Defiantly Australian Made

When The Snowdroppers first hit local stages, bringing with them some of the theatrical baggage that came from the world of burlesque within which they formed, their image was all '30s American gangster hip and blue-collar muscle spouting a mission statement to 'bring the sex and sweat of the classic juke joints that spawned the blues'. In amongst the “work song” blues sensibility was the odd banjo, which brought in a country aspect to a very stylised look and sound.

It's taken them three-and-a-half years to follow up their debut album, Too Late To Pray, but with Moving Out Of Eden The Snowdroppers have worked hard to redefine their music to reflect the fact that, for all that they presented before, they're very much an Australian band.

“After the first album,” Johnny Wishbone explains, “we'd done so many miles on the road, it was basically all we had, you know what I mean? We're a live band, always been a live band – and we were just touring so much I guess after a while, at least I did, started feeling a simpatico with those bands that had come before that had just done the hard yards and just kind played hard and didn't really worry about what else was going. It was just hit the road and play hard, you know, to that kind of grass roots following, if you will.

“I guess it was important to us, with this album, to sound more like us. The first album, kind of throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks, we'd kind of settled into our own skin a bit more and our own skin is Australian skin.”

So allowing the Australian accent to come through a lot more was a pretty conscious decision. “We did have a bunch of songs we wrote, sort of after Too Late To Pray,” Pauly K continues, “some of which made it to the playing stage and things, some didn't. We were writing, but I think we did end up with quite a few songs that we ended up just canning, I guess, after a while. It wasn't so much that they were bad songs – it was just more that it was more of the same, and we kind of got a little bored of playing them.”

“Maybe whether it was conscious or subconscious,” Johnny adds, “we were perhaps, in that early stage of writing after Too Late To Pray, kind of still maybe playing up to what we thought people wanted us to be, you know what I mean? Then I kind of had a bit of an epiphany that, like, people don't really know me but it was kind of a big deal for me just to kind of work out in my own head that you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.

“If we made Too Late To Pray Part 2, which we really didn't want to do – it wouldn't satisfy us – some people would love it and some people would hate it. If we made the album that we wanted to make and kind of develop and do what we wanted to do, some people are probably going to like it and some people are probably going to hate it. So you might as well do what you want to do. So from then on, yeah I guess we kind of scrapped a lot of songs and just went with the gut.

“I guess we realised too, at the end of the day, we're just a rock band. We're not a bluegrass band, we're not a country band, we're not even a very good blues band,” he laughs, “to be honest. We realised, yeah we're just a rock band, albeit with some of those influences, so I guess we just allowed that [to] shine through, and coming back to the kind of pub rock thing, that's Australian pub rock, I guess from the '70s, very much influenced by the blues. I mean you had Chain and those sorts of bands, but then right through, I guess, Skyhooks obviously and Midnight Oil and all these bands that still had a real sort of, well, rock but also obviously had very obvious pop sensibility as well.”

As reluctant as they are to use the word, they suggest that they've “matured” as musicians, and the album certainly opens things up much more than the debut, the arrangements more complex and musical. “Some of the songs, I guess, went the other way,” Pauly admits, “like Excavating – first track – that's basically, except for the last 32-bars, the entire song is basically one note. So it was really kind of seeing how basic we could make a blues song,” he chuckles. “Just drrrrrrr. It's all built around the rhythm and the drums, I guess, more so than a chord progression. So we had a bit of, I guess you could call it branching out in that regard.”

“We're constantly fighting with our drummer over this,” Johnny chips in. “We were a lot more conscious of just serving the song a lot more rather than this ideal of what we happen to be – 'No, we've got to put this in there because that's what people like about us; it's got to have a boom-ta boom-ta boom-ta banjo song or it's got be brass or it's got to be…'”

“Chuck in a guitar solo!” Pauly pipes up. “Where's the harmonic?”

“It was serving the song,” Johnny continues, “you know what I mean? And I think it was just such a rewarding experience doing that and recording that [rather] than doing something just to please someone else. And let's put it this way, there was a lot more thought put into the lyrics this time 'round rather than going, 'We're recording next week, have you finished those lyrics yet?'” he laughs.

While their fans might have been expecting Moving Out Of Eden to be much more like Too Late To Pray, when you set up a visual image and stage persona as strong as the one The Snowdroppers have been presenting for the past half dozen years they've been playing the traps, whatever preconceptions fans might have are greatly amplified, and attempts to break out of those preconceptions can be incredibly difficult. Take KISS, for instance – when they decided they wanted to 'mature' and took off the makeup, they nearly blew their whole career. Perhaps the best local example – and The Snowdroppers reference them in the album's last track, the quietly scathing life-on-the-road Plaster, in the line, “You've got to save me Shirley 'cause all my friends are getting married too-oo-oo” – is Skyhooks, whose at the time quite bizarre visual image captured the zeitgeist but trapped them in aspic as our own “cartoon popsters”, just as quickly dismissed when they tried to broaden their musical context.

“We are a very theatrical band,” Johnny concedes. “That is inherent in what we do. I think it's all about… Buddha says to find a middle way. And I guess that first album was kind of on one extreme of this, visually so stylised, which was cool at the time – it was fun to play dress-ups, you know what I mean?” he laughs. “But it was just so extreme, and that's always something… I've always felt it's very, very important to have a strong visual brand. It's so boring seeing a band in T-shirts and jeans on stage doing that, but at the same I think [what we were doing] was a little bit extreme and it's narrowing kind of closer to who we really are this time 'round. I don't want to say it's dumbing it down – it's always gonna to be there, and we're happy for to be there…”

“It's fun to have all that to play around with,” adds Pauly, “to be able to do over the top stuff.”

“It helps you get in the mindset,” Johnny concludes. “Kind of put on the suit, as it were. I'm sure that's the same for a lot of artists, but I guess it's kind of lining it up where we're at as a band now. We're not the same band that recorded that album that we've been speaking about for the last 20 minutes. So it's about getting it to match again. If we kept that kind of extreme sort of thing, it wouldn't marry up.”

“Funny though,” Pauly adds, “saying people kind of take visual things as a shortcut, and I mean, the entire time we've been together, people see the banjo and like a vest or something, and you see a write-up… 'Snowdroppers are folk/rockabilly!' And we're like,” scratching his head, “oh, er, alright.”

“It can be a little bit misleading perhaps,” Johnny suggests, and then in reference to some of the bands they've been lumped in with the past couple of years by lazy music journalists, “I'd like to put it on record that I hate Mumford & Sons!”

The Snowdroppers are playing the following dates:

Friday 15 March - Adelaide Festival, Adelaide SA
Friday 22 March - The Standard, Surry Hills NSW
Thursday 28 to Friday 29 March - Bluesfest, Byron Bay NSW
Friday 5 April - Northcote Social Club, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 6 April - The Bridge Hotel, Castlemaine VIC
Friday 12 April - The Zoo, Fortitude Valley QLD
Saturday 13 April - Woombye Pub, Sunshine Coast QLD