Pegging Bananas

"I don't know how one guy could eat so many bananas,” muses Owen Penglis. He's put down his tea and his copy of The Troggs' Reg Presley's conspiracy theory book Wild Things They Don't Tell Us. Instead, he's talking about Straight Arrows' recent Standard Bowl gig, one of their first since they finished recording second album Rising.

“Beforehand they were filming some kind of commercial and that dick from Good Charlotte who's on TV, on The Voice [Joel Madden], he was there doing an ad and they asked us to be the background music of the ad and we said no. They had all this fruit for him backstage, like all these bananas and shit, so that's where all those bananas came from that we pegged out at the audience.”

And that's a Straight Arrows show in a nutshell: pegging bananas and throwing toilet paper into the audience, shouting into the mic about bad tempers and mind control, and sometimes cocking up the songs. And Penglis attributes their high energy to excitement, not illicit substances.

“It's just the excitement, you know, we're all really good friends, and usually you get to the venue like five hours beforehand and set your equipment up and then try not to get too drunk before you have to play. And it's really hard to do that when you're sitting in a pub for five hours. So usually we're kind of drunk and just so excited and happy to be playing that it just comes across like that I suppose.”

And on cocking up – “[You] can't really take yourself too seriously if you're having trouble playing your guitar. We've gotten better now. You can't take yourself too seriously if you're just onstage making mistakes. I guess people can relate to that – everyone makes mistakes, and we're saying it's cool to fuck up on stage and it's cool to sound shitty.”

It's that shitty sound that led Penglis to coin his own genre for Rising: mid-fi. “That's pretty much me trying to make up something so people would stop calling us a lo-fi band. I guess we got characterised as that because all these early 7-inches we recorded, it was just one microphone and a cassette four-track, I guess they sounded pretty shitty and at the time I thought they sounded pretty good, they were like the best I could manage. So medium fidelity means it sounds a little bit better but not stupid and polished or something.

“I find something appealing in music that doesn't sound like it's had a team of guys polishing it for a year; there's something more direct and more human about stuff that is full of mistakes and weird noises and fuck-ups.”

The group – rounded out by Rising Fortune's Angela Bermuda, Palms' Alex Grigg and Adam Williams – started to record the album at Penglis' home studio (his loungeroom and kitchen), before a new neighbour complained, and they packed up for a studio space in Kings Cross. “We've always had really cool neighbours and I try to be really mindful of them because it sucks having some dude playing drums at 9pm next door. I would record while everyone was at work during the day and stop before they got home. I did the whole Palms album here, I've done quite a few records here... And this one lady moved in next door and knocked on the door while I was recording something and started screaming at me and called the police and all this stuff and I'd never even met her before or seen her. I was like, 'Okay, that's cool, I'll stop now.' And the next day I started up again and she came back again and she made it really difficult – and then she moved out.”

It's other projects, including work producing The Frowning Clouds and Royal Headache, that kept Penglis and co. from making the follow-up to 2010's It's Happening sooner. But the creative tap doesn't stop dripping – not for long anyway. 

“Sometimes it's not happening, you can't beat yourself up. You've just got to do something else – go buy a sandwich and read the newspaper... Sometimes you'll spend a couple of weeks on someone else's record and then at the end you'll be like, 'I just want to not listen to guitars for a few days.' But what else am I going to do? I could wash dishes or deliver pizzas, but I think music sounds a lot better than that.”