'I Have A Really Small Dick'

“I have a really small dick,” says Leroy Macqueen, the 27-year-old guitarist/vocalist for raucous rockers The Gooch Palms. It’s quite the rock-interview confession, yet not a shameful secret. If you’ve ever seen the Novocastrian duo – which Macqueen shares with his girlfriend, drummer/vocalist Kat Friend – play live, then you’ve likely seen the cock in question.

“I get one hundred per cent naked."

“I just get it out there,” Macqueen shrugs. “I get one hundred per cent naked. And because we put everything out there, there’s nothing that people can say, nothing that can hurt us. That’s who me and Kat are. We don’t really care what anyone thinks, we do what we want.”

“We’re not great musicians,” Friend offers. “We just try and get up there and be as entertaining as possible.” And, so, a Gooch Palms show doesn’t just deliver their jams, a steady barrage of two-minute songs played by a two-piece whose drummer plays all of two drums. But, with its nudity, costumes and performative banter, there’s a heady dose of theatre. On stage, Macqueen and Friend have the presence of gifted actors, both revealing something incredibly personal of themselves, while going to a place beyond the everyday.

“I’m a big fan of musical theatre,” admits Macqueen. “One of my hobbies is to sit on YouTube and just watch endless hours of concerts. From Metallica and Kiss to Miley Cyrus, GG Allin, David Bowie and then maybe a Rocky Horror Picture Show live performance. I’m into performers who are really theatrical, and I’ll take inspiration from anywhere.”

“A lot of people expect Leroy, when he gets off stage, to want to come and snort coke off their boners, to get crazy with them,”

Such theatricality is rare in indie circles, but taps into a history of flamboyant rockers from New York Dolls through Hunx & His Punx. It’s also something that Macqueen reserves for the stage, even if those who’ve seen his junk may find that had to reconcile. “A lot of people expect Leroy, when he gets off stage, to want to come and snort coke off their boners, to get crazy with them,” says Friend. “They want to jump on him and wrestle. Dudes, especially. And he’s like, ‘No, the show’s over, I wanna have a quiet drink and talk to people, not jump up on a table and dance naked.’ That’s reserved for the shows. He’s not a wild and crazy guy when he’s at home watching TV. If he was, that’d be intolerable.”

Home, for The Gooch Palms, is Newcastle. They were both born there to parents who were “regular, normal Novocastrians”. And, after living in Sydney for three years, they willingly chose to return there even though, as Friend accepts, “everyone knows Newcastle is a bit shit”. But as the place they grew up, home to friends and family, The Gooch Palms have embraced their hometown.

They wore it on their sleeve of their debut LP, 2013’s Novo’s, whose title is slang for those who hail from Newcastle. Its title track, however, is less homage than critique: “Nothing ever seems to change/another generation gone to waste,” sings Macqueen, as the song’s refrain; “9-5, that’s how a Novo lives their life/At 65, they come alive, buy the RV, ready to die,” Friend replies. Then Hunter Street Mall is a grim, satirical portrait of the socio-economic straits (“all the smackies are lined up to pick up the dole”) within which they were born.

“Newcastle, it’s just Newcastle,” Macqueen says, more aphoristically than redundantly. “There’s no bullshit about it. You’re dealing with crackheads and deros on a daily basis. It’s a constant reality-check of 15-year-old pregnant chicks screaming at their boyfriends at the train station. If you’re here too much, it can get too much, it can get you down. But we spend so much time away from Newcastle that every time we come back home, we’re glad to. We love this place. Everyone’s a smart-arse here, and no one can dare be pretentious. If you were, you’d likely be chewed-up and spat out. You’ve always gotta check yourself living here. Newcastle one hundred per cent made me and Kate who we are, and made The Gooch Palms who we are.”

Growing up, Newcastle inspired Macqueen to start playing in bands (he formed his first at 14), to get naked (“parties are always really loose in Newcastle, there’s always a lot of nudity”) and to drop out of high school (“I was never the guy who had ambitions to go to university; I was always too dumb, and always a little strange”). But the path to rock’n’roll debauchery for Friend, a graphic designer who assembles all of The Gooch Palms’ artwork and claims she can’t play a standard drum-kit, was a little more unexpected. Though even her earliest dreams were of being a pop-star – “I’d be in the bath, singing into the taps when my mum was trying to wash my hair” – debilitating anxiety meant that she never got up in front of the class to speak aloud, let alone got on stage. The first time she ever performed was The Gooch Palms’ first show, in 2011, where they played at a backyard party in Newcastle. “As soon as we finished, the first thing I did was run upstairs and call my dad, but I was so nervous I could barely hold the phone,” Friend explains. “It was such a huge deal for me, even if it was a nothing thing for everyone else.”

From the start, The Gooch Palms conceived of their band in conceptual terms. “I’d never played guitar before, and Kat had never been in a band before, so whilst we learnt to play our instruments, we used to talk a lot about the idea of the band,” Macqueen recounts. “We always loved glam-rock, so we knew, from the start, that we wanted to be a visual band. And musically, we only have a floor-tom, snare and guitar, so we were always going to be, like, Ramonesy power-chords, two-minute songs, not too much bullshit.”

"We were always going to be, like, Ramonesy power-chords, two-minute songs, not too much bullshit.”

That musical debt produced Shitty Tribute To The Ramones, a six-song set of, obviously, covers issued online, for free, in their early days. Their successive releases – 2012’s R U 4 Sirius? EP and first LP, Novo’s – chart their evolution, the band honing their craft, and sense of themselves, over an endless run of shows, opportunities that the band never expected to come their way. “There’s no way we thought we were ever going to play things like the Big Day Out or the Sydney Festival,” says Macqueen. “Or tour another country. Or even put a record out! I think that’s what’s good about it, because every tiny thing that happens in this band we appreciate it so much… Anything we wish that we can do that then actually happens, it’s like high-five city.”

Though they were conceived with little ambition, The Gooch Palms are now entering their most ambitious phase. They’ve just booked one-way tickets to the US, leaving the safety, comfort and jobs of Newcastle behind. In North America, they’re now represented by Panache, the booking agent for Ty Segall, White Fence, Thee Oh Sees and Mac DeMarco, as well as fellow Australian acts King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Twerps. A 2014 tour found them playing at infamous garage-rock pile-up Gonerfest in Memphis and, unexpectedly, in front of André 3000 in Detroit. This time, they’ll be nominally based in Los Angeles and hope to spend a month in Michigan making their second LP (“We want it to be a ‘raising the bar’ kind of record,” Friend says), but foresee spending most of 2015 on the road, with tour dates booked solid from March through July.

For the duo, it’s akin to living the dream, Friend daring to speak aloud the cliché that performing gives them a “natural high” beyond drugs. There are no fears about things going awry, with the band founded on their own relationship. “Because we’re a couple, it never gets too difficult,” says MacQueen. “We don’t have that tour van filled with lots of different competing personalities. We don’t have partners back at home. Kat and I are quite similar, if one of us is pissed off about something, the other one’s probably pissed off about the same thing. I think that’s why it’s lasted so long, and why we’ve been able to play so many shows. It doesn’t seem, to us, to be a huge deal to go out and play 18 shows in a row. Because we love playing live. And we actually like each other.”