Rollerball: The Lo-Fi Way.

Rollerball play the B Lounge on Thursday and the Waterloo Hotel on Friday.

Rollerball guitarist Talon is a hard man to interview. Not because the band don’t make great music, or because he’s not up for a chat. They do, he is. We just end up off the track, discussing how crap Sylvester Stalone has become, or why Yoda looks so much better as a puppet than as a computer graphic. We’ll start at the beginning.

“Big Day Out was actually the last time we played,” he explains. “After that I went to Europe for a while, I was in Switzerland and I went to France to do some promotion for a disc we’ve got coming out over there. I was mainly just bumming around over there, but I tried to do something constructive as well.”

“It’s been a refreshing break. We’re pretty fired up at the moment. I spent a bit of time up in the Swiss Alps.”

Getting into the skiing?

“Nah, my girlfriend is Swiss, so I was just hanging out with her, but it was pretty inspiring being up in the mountains. I think there night be a few big alpine riffs on the next record. They’ve got to get in line. But we’ve got a backlog of stuff, so the alpine stuff will have to wait for the next one.”

Are we going to see a flugelhorn solo sometime soon…

“You’re inspiring me man,” he laughs. “Those big echoey mountain sounds are always good.”

What’s the deal with the French record?

“They’ve actually put together the first couple of EPs and we’ve given them a few things that we’re laying around in the draw. They also put a couple of our video clips on for the computer minded Europeans to have a look at. Our lo-fi super 8 movies on their digital screens,” he laughs.

I understand you’ve had a reshuffle in the line up.

“Yeah, The Guvnor has retired from rock’n’roll. So we’ve got a new bass player, Junior, who lives in Sydney at the moment. Basically he’s come up and rehearsed with us a couple of times and taken some homework back with him. We’re heading into the studio soon, thank God.”

You guys would be pretty much overdue for a new local release, wouldn’t you?

“Well overdue. There’s quite a back catalogue of tunes to go through and work out what we’re going to put on the record. Whatever seems to be appropriate. We’re just playing yobbo rock. We’re all getting pretty keen to get an album out.”

You’re on the bill for Friday night’s Fu Manchu gig, wasn’t the first Rollerball show done with Fu Manchu on their Action Is Go tour?

“It was originally going to be the first ever Rollerball gig, just the Gold Coast show at the Playroom. I was in another band at the time called Load, and the guys were such huge fans that they had their hearts set on the show, so Load did the support instead. When I got back from Europe and found out they were playing we thought it would be cool to hook up with them.”

As you predicted, the Rollerball remake sucked, do you feel vindicated?

“I told you it would. I told you it would be disgusting. I haven’t seen it, and I never will. It’s in that category of films I’ll never watch, like Ghost or Dirty Dancing. You just can’t beat the originals. Just like rock music, that’s the way it should stay.”