How The Drones Sought To Return The Wild Abandon To Rock'N'Roll And Succeeded

Melbourne rockers The Drones are in the somewhat luxurious position of looking forward and backwards simultaneously - usually for bands it's just one or the other direction at any given time - and they seemingly couldn't be happier. They've just completed the recording process for their seventh long-player which they're currently shopping around to labels - attending to the business side of their future endeavours - but at the same time they're curating their rich back story by reissuing their entire catalogue on their new imprint, the awesomely titled Tropical Fuck Storm Records.

And even more excitingly - prompted by the ten-year anniversary revisitation of their seminal sophomore long-player Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By at the Sydney Opera House in May as part of the Vivid LIVE festival - they've decided to take that concept and run with it, taking the show to pretty much the whole country. And as anyone who was present at the thrilling Opera House gig will attest, the band attacks the album with such vigour and conviction that it's a performance not to be missed.

"You don't know what they're going to be like in a tour van - they could fart a lot or have a drinking problem."

"It's really cool playing at the Opera House, it's amazing," enthuses frontman Gareth Liddiard. "That's the third time we've played it and you always think it's the last time because it's the Opera House, you don't expect to get asked back, so it's really cool. And backstage is really good [there], you feel like a really posh opera performer. From our standpoint [on stage] it's hard to tell what's happening in the audience because of the lights - you can't really see - so people told us that it was a standing ovation but we didn't see that. But it was pretty amazing."

During the Opera House show The Drones took a few liberties with their performance of Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By, playing the first side in its entirety then going a bit more freeform with the second side.

"Oh, we just got bored at that point I think." Liddiard laughs. "I can't remember what's on the second side! Nah, there's two songs we missed, You Really Don't Care and Another Rousing Chorus You Idiots!!! - I think Another Rousing Chorus has really complicated chords so we couldn't be bothered, and You Really Don't Care is really hard work so we didn't bother with that either."

But while the tour is about paying homage to Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By rather than recreating it wholesale, Liddiard hasn't ruled out rolling up the sleeves and learning those wayward numbers for this coming run.

"I dunno, we haven't really jammed yet," he shrugs. "We'll probably do more, because we did the [Vivid show] on one rehearsal and were rushing it a bit because we'd been in the studio recording so we were more concerned about that. But I reckon we'll probably try and do the whole thing on the tour, yeah."

One notable aspect of the Opera House show was the return of prodigal drummer Christian Strybosch, who had left The Drones in 2004 - during the year-long lay-off between Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By being recorded and released, due to legal hassles - but returned to the fold in 2014 following the departure of his replacement, Mike Noga. Strybosch slotted back in as if he'd never been away, finally getting to play the songs from the last Drones album that he appeared on.

"It was totally weird," Liddiard smiles. "Mike left and then we were, like, 'Ok, we need a drummer,' and the first idea was Chrisso and he just said 'Yeah' straight away so it was cool. He hadn't played for ten years - he played with [Dan Kelly's backing band] The Alpha Males for a while and then quit music altogether. He wanted to get his work together - he's got this kinda corporate job, we call him the 'corporate drummer' - so he got that all sorted and he's got a house and a really cool wife and two kids, and he'd felt like he had to get all that shit out of the way. Then the timing was perfect because he'd just finished doing all that when we said, 'Do you wanna join the band again?', and he was, like, 'Oh, fuck yeah!' So that was really cool, it's just bizarre how things work out. It was really weird to have him back because we never thought it would happen.

"He's an amazing drummer. It was pretty straightforward, because he's a great drummer but also a really great guy - he's someone we already know and we've toured with him heaps, so we already know what we're going to get. It was pretty natural. There's plenty of other good drummers but you don't know what they're going to be like in a tour van - they could fart a lot or have a drinking problem, or shit like that."

As part of the reissue series Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By is being pressed on vinyl for the first time, but all of The Drones' albums will become available in expanded formats with added live material and bonus tracks.

"Yeah, I'm the guy who does all that," Liddiard enthuses. "I've got this big box full of masters and it's my job to look after them. With the vinyl reissues I'm putting together live compilations that you can get with [2002 debut] Here Come The Lies and Wait Long By The River, because I've kept everything - not just all our studio stuff, but a million years' worth of gigs and stuff. It's fun having an excuse to go through everything - we're going to put Wait Long out, but with Wait Long there's an hour-and-a-half of live shit that no one's ever heard. I love doing that."

The Drones have actually been terrific at presenting their ferocious live side in tactile form over the years - there are numerous live albums and DVDs in their catalogue - is it important for them to represent The Drones on stage in their recorded output as well as their studio work?

