Changing Rooms

Melbourne's The Spinning Rooms have clawed their way out of the anaemic abyss of outer suburbia and rural nightmares to thrash out an iconic space on the Australian music scene. Their visceral mix of greasy desperation and howling despair, packaged in an atonal miasma of noise and aggressive anguish, is unlike anything you'll hear this year. Pete Dickinson admits the formula is unique, but came from fairly ordinary circumstances.

“Me and Noah [Wilson – bass] and Ianto [Kelly – drums] were all working at a pub in North Melbourne called the Town Hall Hotel,” he recalls. “Noah was a chef, I was a dish pig, and there was the one CD player in the kitchen. There would be fighting as to who got to play what, and he and I found we were into a lot of the same stuff. There was never any intention of playing any gigs or anything like that; it was this weird project that we did at home. Joe [Greenway – tenor sax] is my cousin, and at some stage we thought he should be in the band. He played his first ten or fifteen shows without ever rehearsing with us. We worked out what we wanted [live]; it was very jammy at one stage. And we never stopped; people kept asking us to play.”

The subject matter embedded in The Spinning Rooms' sound is mired in the existential horrors of being isolated in environments that take extreme mental and emotional tolls.

“The first album is deliberately put in a place,” Dickinson clarifies. “I lived in this tiny little town called Tatura in countryside Victoria as a kid, and I thought of that place when writing the [album's] lyrics. For a long time I didn't bother writing lyrics, I would just make up words onstage. So I ended up sitting down and writing everything in one hit, rather than on a song-by-song basis. These themes came about, almost of their own accord. In the first one there's a couple who have gone back to the country and everything's fallen to shit, and then they return to the city (on Complicating Things) and things aren't much better. Initially it was going to be a break-up album, and there are still overtones of that. I wanted it to be someone on a week-long bender on their return, but I'm not sure it really turned out that way.

“I've always liked albums as albums,” Dickinson continues. “Not something that is a bunch of songs but you are listening to this whole album. Even the artwork mirrors that. The artwork for the first one is a photo of this ghost town in Tasmania, and this one is actually a photo of the house where Noah and I live in Collingwood. So it's a continuation in themes from the first one.”