Future Native: Rocks Music.

Future Native launch Rusty Rocks at the Robina Tavern on Friday and O’Learys on Saturday.

“Rusty Rocks was seven years in the making,” Future Native frontman PJ explains. “It’s all been totally paid for out of gigs, and we wanted to do it to a fairly high standard. We’ve done a couple of clips as well off our won back. Mel (bassist) has a Bachelor Of Arts degree in film and music, so she does all the editing and stuff.”

“There’s a lot of band’s that pose to be independent and alternative, but we actually are independent and alternative,” he laughs.

With that amount of time under their belts, it’s hardly surprising the band cover an amazing amount of musical territory with their debut album. Although the band have released a couple of singles in the past, Rusty Rocks is the cumulation of the band’s long term vision, fifteen tracks running the musical gamut from pop to punk to more Earthy sounds. No mean feat.

“A lot of that comes from being adaptable to get a gig. In Queensland if you want a gig and you don’t have a song on the radio you have to be able to adapt. But also, we’ve always aspired to be diverse in what we do. Other band have just one sound, and after three or four songs it can just bore you, you know. We want to keep people attention. We don’t want to get bored ourselves…”

“We wanted to take people on a journey. It’s very conceptual. The time we took actually worked to our advantage, because we went through a whole learning curve and exploration, which wouldn’t have leant to so much diversity if it had happened in a short period of time.”

Rusty Rocks has a strong ecological and environmental conservation theme running through its material, a social issue that’s close the hearts of all the band’s members.

“I suppose just seeing statistics on things like the destruction of rainforests and whaling and overfishing drew us to it. According to a friend of ours, who is an American marine biologist, some parts of the oceans have been fished completely dry, particularly around Asia. You don’t need to be a genius to realise the Earth can’t sustain this action.”

“Even though more people are becoming environmentally aware, commerce is not reflecting that. Multinational companies are not changing. Even though we’re doing the right thing and separating recyclable stuff and whatever, massive companies are not being put under pressure by the government. They’re too yellow, man. They’re too weak. There are so many things going wrong and so much work that need to be done.”

The launch shows for Rusty Rocks also tie in with the bands political ideology.

“We’re playing at the Robina Tavern on Friday and O’Learys at Caxton Street on Saturday, and there’s a bike ride by a group called A Nuclear Free Future For Everybody. They’re doing a bike ride to Narangba, and we’re giving five dollars from every CD at the launch to their campaign. The campaign is to stop nuclear food irradiation in Narangba. Basically they kill germs on the food by exposing it to nuclear energy. So, the germs are dead, but… where are we going to be a few years of eating this shit? The locals are starting to get up in arms about it, you know.”