On Making Rock'N'Roll Dreams Come True

"The new album By Design is definitely autobiographical," As A Rival's Pete Cerni reveals. After he finished uni, Cerni admits he had "a bit of a shitty time". "I was trying to find a job and I didn't find any full-time work for about ten months." He wrote the first song for the band's debut album "four years ago" and Cern shares, "There's a song, School Bus Apocalypse, track ten; it's the first song I've done that's actually about anything." Cerni studied "game design" in Norway ("I was actually doing an exchange") and, during that time "did this game and it was about this lady who was a school bus driver, and she had to go around collecting the kids from school because there's, like, zombies attacking the town and the army were coming to bomb the town. So then I just wrote pretty much all that song overseas on an acoustic guitar."

"It was about this lady who was a school bus driver, and she had to go around collecting the kids from school because there's, like, zombies attacking the town."

By Design is mixed by Grammy Award-winning producer Adam Kasper ("he's been a part of some of my favourite albums like Queens Of The Stone Age - Songs For The Deaf, and Soundgarden and Foo Fighters"). "I wasn't the one that approached him," Cerni confesses, adding, "It was my old bass player; she got in touch with him, so I didn't even know. And she just forwarded me this email, and at the end it said Adam K, and I'm like, 'Are you fucking kidding me? Is that Adam Kasper!?' And she's like, 'Yeah,' and I'm like, 'Holy shit!' 

"I still didn't believe it even the day that I sent the mixes to him," Cerni marvels, before admitting "it was just a really surreal experience". "Really, I just write music for me - and playing, you know, 'cause I love playing music - and for people to be involved, [of] that kind of calibre, is just really humbling and makes you feel good. I knew the batch of songs was solid, you know, and I was excited to get it out there but, yeah! When you have people around like [Kasper] and Tom [Read] from Bodyjar, and all these people that you look up to, and they are all keen to be a part of it and they're telling you that it's awesome, it definitely makes all the painful bits worthwhile."          

When asked what turned him onto playing music in the first place, Cerni recalls, "In Grade Six we went and saw, of all things, the police rock band just up at the local gym... we came away and it was like, 'Shit, yeah,' and then everyone was like, 'Oh, let's start a band'." Cerni "wanted to play drums originally", but his mum wouldn't have it. "My brother had a guitar that he played for about six weeks and it was just collecting dust, so [mum] was like, 'You learn guitar,' and I go, 'Alright, I'll make a deal. If I learn guitar and I do it for two years, you buy me an electric guitar'. So she actually ended up buying me the electric guitar within a year, I think."    

One of the bands supporting As A Rival, Friends Of The Enemy, just returned from a Japanese tour. "They said it was insane," Cerni, who hopes to lock in some Japanese tour dates for As A Rival, enthuses. So what's on Cerni's bucket list? "Playing somewhere where no one knows ya personally."