Back On The Road Again

ocking San Diego three-piece The Paladins are flying across the pond for the first time in years to take part in Brisbane's annual Kustom Kulture celebration GreazeFest. They've just worked their way east-to-west through America for the past three weeks, an experience Dave Gonzalez admits was “even better than we thought it would be”, and with drummer Brian Fahey and bassist Thomas Yearsley the trio have even been working on new music. In fact, the band will be bringing something special with them Down Under in the way of a brand new 7”, featuring the first new Paladins recordings in ten years.

“It's kinda bluesy and it's kinda tiki; it's kinda swing and it's kinda rock'n'roll at the same time,” drawls Gonzalez. “It's got some jazz in it, and it's just one more time when The Paladins do something different and mix a lot of vintage roots styles together.”

Big fans of everything from country and R&B to traditional Hawaiian sounds, The Paladins manage to continue contorting these variables into a rocking constant. “We just blend all those styles together and it comes out to be Paladins, it comes out to be different, y'know,” remarks Gonzalez.

From the moment they formed in the early-'80s, The Paladins have gone against musical trends, forever fighting the hard battle to maintain their own identity. But by being true to the sacred format of straight-line rock'n'roll they've managed to stand tall while other acts have fallen. To this day they strongly believe in their music – never calling on gimmicks – and they've taken this focused mindset with them into the studio and onto the stage for the past three decades.

“We started out and a lot of things were happening at the time; punk rock was still going on and the New Wave was going on and the rockabilly started hitting, and we kinda slid in underneath that New Wave and the rockabilly, kinda even slid in towards the punk rock for a while because it was so different to what regular rock music was doing,” Gonzalez recalls. “It's taken a long time – we used to play our music and write our songs and try and have that real traditional sound, and we thought that if we write good songs and make good sounding records, even though we're coming at it from a '50s angle, it's a timeless angle, it's going to stand up and I feel like it has.

“It's taken twenty-plus years for a lot of the world to get into it,” he continues, “but now you can see there's big festivals like GreazeFest where the whole culture comes out from all over the place, and it's like that in many other places; we've toured around the States and we've been able to go to Europe a few times, and we see it, we see people opening up to it and getting into it and it seems like this music is still rocking along and gaining speed when a lot of the other stuff we were up against way back has fizzled out and sounds really dated. I think if it's got some blues and some good ol' rock'n'roll into it it's going to stick around.

“I feel really lucky that we can still be here, we can still hook up and take this opportunity to come back to Australia. I try to relate that coming back to see The Paladins is kinda like coming back to see Evel Knievel try to jump Caesars Palace,” he jokes. “It's going to be interesting... just stay close to the landing ramp.”