Escape From No Man's Land

From their very earliest forays into the Brisbane music scene, Violent Soho displayed an endearing collective naiveté towards the industry – a certain wide-eyed innocence and belief that it was all about the music – which lent both them and their music a certain purity, even when their songs were as dishevelled as the band members themselves.

From the outset the four-piece chanced their way into their amazing adventures via talent, charisma and camaraderie rather than some cunning strategic plan; everything that they've experienced and achieved in the last few years – signing to Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label in New York, recording in Wales with esteemed producer Gil Norton (Pixies, Foo Fighters), touring the States with a stream of high-profile bands – seemed more though destiny than design, and they accordingly took every windfall that came their way with a grin and a grain of salt.

Yet this same innocence could very well have been their downfall when they returned from their year-long stint in the States – ostensibly on a paid sojourn to write the follow-up to 2010's Violent Soho­ – armed with an amazing wad of experiences but precious little else, only to be dramatically cut asunder by those controlling the purse strings. To say that this brought them crashing back down to earth is a massive understatement; they were now for all intents and purposes stranded in the suburbia of Brisbane, exiled in the city that they love but miles from where they wanted to be in every sense of the term.

“It was pretty fucked in all honesty,” admits frontman and chief songwriter Luke Boerdam. “We spoke to our manager – who was back in New York – and he said, 'Just get down there and write another record'. We were all stunned because we'd been touring America that whole time straight, so to be just pushed back home – I think we were all in our parents' places.”

“We were totally, one-hundred percent led to believe that we were moving home to write the follow-up record – paid for, as in we weren't meant to have to go back to work,” guitarist James Tidswell continues. “Not when it was initially put to us anyway, it was, 'Go back, just write the next record, and then we'll sort it out and keep going'. Then we moved home and were suddenly told, 'No, there's just nothing. Not only that we sold your van and you now owe more money because you owed more on it than we sold it for'. It was crazy shit, crazy shit. We're left in the middle of nowhere, all in different houses, we've got no money and nowhere to go – we were in no man's land. So from then on we all got jobs, and eventually that gave us enough time and money to start getting in contact with each other, for a beginning.”

“We didn't even call each other for a while,” Boerdam smiles, “which was fair enough in the circumstances.”

This upheaval could very well have split a lesser band asunder, but after a prolonged layoff they eventually got back into the swing of things. Was the break from the band – and by default each other – reinvigorating in the long run?

“A little bit,” Boerdam ponders. “No it was, but it took a while. It took time to get the writing to a point where I wanted it and for us to be interested again. There was a whole twelve months where it wasn't interesting for us, like, 'This isn't working. The songs are boring. Why is practice boring now, when we used to love it?'”

But this hurdle too was surpassed in time, and soon Soho were meeting regularly in the practice room to work up the songs which would become their accomplished third album Hungry Ghost, a record far more assured and adventurous than their previous output without sacrificing any of the core band facets that made them so palatable in the first place.

“I just remember thinking, 'I want more layered guitars' and I want to break away from the normal arrangement – even if it is the same arrangement I want it to sound like it's not the same arrangement,” Boerdam tells. “Lyrically I didn't want to write personal songs anymore, which was the entire basis of the last record – it was all personal suburban stories like Jesus Stole My Girlfriend or Muscle Junkie – whereas with the new songs I was more into focusing on all the sounds and mucking around with pedals and equipment. We grew maturity-wise as a band – in terms of our influences the list grew from maybe a hundred bands to thousands between us, with all the touring and being stuck in the tour van for twelve hours a day. Once we started tapping into all of those influences, that's when it became interesting again, and that's what we went with.

“Plus, I think it's miles removed from the last record because we did everything in Brisbane. We said, 'Fuck it we're doing it our way – we're doing it with Bryce [Moorehead – producer], and we're doing it in the shed down in Albion'. It was awesome, and so far removed from how we did the last record – going overseas and recording with Gil Norton – and I think that makes it sound pretty different from the get-go. The whole recording process was completely relaxed, and the approach was way more about doing stuff in the studio – the songs were written before we went in, but we had way more time to get all the sounds and get everything just painted out so we could muck around adding and removing different layers, even trying out different vocal parts here and there. I think it just added up to a more well-rounded and better-produced record – for us.

“I think that Gil did a great job on the last record, but I think Bryce really nailed what we were trying to do with this record. We wanted it to be more relaxed and we wanted it to have a more slacker vibe, we didn't want it to be so aggressive and obnoxious and 'in your face'. It was about being relaxed.”

Fortunately, Boerdam's assertion that he concentrated more on tones than the words of the new songs doesn't hold up to close scrutiny, because it's a uniformly strong batch of lyrics, dripping with rich imagery and complete with a fascinating overriding theme.

“With Hungry Ghost, behind every song I do see some overall theme – there's society as spectacle, this big fake-masked reality that we're born into and we buy into it every day and we live it every day,” the writer reflects. “So the whole record for me is about escaping that normality and escaping that reality that we're forced to live in every day. OK Cathedral is about finding that place to escape – just being alone and smoking a joint while you look at the sunset. Or Dope Calypso's about walking to work and picturing skyscrapers falling over. That's where the title Hungry Ghost comes from;  I found this book which touched on Buddhism, and the idea that we're addicted to living in this world and this society and how we have this addiction that we can never fulfil, so we can never be content and you just lose yourself and fade away and become nothing. All the songs to me are about escaping in your own way.”

And now that Violent Soho have themselves escaped from their personal purgatory clutching this great new album, do they feel that they've learned anything about themselves and the band?

“We've always been stupidly naive about the peripheral stuff,” Boerdam ponders. “We just think, 'Do we still enjoy getting in a room and playing songs together? Yep? Well let's release a record'. None of the other shit should matter or get in the way. Who cares that we toured America? We don't care, what matters is whether we want to write music together and make a record and get out there and tour it, and we do. It's as simple as that.”

“You can't describe it, it's all-consuming,” Tidswell marvels. “You're in your first year of marriage and you've only spent thirty-something days in bed with your wife in the entire year, and you're playing [tiny now-defunct Brisbane venue] The Troubadour... Then later you're addicted to drugs, you're spewing blood, you've got no money, and you come home [to Brisbane] and you've got to get a job at McDonald's... I can't tell you what us playing music together means.”

FAST FEUDS

When Violent Soho claim they were doing it tough upon their return from the States a few years back they weren't kidding, as guitarist James Tidswell recounts.

“I was living at my sister-in-law's place and I couldn't get a job too far away from there. I knew there was a McDonald's close and my cousin worked there so I figured I could get a job,” he remembers. “On my way to the interview I started getting vague congratulatory texts, just confusing, so I get to the interview and this kid goes to me halfway through, 'Ah, are you from Violent Soho? I saw you at Splendour!' I couldn't believe it, and I thought, 'I can't do this!' But I went through the process and they sent me home – the whole thing was pretty fucked up, they showed me every part of McDonald's, it was so weird – and then on the drive home I hear the nominations for the ARIAs on triple j and we'd been nominated [for Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal album]!

“So I was literally on my way home from an interview for my first job at McDonald's – after 200 shows in America for a year and doing the band for years – and I hear that news. Then McDonald's called me and I pulled over; they left a message, 'Come in and get your uniform, you've got your first shift!' and I just called and said, 'Dudes, I'm not coming. I can't do this'. That's what the mood was like.”