"Yeah, for sure," Liddiard nods. "When I was growing up and listening to the Hendrix stuff and Zeppelin and The Doors, I preferred all the live stuff. Those were bands who'd have a studio version of a song but the live version was mega different because they could play like that, then one day bands like Green Day - or whoever - came along then suddenly it's always the same whether they're playing live or in the studio. But before them it was Jane's Addiction, Guns N' Roses, Black Flag: all bands who could turn a four-minute song into a ten-minute jam-epic art-piece live, and we still do that — we don't play the same shit two nights in a row, we'll get to a certain bit and start making shit up. So it's cool, because there's always a live album in us - something like Shark Fin Blues always stays relatively the same, but nearly everything gets really different when we play them live and it changes from year to year."

So The Drones consider themselves an entirely different proposition on stage than in the studio?

"Yeah yeah, because you can't capture the live thing in the studio and you can't do the studio thing live," the singer continues. "It's silly to try. We were brought up in an era when that's what you did - and we were brought up in a scene where that's what you did - but there are plenty of people like Scott Walker or Pharrell Williams or whoever who can't play live, they're shit live because they never learned to do it. They never had the part at the beginning of their career when they had to learn how to do it because they needed money, but we learned how to play live before we ever went into a studio.

"When we went into the studio for the first time we didn't even know what the fuck it was! We had to do everything live, and we didn't realise that if I fucked up a line I could fix it in post-production, we'd think, 'Ok, if I fuck up a line during this song we've gotta go back to the start and do it again.' That's how we did the first two records - it's all completely live. The recording engineers were loving it, and they were deliberately not telling us that we could fix shit because they were enjoying the whole process. It's a good way to do it. But yeah, we're a live band first and foremost and you can't get the live shit in the studio, and the studio's got all sorts of extra weird gear so you can tool around and make crazy shit so you've got to do it different."

It's a decade since Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By was first released, but Liddiard reckons he feels like pretty much the same bloke who made the album.

"We've all changed in ten years, but I haven't changed that much - I haven't had kids and I haven't become a boring old adult," he ponders. "I don't feel different, I just feel older. Back then I feel like we had a lot to prove, plus you're just more naturally pissed off when you're that age. It's different but the same."

The album received instantaneous acclaim upon release - as did Shark Fin Blues as the first single - but the sudden attention wasn't really that much of a surprise for The Drones.

"I haven't changed that much - I haven't had kids and I haven't become a boring old adult."

"In a way it was," Liddiard recalls. "The rational side of us thought, 'That's weird,' but there was a plan to fill a gap in the market, and that gap was pretty much what we were, which was crazy rock'n'roll. There was no MC5-type music at that point - there were a cool few rock bands like The Hellacopters or something - but it wasn't anarchic, it wasn't completely wild. There were guitar bands who were rocking out but they weren't doing what say The Dirty Three were doing, where you just go fucking ballistic and blow the roof off the place. Like Hendrix used to do, or The MC5 or The Stooges.

"We just thought, 'Let's just do that, let's bring the crazy back!' And the bad vibes, because in rock'n'roll bad vibes are good vibes - it just sort of depends on what sorta vibes you're into. Like Black Flag or something, that's just really fucking bad vibes, same as The Stooges - it's hostile, evil shit, like The Birthday Party. But [when we were starting] no one was doing that, everything was doing fucking Detroit rock or something at the time but without the fervor and without the hostility, and we thought, 'Fuck, if we do this in an Australian accent we'll be alright,' so we weren't surprised in that sense when we were alright and we got accepted."

As usual, however, it wasn't all beer and skittles on the review front.

"We only got one bad review, which I think was in Inpress," Liddiard chuckles. "It was the album's first review but I don't think we kept it, and the lady goes - it was a woman who reviewed it, perhaps an aunt or a niece of the editor at the time, there was some sort of connection there, it was pretty funny - and she goes, 'The album begins with Shark Fin Blues and the drummer's having a difficult time playing because the beat's all out of whack.' And Shark Fin Blues is in a weird timing, like 5/7 or something which is lopsided and weird but not unusual. Then she goes, 'It's got a few good ideas in it but it's not executed very well.' The next song is Baby² which is 4/4 and the reviewer goes, 'Now the drummer's got the hang of it!' Then it finished, 'This is an album full of potential but it's full of failures too because the singer can't sing and they can't play guitar.' We should have cut it out and kept it because it was fucking piss funny!

