Still Suave

Before heading off to London, their first visit there in 30 years, to play a couple of Hard Rock Calling concerts in London's Hyde Park with Cold Chisel, Australia's most unassuming and for many finest songwriter Don Walker was in Adelaide to do two shows at the City Of Churches' Cabaret Festival with his other band, The Suave Fucks, and it was from there he fielded a few questions about what he's been up to outside the Chisels. On the agenda is talking up the then-forthcoming Nightfishing Tour.

“New songs,” Walker says, when asked what we can expect on the tour. “Well, there are always new songs. I guess the difference between when we played last year and this time is more new songs. Quite a few of them have been recorded but not released yet, and there are some that we haven't recorded yet and I'm hoping to do that on the back of the dates in Sydney. There's a lot of unreleased music now, a whole album's worth. I can give you some titles – Hully Gully, Young Girls, um, Pool – there are two versions of Pool. One's a swampy version recorded with The Suave Fucks back in 2006 and another is a completely different version musically with just me on piano. And I might even put both of them on, because both of them are the same lyrics with completely different pieces of music.

“It's nice, when you're compiling an album, to have different recordings of the same song with a few years separating that you can choose from, because songs evolve. Sometimes songs evolve and deepen, and sometimes they go stale.”

The Suave Fucks are drummer Hamish Stuart, Michael Vidale on bass, Roy Payne on baritone guitar, Glen Hannah on guitar and Garret Costigan on pedal steel. A slightly different version of the band features on the album, Live In Queenscliff, recorded at the 2006 Queenscliff Festival, which was finally released in February last year, and itself followed the reissue of Walker's solo and Catfish back catalogue over the previous two years.

While he was looking forward to the concerts in London, Glasgow and Manchester with Cold Chisel, Walker didn't have any huge expectations. “Cold Chisel hasn't been to the UK for thirty years, and we probably only played half a dozen shows in the UK in all – we were mainly concentrating on Germany. It'll be nice to do what we do in front of people over there, and particularly playing the festival, because at the festival we'll get to play to English people. Our curse over there, when we used to go there, was English people couldn't get in, thirty years ago. We were flying to the UK and getting up in little clubs and just playing to the same pack of Australians who were coming to see us in Bondi.

“The guy who runs [Hard Rock Calling] rang us up. He's a big promoter in that part of the world and I think he had seen the figures on our tour in Australia [last year's record-breaking Light The Nitro Tour that saw them play to more than 270,000 people] and he rang [co-manager] John Watson and said he'd like us on the bill for Friday night of the festival, which is the rock'n'roll night.”

In the event, Walker left for the UK ahead of the rest of the band, hired a car and took himself off on a trip to Scotland before returning to London for rehearsals and the shows, the Hard Rock Calling concert seeing them perform alongside Soundgarden and Iggy Pop & The Stooges. At least they didn't get the plug pulled on them like McCartney and Springsteen on the Sunday.