"[It's] not a good smell - six guys in a stuffy van who haven't showered for two weeks. We can't notice, but I'm sure everyone else can."
The Ocean Party are a bunch of hygieneless young men. "I guess I would say that it's not an unusual occurrence for us to not shower for a week or two while we're away on the road," reveals guitarist Lachlan Denton."[It's] not a good smell - six guys in a stuffy van who haven't showered for two weeks. We can't notice, but I'm sure everyone else can."
"I was drunk one night and the whole [idea came from] just talking about really intense close ups of body parts so that there was a bit of mystery about what exactly you were looking at."
This off-putting revelation comes off the back of his explanation (we needed one) of their Back Bar video clip — PSA, avoid eating before sitting down for a gander at this clip. It features band members singing in various states of undress, spliced with unnerving close ups of indecipherable body parts covered in equally indecipherable glop. We spy an armpit, a neck muscle - also known as the sternocleidomastoid - tummy rolls... the rest? Dunno. "I think there was some Vaseline in there and a bunch of moisturisers all things like that," Denton laughs. "I was drunk one night and the whole [idea came from] just talking about really intense close ups of body parts so that there was a bit of mystery about what exactly you were looking at. And then Matt [Cribb, director] brought along a bunch of creams and it just went from there." Did that clip finally warrant a decent scrub in the tub? "We probably didn't shower at all, we went straight to the pub after [filming] I think," he admits, not at all sheepish. "We spend enough time travelling around in a van being gross, that's not the half of it."
As pungent as they might be on the road and in front of the camera, they've earned the right to avoid general cleanliness. The Melbourne six-piece have barely taken any time between smashing out six LPs in seven years on top of their own individual projects. Restless is their sixth instalment, but "there's a massive backlog of songs, the [seventh] record is done after this one." Their Speedy Gonzales attitude can be attributed to the fact that "I think everyone knows when to leave something, when to kinda go 'yep, that's done'. I guess the thing with most bands who don't get out a lot of material, I think it's fiddling... For us, our albums are like a snapshot in time... as soon as people stretch records out over five years, it's a different thing."
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Between relentless touring and DIY recording, Lachlan and his brother Zac (drums) play in an outfit called Ciggie Witch with Liam Halliwell (guitar), who also performs under his solo project Snowy Nasdaq and with Emma Russack and Totally Mild, Curtis Wakeling (guitar) sprouts tunes through his project Velcro, Jordan Thompson does "some stuff under his own name" as does Zac, Mark Rogers (bass) has "a hip hop project under Crowman, which is a part gag - I don't know, no one knows if that's a gag or not", and Denton himself occasionally performs under his own name.
Phew! No wonder showering gets put on the back-burner.