"That was the first review it got too, so we were just, like, 'Oh, here we fucking go.' Because when you play like mad, if you're Roland S Howard or Johnny Thunders and you're playing guitar but you're playing sarcastically - you're taking Chuck Berry shit or surf guitar and just going, 'This is fucking stupid' and playing sarcastically - but a lot of people miss the sarcasm and think you can't actually play! I can actually play - I can play any Eric Clapton shit you want and play it really good, but I choose not to! It's not going to happen in public."

And does chief songwriter Liddiard believe that the average Drones song packs more punch from the words or from the music?

"I dunno, both - I think both are important," he muses. "That's what we're trying for anyway. Another thing about that 'hole in the market' that we saw back in the day - and it sounds silly framing things as 'holes in markets' - but back in the day you'd have something like, say, Led Zeppelin, and the music is just sick, just off the hook, just crazy good, and the singing is okay and the lyrics are shit. Then you get something like Bob Dylan back in his heyday from late '60s through to mid-'70s, and the lyrics and the singing I find fucking great but the music is just kind of country music, it's a bit shit - there's no imagination in that department. So I always thought, 'Fuck, get Led Zeppelin with a Bob Dylan lyrical thing on top and you've got a good thing going, right?' So that was another plan with The Drones - sick music and good lyrics."

Does one of these disparate sides to a song come easier during the creative process?

"The music is easy because I'm a guitar player," Liddiard concedes. "That's easy, you just pick the thing up and start noodling and if you can't think of anything then you just go, 'Ok, what's a weird scale that I would never use?' and then you start tooling with that, and before you know it you've got something. It's the words that are hard, because you literally have a blank page. With an electric guitar or a drumkit it does half the work for you - if you strum an E-chord on an electric guitar it sounds really fucking good already. Same with a piano or a synth - these things inherently sound good - but with a voice it doesn't, you sound like an idiot until you've got something really good.

"Whether it's Bob Dylan or GZA from Wu-Tang Clan, unless you put the hard yards in and really struggle to get the good words it's shit, it's really hard. It's hard to explain how hard it is - it's just the most fucked-est thing. But somehow you can do it and eventually you'll get something good. If there was a really good singer who could write really good words I'd hire him and I'd just be the guitar player, I'm serious. I mean it."

It's hard to explain how hard it is - it's just the most fucked-est thing.

There was one new song offered to punters during the recent Vivid gig, a verbose but brilliant tract that seemed to be about the trials and tribulations of convicted drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.

"Yeah, it's kind of about those two dudes - it was written at that time," Liddiard admits. "In a metaphysical, kinda vague way it's about them. It's just a weird subconscious rant about travelling - I don't know what it's about, but it's a really fucked up song. It's good. That's the first song off our new album."

It's obviously tough articulating the direction of a collection of music, but it's clear that Liddiard is pretty pumped about his band's latest studio creation.

"We're happy with it, but it's nothing like [the last Drones album, 2013's] I See Seaweed," he offers. "It's pretty weird. Chrisso came back in and he's a really interesting drummer - he was more into trying different sounds rather than, 'We'll do the classic mic-up of an acoustic drumkit.' He just tried everything. And because we've got the studio now - we've got a studio in Melbourne with a group of other friends, we've got a little conglomerate together - which is full of crazy, whacky gear and he was using all of that. I dunno, we just wanted it to be different to the last album, and the last album had that Stooges' Raw Power vibe where the guitars are forward and the drums are back, but this time we thought, 'Ok, we'll let the general rule be drums forward and everything else back,' so it's groovy... it's really hard to explain. It's fucking weird. Totally weird, totally evil and kind of groovy."

Which only sounds like one of the greatest descriptions of an album ever. Although, as Liddiard tells it, their new studio acquisition was almost their undoing rather than their eventual saviour.

"We [recorded] every weekend for six months, and we've got tons of cool gear," he says. "Me and The Drones have been squirreling gear away for a while, and we're in there with Dan Kelly and Phil Gionfriddo - two friends from Melbourne - and they've got lots of good gear too. We've got this big console that used to belong to Nile Rogers and was used to record that Madonna album True Blue and a bunch of other stuff, so we're channelling Madonna in the mid-'80s. And it's in Fitzroy which is nice because it's really central and with us living out in the bush still it's cool to have this little clubhouse in the city where we can all hang out and play. The whole album was made on weekends and we got really used to just all of our friends coming over on the weekends: we managed to learn how to work while our friends are all literally in the studio drinking, taking drugs, gambling - doing all sorts of illegal things - and after a few months we learned how to focus on what we were doing. It's really cool, the album was made during a party for the most part!"