Gooch Palms: Putting In Hard Yards Without Sacrificing Their Garage Charm

Newcastle garage-pop duo The Gooch Palms may have recently returned to their hometown – having spent a couple of years using LA as a base from which to launch their seemingly endless cycle of US tours – but that doesn’t mean that their international ambitions have abated. 

Indeed, if anything, their focus has spread even further abroad, and now that the globetrotting pair, Leroy Macqueen (guitar/vocals) and Kat Friend (drums/vocals), are armed with their persuasive third album III, they’re hoping it will unlock even more kingdoms for them to overthrow with their messy, goodtime aesthetic.

“We got back to Australia last year, but then we went back [to the States] earlier this year to do 40 shows because we hadn’t toured there in a couple of years,” the affable Macqueen explains. “We had a ball living in America, it just went too quick – I wish we could have held onto it for a bit longer. 

“It’s a lot of hard work touring the States and we’ve since spread our wings to take on Europe and the UK as well, and we’ve even had some offers to go to Russia next year, so the doors just keep opening!”

Excitingly their first forays into Europe – where Australian rock’n’roll is cherished in many countries – paid more immediate dividends than the notoriously fractured and hard-to-crack American market. “Oh yeah, they love it over there,” the singer smiles. “I wish the rest of the world was like Europe – they love it! I think Australia’s the best when it comes to crowds, and I’m not just saying that to sound nice or whatever – we really do have it the best over here. 

“America’s such a hard slog, but we have such a cult following over there now so this last tour was the first time we’d sold out shows and stuff, like all the hard work was finally paying off – it was really cool to see. 

“We still had nights playing in say St Louis, Missouri on a Monday to three people, but we’ve been around the block enough times now to not let that get us down too much. And sometimes you have the best time on nights like that hanging out with the three people who turned up, sitting at the bar with them, and we’re notorious for turning those three people into a barroom of people, so we never get too down about that stuff. 

“It’s better than the alternative, which is going back to work or whatever, so we’re really appreciative that anyone shows up!”

“It’s the happiest I’ve ever been with anything we’ve done."

Macqueen concedes that The Gooch Palms have it easier working overseas markets than some of their contemporaries because being a two-piece keeps expenses down, while the fact that they’re in a relationship outside the band makes extended sojourns so much easier. 

“I don’t know that it would work for a lot of bands, because me and Kat are a couple it makes it pretty easy to just uproot and go,” he reflects. “It would be pretty hard to convince a group of people to do it, although it happens enough – King Gizzard do it and Dune Rats and Skeggs are doing it, the list just goes on these days. 

“I feel that it’s a lot easier to get over there and do stuff now, and I feel like they just love Australians everywhere we go. I don’t know if that’s a cocky thing to say but it just seems that way.”

Not only are The Gooch Palms killing it globally on the live front but they’ve really lifted their game in the studio as well, III representing their most confident and assured statement to date – without sacrificing any of their inherent cheeky charm.

“It’s the happiest I’ve ever been with anything we’ve done,” Macqueen beams. “This one was the first one where we had the chance to demo a shit-ton of songs and then cut it down, and the first time we’ve ever gone into a ‘big boys' studio’ and gone in with no idea about how the songs were going to come out. 

“It was cool, it was kinda like a long process but because I decided that I wanted to do the vocals at home myself – just because I felt more comfortable like that – so it was like we recorded the album everywhere. Some of the songs were recorded in LA but that’s the beauty of how you’ve basically got a portable studio now in your laptop. 

“So I was recording stuff and Marfa Lights on the album is the actual demo version! The reason that there is any drum machines on the album was because I was using it as a songwriting tool to just make an 808 beat, but when we put Kat’s drums on that one we found that we liked it more sparse. 

“It’s just one of those things, we just had a little bit more time and money. We were kind of burned out from touring so just decided to chill last year and it was good because we got to bounce ideas back and forth after the initial recording, which was really, really fun. 

