SaskwatchFour years ago, nine music students playing soul and jazz covers were spotted busking outside Flinders Street Station by Melbourne soul DJ Vince Peach. They became Saskwatch and Peach gave them a regular gig at Soul In The Basement, Cherry Bar's Thursday night soul night. Northside Records proprietor and soul champion Chris Gill checked them out, fell in love with them and started a record label just so he could put Saskwatch on it. They released their first album Leave It All Behind in 2012 and in 2013 they flew to the UK to play Glastonbury Festival. It's fair to say the last four years have been a pretty racy ride for Saskwatch the band.
Saskwatch have just put the finishing touches their second album, Nose Dive, which trumpet player and songwriter Liam McGorry says was just a natural continuation of the first: “We never really saw the first one as an album... We didn't sit back and say, 'There's the first one done, what will we do for the second one?' It sort of just kept going. So I think that helped stop any complacency or any writer's block or lack of ideas… It took maybe three years of playing to become a band, from busking. Once we had it out we were sort of like, 'Okay, we can probably do a better one'. We've just been trying to make a better album as opposed to just a bunch of songs.”
The album was crafted from hours of rehearsal squeezed around a hectic touring schedule. The band gigs non-stop, which is a hangover from their busking days, says McGorry. “I guess it's always been a hardworking band. We like to play a lot of gigs and, from those busking days, we took any gig we could get for two years or three years. And doing that was great in that we play together, but we also now put a bit more emphasis on songs and a bit more emphasis on the way we deliver stuff.”
The band spent three weeks recording Nose Dive, a much more luxurious amount of time than the four days they spent creating Leave It All Behind. “It was a really great experience to spend a bit more time on songs, do more pre-production stuff, firstly with Magoo who we worked on the album with, and a bit more time in general on stuff. It was great to have that time to experiment and refine things a bit more,” says McGorry.
Saskwatch are on a clear upward trajectory. The only real issue is that getting nine people to do anything is a bit of a mission. “It's probably one of the main difficulties we have as a band, just general logistics. Over the three or four years we've been playing, we've gotten down a few things, like, rehearsals are great – it's all good now. But I guess still flights and accommodation, even at short notice – in any place, trying to get nine or ten people into a hotel, or into anything, is difficult, and costly, so that's the hardest thing, I think.”
