"Nick Barker, Nick Barker, Nick Barker – Like, Fuck! Enough Already!"

Perched on a stool inside a café in an inner-city suburb, Nick Barker embodies rock’n’roll. We grab the corner table and order a coupla lattes. “I was kinda starting out thinking, ‘Alright, I’ll do another Nick Barker record,’ which, I was like, ‘Oh god!’ I mean, even I groaned, you know? Really! And then I just got with Justin [Garner],” Barker recalls of his new band’s origins. The pair started writing together and Barker praises, “Over the years of playing together, we’ve just developed – what’s the word? Like, we’re symbiotic.” Barker reckons working with Garner “brought [him] back down to earth a bit”. “[Garner] just writes these really kinda basic, ‘70s things that I’m too kinda up my own backside to write. You know, because I won’t allow myself ‘cause I don’t think they’re clever enough.”

"Nick Barker, whaddaya do best? Well, what you do best is pretty dumb rock’n’roll, you know?"

Sipping his coffee, Barker then elaborates: “I just thought, ‘I need to reset’. I got fuckin’ sick to death of my own name, you know: Nick Barker. I’ve had my name on everything since The Wreckery split up, pretty much: Nick Barker & The Reptiles, Nick Barker, Nick Barker, Nick Barker, Nick Barker, Nick Barker, Nick Barker – like, fuck! Enough already, you know?” Contemplating his next move, Barker practiced self-evaluation: “Nick Barker, whaddaya do best? Well, what you do best is pretty dumb rock’n’roll, you know? You write fuckin’ funny lyrics and you write really basic songs that are meant to be played on electric guitar. So just do that, you know?”

Following this light-bulb realisation, Barker and Garner “started writing really basic stuff and then just bashed ‘em out with [drummer] VENOM”. “It was just the three of us in some shitty room in [VENOM’s] house that his cat was living in; we were [acting] like we were 17! Amps just goin’, ‘RrrrraaaAHHHH!’” Unsurprisingly, the cat ran straight outta there. “Then we just kinda went in and recorded it,” Barker continues. “So we’d only played the songs probably twice before we recorded ‘em and then, you know, I’d just play bass on it and get Michael [Hubbard] to come in and sing some stuff and it was how records should be made; [we] didn’t second-guess any of it and just did it really quickly.” Although The Heartache State record came together quickly, Barker always exercises stringent quality control. “The only thing that I can control in my bizarre musical career is what records I put out,” he stresses, “and as long as I look back at them and go, ‘It’s a good record,’ that’s the only thing I can control…” 

He’s tried to get on festival bills for quite some time now, but to no avail. “Everybody wants to play a festival, for obvious reasons,” Barker bemoans. “If I could do Meredith and Boogie, then I could drop dead happy, you know? They’re the good two. That’s kind of why I started this band… [So] we could just play some fuckin’ dumb rock’n’roll and hopefully get on a few of these things.”