One Last Drive

It's two years now since 78 Saab released their fourth album, Good Fortune, which included a song called Whatever Rules You Break, with singer and guitarist Ben Nash singing the line,“Don't ever lose sight of what you truly believe in”. On the first day of December, Nash and his offsiders, bass player Garth Tregillgas, lead guitarist Jake Andrews and drummer Nicholai Danko, are taking to the stage for their final performance as 78 Saab, and perhaps that's down, in a sense, to their following the advice in that song.

“Everyone's got mixed emotions I guess,” Nash suggests, as the final day looms ever larger for the band. “I don't know; we've always so strongly associated ourselves with 78 Saab and what we've wanted 78 Saab to achieve. From the absolute get-go we were really quite serious about what we wanted out of the band and I guess – I mean this is my side of things, we're gonna get four sides to the story here – but I just felt it was time. We've got a really good body of work for us and perhaps, you know, it was better for us to spend the time required to get to the level we were accustomed to. The short answer to that is, basically, if you want to make a great album, it's not going to happen overnight; you have to put in some serious time and perhaps we weren't sort of like getting that amount of time together to do that and so we thought that, as a result, let's call it a day.”

Never the most prolific of bands – four albums and a couple of EPs over their 15 years together – 78 Saab nevertheless earned themselves a solid reputation as an act band that always delivered both live and in the studio. They originally came together in 1996 at ANU in Canberra when Nash and Tregillgas entered that year's Australian National Campus Band Competition. And it'll all end at The Annandale.

“We'd only played a handful of gigs in Canberra and then suddenly we were coming up to Sydney,” says Nash, “and I still remember clear as day coming up over the hill into the inner west and The Annandale – I think it was a Wednesday night and we were first on but to us we could have been playing at the Entertainment Centre. That was back in '96 and there've been a lot of years – we saw the writing on the wall in 2000 [with The Annandale closing] and the resurrection, so you can't underestimate how critical the venue is not only to live music but to live independent music. It's a gamble for a venue to say it's going have seven nights of original live music instead of getting in some cover bands. That was our vision, an independent band that made our own music, and aligning ourselves with like-minded venues like The Annandale, that was really critical to us.”

That campus competition brought with it the chance to record a debut EP, Eastwards By Removal, courtesy of one of the sponsors, Troy Horse, while relocating to Sydney saw 78 Saab become one of the first bands to work with Winterman & Goldstein, a management company that started their own label, Ivy League Records, which released their second EP, Hello Believers, in 1998. Their debut album, Picture A Hum, Can't Hear A Sound, followed in 2000, then Crossed Lines in 2004, The Bells Line in 2007 and, finally, as it turned out, Good Fortune in 2010.

“Good Fortune went really well,” Nash admits. “It was borne under some, er, difficult circumstances, so I think in a way, looking back on Good Fortune, personally, the fact that we got that out and how happy we are with the album, the certain level of professionalism that really kicked in there.” In the end though, it's a tough old business, this music business, and tougher when you're essentially an independent act, even when you're signed to one of the most enthusiastic of independent labels.

“It's obviously no secret that we weren't making a living off rock'n'roll,” Nash admits before adding with a laugh, “I don't think anyone really does. And as you get older, life gets in the way – you know, marriage and kids and all that – but I mean, I don't want that to get in the road of the story. It's just one of those things that kept building up and we just were finding it a little bit harder to all get together in the same room. I guess we could have kept 78 Saab going, playing every couple of months, playing the hits, but I think we saw ourselves always as a studio band first and foremost, even though we love playing live, and making great albums and perhaps we thought the work required to get to the level we were going to be happy with wasn't going to appear, even though I'd love it to happen.

“We're still all great mates. We had a beer, I think it was back in May this year, ostensibly to clear the air on where we were going on the new demos and everything, but I think we all came to the conclusion that maybe it's best to knock this on the head and have one final big show as a send-off and, you know, go from there. Hopefully we'll get a recording out of the last show as well, and I know we're also pulling together everything we've done and we'll get that out for iTunes for December as well, so in drawing under everything we're also trying to make sure it's a completed body of work for anyone who ever stumbled across us and wanted to know how we got from Eastwards By Removal in 1997 to Good Fortune in 2010, it'll all be on the internet,” Nash laughs again.

Not that the various members will necessarily be dropping out of music altogether. “Oh no,” Nash confirms. “I think once you pick up a guitar or sort of once you start playing drums, it's never too far away. How that plays out is obviously yet to be decided. From my perspective, certainly, I've got a whole batch of songs there and I'm unsure how they're going to come out, but I love to play and love to write so I don't think it'll be too far away.”

78 Saab will be playing the following shows:

Saturday 1 December - Annandale Hotel, Sydney NSW