The Beauty Part

For a while there at the turn of the millennium local indie quartet Dollar Bar could do no wrong. They released a string of vibrant, catchy EPs which totally captured the essence of their glorious and often shambolic live shows, and then capped it all in 2004 with the release of their brilliant self-titled debut long-player. Singles from Dollar Bar such as Cute Gurls Have The Best Diseases and Made In Paris soon saturated the airwaves – becoming staples of both community radio and our national youth broadcaster – but just when you though Dollar Bar were going to take things to the next level, they essentially disappeared.

From all accounts this split was completely amicable, with members moving interstate and the lustre of the band's ambitions and achievements simply waning with time. Incarnations of the band would pop up from now and again, but these never involved the four mainstays at once so it was never quite the same, and for all intents and purposes Dollar Bar was consigned to the history bin, far too early and with far too little fanfare for many of their devoted followers.

Then, a couple of years ago, word began to spread that they were getting the band back together. Soon there were even a couple of ad hoc releases in the marketplace – the demo collection Run It Up The Flagpole and the split-cassette with fellow prodigal Brisbanites Little Lovers both emerged in 2012 – but now, excitingly, they've taken this resurgence to the next level with the impending and long overdue release of their sophomore album, Paddington Workers Club.

“We kind of just didn't want to do it anymore,” recalls frontman Dale Peachey of Dollar Bar's initial split. “We always had a hell of a lot of fun doing it, and I think it was getting a bit serious. Every band in the world wants to go higher and higher and higher and take the next step to get bigger and more popular, but we got to a point as a group which was as far as we wanted to go. We just stopped because it started getting a bit serious.

“Then we played at a mate's birthday party after a few years' break and just went, 'This is so much fun! Why did we stop?' Now we're back doing it because we love playing together and we're just having so much fun. We're loving jamming with each other, and it's great – it just feels so good. Playing at that party sparked the spark again, and made us realise that we miss the band and the songs and what we have onstage, so we decided to keep on doing it but more as a hobby now. It's back to why we were doing it in the first place and we're thoroughly enjoying it.”

Even despite their debut album's enduring legacy, it seems a shame that it didn't receive more attention at the time, a fact that Peachey willingly concedes.

“Of course, I would have loved it,” he admits. “But I don't think it would have made a difference to us stopping or anything like that. If a record label heard this [new album] now and wanted to pick us up now, I don't think we'd do it – I doubt we'd want to drop everything to hit the road touring or anything like that. Unless a band like Superchunk came out and wanted a national support – of course we'd do that – but we aren't really interested in the slog of touring and promoting ourselves, we're all busy with families and houses and stuff.

“I don't think our faces were out there enough – I don't think we were out there pushing it, we weren't really an 'in your face' kind of band. That's why it didn't get as much traction as it might have, because we weren't up in everyone's grill. A lot of bands just seem to be everywhere even if nobody likes them, and it's due to management and promotion and just the way the cogs turn – it feels like they're wasting space when decent bands could use that space so much better.”

Now, with Paddington Workers Club nearly ready for public consumption, such outdated concerns seem trivial. The new collection is typical Dollar Bar fare, loose and immediate, with all three major songwriters – Peachey, bassist Patrick McCabe and guitarist Chris Yates – sharing the load a lot more equally than in the past, and Peachey seems stoked with the outcome of their labours.

“It's a hell of a lot more lo-fi for starters,” he muses of the new album. “We recorded at quite a young studio – Donny [Miller]'s Nowhere Audio – and because our writing and rehearsing and playing together is quite random and long distance, we're doing it completely differently now. We used to practice every week when we'd get together and we'd have our finger right on the beat, but this time we're going for that more lo-fi sound because it's kind of what we have to work with in a way. But we're doing the best we can with it, and I think it's turned out awesome really, I really like it.

“Obviously in the past nine or ten years our taste has changed a bit. Chris has been leading it a bit in regards where we do it and how we do it, and his taste is very rock – he likes his garage and stuff like Royal Headache, and this is showing in the recordings where we're not being so fussy. We're finding that we're still getting a good song out of it. One approach we took at the start was going, 'Stuff it, why don't we just record a Guided By Voices EP?', where the songs would be good but the production would just be a secondary consideration. In the past we've tried to punch the production up a bit, but this time we're not so worried about it because we think the songs are going to work for themselves. It was a natural progression and what we had to work with, and we took as much strength as we could from that process.

“It is more of an even [songwriting] spread, but not on purpose. It started off in the beginning as mainly my stuff but by the end [of the first tenure] the writing was more even, and we've picked it up from that point. I've got no problem at all spreading it out, I like it. What makes Dollar Bar special is the combination of the four of us playing together – including Brendan [Rosen] on drums – and that's what we've really missed. After so many years we've found our own way of playing together, and we've come back onboard doing it again. It's a good unit – I really like this unit of people.”