Gazy Dayz

On their second album, Beaches have collaborated, somewhat unexpectedly, with kosmische legend Michael Rother. It wasn't a long-distance, soundfile-swapping scenario, either: when on tour in Australia, the founder of Neu! and Harmonia came into the studio space in Melbourne, Jack Farley's Transient Studios, where Beaches were in the middle of finishing off their She Beats LP.

“It was quite surreal to even just see him in Jack's studio in Northcote,” says Beaches guitarist Ali McCann, in recollection. “There's crap everywhere, people living in there, artist studios; the recording space is quite open. So as he was standing there playing, we were sitting behind him, kind of just laughing at the fact that he was there in Jack's studio, of all places, laying down guitar for our album.”

Beaches first met Rother when they shared a bill with Harmonia at the 2009 All Tomorrow's Parties festival, and when he returned for a solo tour in 2012, he offered to “play some guitar” on their latest LP. “I said, 'Are you shitting me?'” McCann laughs. “But to him it just wasn't a big deal. He's collaborated with lots of bands: John Frusciante, Fuck Buttons, German contemporary bands; so he was pretty relaxed about the whole thing. He said, 'Look, I'll just come in, maybe two songs, I'll play some stuff over the top and if you want it, great, if you don't, that's fine'.”

She Beats marks the follow-up to 2008's Beaches, and again finds the band functioning as five-piece unit; each member taking turns to sing vocals, to have their turn 'out front' of an outfit built on the collaboration of the collective. This traces back to their beginnings, which grew out of a friendship, and the social nature of playing in a band. Though guitarists Gill Tucker and Antonia Sellbach, and bassist Alison Bolger (of Panel Of Judges, Sleepy Township, etc.) had been “playing in bands for years and years”, McCann and drummer Karla Way were playing in their first-ever band; “so,” McCann recalls, “there was a different feeling for us than the rest of the Beaches ladies.”

When the idea for their band was more concept than reality, a friend asked if these ladies were going to be called Bitches. Instead they became Beaches, their handle riffing on the comic qualities of borrowing the name of cinema's ultimate female-bonding chick-flick, but also on their own love of camping and the ocean. “And then along came Beach Fossils, and Dirty Beaches, and Wavves,” McCann laments.

“The words 'breezy' and 'summery' come up when people write about us; we're usually considered 'summertime goodtime' music,” she offers on being a 'beach' band in the blogosphere. “I mean, we certainly don't make dark and depressing music, but there can be elements of darkness and heaviness in there sometimes. Generally things are more shimmering, light, sunnier, but sometimes the way people write about us makes it seem like it's 1970s Sydney, and we're all cruising around in Kingswoods like we're in some kind of Puberty Blues for adults, girls out for summertime good times all the time.”

Beaches have twice toured the US; first in 2010, then again in 2011. “The first tour was awesome, just for the simple fact of having all of us there, going away together, travelling. In a van that had wi-fi!” McCann says. “I'd lived in New York in my early 20s, but I'd never seen much of America outside of that. It was great to be able to do that classic cross-country trip, going down the Pacific coast, travelling through the desert across to Texas, because of course we were playing SXSW. We played some great shows, we play some shows that were not-so-great, but even then they were bloody hilarious.”

Starting out in Seattle, the band decamped for acclimatisation at Bear Creek Studios, where Sellbach had made Love Of Diagrams' 2009 LP Nowhere Forever (oh, and, also: “it was the studio where Lionel Ritchie made Dancing On The Ceiling!”), the tour seemed at its most absurd in Athens, Georgia, where Vanessa Briscoe of post-punk/proto-college-rock types Pylon, whom Sellbach had befriended, treated the band to indulgent Southern hospitality upon their arrival (“there was all this slow-cooked food; she made brisket!”), in advance of a show where but a handful of people turned up, and the Interpol-wannabe headliners, Misfortune 500, still rocked it “as if they were playing to a stadium”.

The band were travelling around on the back of Eternal Sphere, a 2010 EP issued by Californian imprint Mexican Summer (best known as the home of Best Coast). It tided over listeners in the five-year wait between Beaches' self-titled debut and She Beats. “I'm really glad that we didn't rush our second release, just because it'd been a year, or two years, or whatever,” says McCann. “We eventually reached a point where it was just going to take however long it took.”

Part of the reason that She Beats did take as long as it took goes back to the band's social-club beginnings; to the way that they've always been about the five of them. The presence of Rother means that the LP's 'special guest' will get plenty of attention, but isolating an individual – be it within or outside of the band – runs counter to the spirit of She Beats, which is very much of the collective.

“It's always been a democratic collaboration,” McCann offers. “There's never been a song where it's one person driving the sound of it, or the direction of the band. Even if one person has come up with the initial idea for a song, it's always open for interpretation, open for discussion.

“It means there's lots of talking, especially when it comes to recording and mixing. It wasn't just one person sitting down with Jack Farley, it was always two, three, four, or all of us contributing to the mixing process. Sometimes we wondered if there were too many cooks, but it's important for us that we all have a say in everything. That's part of the reason why the album took so long to come out.