Killing Songs, Ripping Off The Beatles & The Dreaded Content Void

Pete Kilroy and Bill Bingley are still riding high one hour after Hey Geronimo's Like A Version went to air on triple j when they swing by The Music. They had been waiting with baited breath to hear the reaction to their Barnett/Regurgitator mash-up "after turning up without amps… Oh God, what have we done?" recalls Bingley with a laugh. "We were so nervous about it — put it this way, let's say it is a relief that it's over. It didn't suck. I felt pretty good about [the mash-up] until I told a friend in the music industry who's a bit of a big wig… and she's like, 'jeez, you're keen. That's a bit of a risk'. And I'm like 'oh shit it is a risk'," laughs Kilroy.

Their debut LP Crashing Into The Sun is an absolute killer, literally; eight of the 12 upbeat tracks are "about someone meeting a horrible end". "It was like dude, what have we done! We didn't do it deliberately!" Bingley says in mock horror. "I think you can justify depressing lyrics if everyone's dancing." They've replicated with finesse a style that is rarely achieved by like-minded bands — taking elements from The Kinks, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Animal Collective and seamlessly threading them into their own unique sound. Some bands attempt '70s psychedelics a la Tame Impala, but "the thing about Tame Impala is no one is going to out-Tame Impala Tame Impala. So there's not even any point trying," laughs Bingley.

"The thing about Tame Impala is no one is going to out-Tame Impala Tame Impala. So there's not even any point trying."

Hey Geronimo have taken a different approach and created a purely '60s rock album that sounds like it was recorded in 2016. "It's kinda like, Ross [Pearson]'s guitar might sound like The Kinks. Then Bingers might put this part in like Animal Collective or whatever. I'm going back to Beatles because that's my go-to and all of a sudden the 'r's in Boredom are sounding like Helter Skelter. That's pure…" — Bingley cuts Kilroy off — "I'm trying to not say plagiarism. Appropriation? We always feel like, you know, if you're ripping off the best bands ever then you can't go too wrong. It's just that every time we get there, it's always Paul McCartney."

"One placeholder lyric was actually from When I'm 64 on The Girl Who Likes Me, and that is straight up word for word from When I'm 64. Paul McCartney won't care if I took his line," Kilroy laughs.

They made sure a modern flavour was added into the LP during the mastering process. "Our mixing notes to [Steven] Schram were like two lines. 'Hey dude, this is a '60s song, but we want it to sound like it was recorded in 2016. Go.' But seriously, the notes were 'Hey dude, we don't know what to do with this song, do whatever the fuck you want'. Boom… 80% of the time he would send back the mix and we'd be like 'that's perfect,'" smiles Kilroy. The end result was evidently miles ahead of their original tracks — "Like Lazer Gun Show. I've said this before, but I remember we'd just finished tracking it and I'm like 'if this song was a person, I would take it out the back to the pool and I would hold it under water until the bubbles stopped. That's how I felt about that song."

Their attention to detail extends from micro-elements of musical influence to the individual artworks that accompany each track — '50s, nuclear family-style illustrations with modern metaphors which they examined in detail through a Twitter track-by-track in the lead up to the album's release. "It filled a little bit of the content hole that can never be filled," — "The endless content pit" groans Bingley. "That's what Hell is gonna be dude. When you die and go to hell, purgatory is just gonna be thinking up content every day for eternity." Ironically, Kilroy is a digital content manager at Chugg Entertainment, and Bingley takes the opportunity to rib him about it. "That's what old mate did at triple j: he's like 'this will be good content' and I was like, and this was off air — I went…" Kilroy mimes vomiting over the edge of the seat. "We hate content and we hate Twitter. Seriously, the worst thing about being in a band is having to do social media. It's so shit."

"People are actually talking to us on Twitter now. Because for a long time it was just beaming off into the void. We'd literally been doing Twitter for years, just terribly — like a bad stand-up comedy routine — just endlessly, every day, to no one. One day our manager was like 'so you know the point of Twitter is that you're supposed to talk to other people," says a mortified Bingley. "It was this little light bulb that went off above Bingers' head," Kilroy jokes. 

"Content has become an in-joke with us. We love the word because it's just so horrible. We're always like 'what's good content? Why don't I take a photo of that dog, that's pretty good content!'"