘How the fuck did we do that?’”

One gets the impression that Better, Not Bitter will quickly become a crowd fave, with its chorus of “It’s fucking bullshit, maaaate!” and all.

“With that chorus how could it not be?” Knighty laughs. “I’m just surprised that somebody hadn’t already done it before. It’s a national anthem just sitting there, and I can’t believe that all these frigging geniuses in the music world for the last 400 years haven’t fucking done something with it! It might have been all too much for fucking Mozart.

“You don’t even have to try to write a song like that, and you just think, ‘Why didn’t someone do that before now?’ It’s a disgrace! We made a great film clip for Better, Not Bitter as well, a really good one – that was filmed up at the farm. And one of my fave things coming up – one of the best things I’ve ever seen in my life – is this animated film clip for Bum For Grubs. It was done by the same guy who did the animation in the film, and I don’t want to give too much away but it involves a fist fight with bum grubs.”

The film Knighty’s speaking of is Matt Weston’s excellent 2013 band documentary Cosmic Psychos: Blokes You Can Trust – a look at the band’s long career with their tyres being pumped up by famous fans such as Eddie Vedder, Mudhoney, L7 and The Melvins – and the flick seemed to spark a whole new wave of interest in the veteran boozehounds.

“We had a great trip to the States after that, then we did Europe a couple of times,” Knighty enthuses. “But the trip to the States was fantastic – it was bloody awesome – and we got to catch up with a lot of people we hadn’t seen for a long time. In LA we caught up with the L7 girls, and Suzie [Gardner – guitar/vocals] wasn’t there but the other guys hadn’t been in the same room for fucking years! And lo and behold – although I’m not saying we had anything to do with it – but maybe it was a good excuse to get ‘em started, because they’re actually playing again. Which is great news, can’t wait to catch up with them.

“[The film’s impact was great],  especially considering that we did nothing really, absolutely nothin’- it was all Matt Weston’s bloody work. He put all the sweat and grind into it and we did fuck all, but why not? It got the beer tap fucking flowing again! But if I’ve been saying this for years, if you don’t do anything – if you’re just in a band and you don’t do anything – then rock’n’roll is like a clock, and we’re just standing at three o’clock, we’re not going anywhere and we’re doing the same old thing – but the hand swings around so why chase it? Too many bands chase that fucking hand and they get exhausted and fall off the clock – I just stand there with a can of beer and do nothing and let it come to me. It’s like ‘flared jeans are in, nah fucking flared jeans are out’! Cosmic Psychos are fucking stupid, well alright they’re still there and they’re still stupid, it’s great. It doesn’t matter. I think rock’n’roll gets a little bit too serious with himself sometimes, and we’re always there hopefully to relieve a bit of the tension and pull its head out of its arse.”

"I think rock’n’roll gets a little bit too serious with himself sometimes, and we’re always there hopefully to relieve a bit of the tension and pull its head out of its arse."

Now that Cum The Raw Prawn is on the shelves the Psychos are hitting the road, but not on their lonesome – they’re dragging along Brisbane hoodrats Dune Rats, and it could be interesting to see which of these notoriously hedonistic acts will triumph in the post-gig party stakes.

“Oh, I reckon they might be teaching us a few fucking tricks,” Knighty offers self-deprecatingly. “They go pretty hard those kids, between the two of us we might split the atom, I’m not sure. They don’t seem to be too serious, although they’re good at what they do – I haven’t met ‘em yet, but I’ve seen the shenanigans they get up to. So it will be some naughty young boys and some naughty old boys together. They’ll probably think we’re a bunch of stupid old farts, but who cares? We’ll go down fighting…”

And after that there’s plenty more in store for the hard-working trio, who are looking to play a long way from home without having to dig around and find where they left their passports.

“We were going to go to Europe again this year, and then we decided not to go,” Knighty explains. “I was sort of thinking that I don’t want to burn our bridges or outstay our welcome too much. We’ve got a couple of big festivals to play over there next year, so we thought that by the time we do Australia that’ll be fine for this year. I’m really keen to go way out fucking way out fucking woop woop, and play way out north of the back of fuck sorta places, way out in the country towns and whatever so we can take our chaos elsewhere where people will probably hate us – they might laugh at us at least, so that’ll make ‘em feel better. I remember we did a tour with Magic Dirt years and years ago and we did quite a bit of rural stuff on that one and it was good fun – it was really good fun actually. I know what it’s like being the only punk in the village growing up, just like I was growing up, and it doesn’t matter which town or where it is there’ll always be someone who you’re gonna make very happy.”