“I feel like these days there’s no rules about how you do things and it’s cool like that – you don’t have to go and spend three weeks in a studio and you have to come out with a finished product, because everything’s like an open source now so if you have the program you can send it back and forth with Dylan [Adams], our producer: I was doing guitar overdubs at home!

“Because a lot of times you finish your album and then you start playing the songs live and you start changing things and the songs kind of get a bit better than what’s on the record, so this time we had a bit more time – maybe three or four months – to take bits out and put little bits in, it was awesome. It was a really fun experience and it’s definitely the album we’ve always wanted to make, so we can go back and write another Novo’s now,” he laughs heartily.

Novo’s, of course, is The Gooch Palms’ 2013 debut, a relatively scrappy lo-fi punk affair which perfectly encapsulated their sound at the time but which became the jumping-off point for a few years of continual growth.

“None of it’s been forced by us, it’s all just circumstantial,“ Macqueen insists. “With Novo’s we had no money and just recorded it all ourselves in the bedroom, then we got a government grant to go record [2016 follow-up] Introverted Extroverts with Bill Skibbe and we wanted to go for it then but he said, ‘No!’ because he’d heard Novo’s and said, ‘Whey don’t we go the next step up from that one?’ 

“And I’m very thankful for that actually, because I was going into that one wanting it to come out like a huge-sounding album and was potentially going to have to get other members and stuff, and he kind of reined it in.

“Now people are asking me if there’s been a bit of a trilogy with this one being called III and I kinda think it might be: it might be the full-stop, and now we can kinda go and do whatever we want. We’ve already started messing around with ideas of what we could do next, so we’ll see.”

Interestingly, Macqueen can trace this period of ramped up artistic ambition and evolution back to one specific tour in 2016, when they – alongside fellow Oz rock reprobates DZ Deathrays and Dune Rats – joined Brisbane rockers Violent Soho on the massive sold-out national tour to promote their album, Waco. 

“A lot of it traces back to one specific moment, and that was being on that Waco tour with Violent Soho,” he grins. “You can see all three bands who they brought along – look at Dune Rats, look at DZ and now look at us – everyone really stepped it up after that that, big time. 

“Dune Rats put out a number one album, then DZ have just been smashing it – I feel like all of us were better off from that tour by the end of it, because we just got to witness how if you put in the effort and the hard work what can come back.”

And with The Gooch Palms about to embark on their own national tour in support of III, Macqueen explains that just because the new tunes sound relatively sophisticated on record, fans shouldn’t expect any less mayhem in the live realm.

“It’s a lot different writing for Gooch Palms than for any other thing I’ve done because you still have to consider what we have in our armoury: just floor tom, snare, cymbal and guitar,” he offers. “So in the back of your head while you’re writing, even with this one, I was thinking, ‘We’ve still got to play this live as a two-piece.’ 

“So it is a lot bigger sounding, but I remember seeing Ty Segall many years ago and he had a ballad called Girlfriend and he launched into it live with the full band and it was the heaviest song of the set, so it’s always stuck with me not to worry too much about the matching the studio and live aspects [of the band] because they’re just so different.

“We could have gone and got a keyboard player and a bass player to play live because there are a lot of things on this album, but I just went, ‘Fuck it, we are what we are live and it will be loud and abrasive, and I like that.’ I’ve always been a big believer of keeping the two areas separate.”

Getting back on stage is what Macqueen is jonesing for the most, having sustained a war wound on the band’s most recent American sortie. 

“I just can’t wait to be honest, I wish it was starting today,” he enthuses about the Aussie tour. “I’m definitely going to be coming out of the blocks at 100 miles an hour because I haven’t played guitar since the US tour after I absolutely fucked my shoulder three shows in. I tore the muscle off the bone and [have] been getting cortisone shots and haven’t been able to play the guitar, but I’ve got the all clear now.

“I had to do 38 shows in agony, it was just swollen the whole time – I got it from loading in, my guitar case fell over and took me down a gutter with it. It was one of those things, I’ve played rugby league my whole life so it’s nothing new – you’ve just got to play through it. 

“So we got back and I received the ‘not too bad news’, but it’s made me even hungrier to get out and play now – I’m itchin!”