"It’s My Job To Keep Out The Way And Let People Dance Or Fuck"

Already settled into a corner booth at rock’n’roll favourite, Yellow Bird Café in Windsor, The Bamboos bandleader Lance Ferguson and Tim Rogers are discussing how to seat their older relatives comfortably during their upcoming tour. Ferguson is dressed neatly in a chambray shirt with Don Draper hair and Rogers wears a check shirt over white t-shirt combo (probably a classic Bonds chesty, actually) with that trademark tousled quiff. There are fries on the table, the beer’s a-flowing and it’s immediately apparent these gents have formed a mutual admiration society. Rogers is “doing a Shakespeare course at the moment” and drops an impressive word into the conversation (apocryphal – look it up). “I’m just using words I don’t properly understand,” he jokes. 

The first time Rogers featured on a song by The Bamboos was 2012’s I Got Burned, which sees the legendary You Am I frontman’s foxy falsetto strutting alongside an unforgettable, hip-hypnotising riff. Rogers admits he was “knocked out to be asked” to work with The Bamboos. This collaboration definitely deserved further exploration and Ferguson admits he was happy to leave the lyrical side of their resulting The Rules Of Attraction long-player to Rogers. “What Tim does with the written word is insanely great,” he extols. “But Tim didn’t just do that, he also came in with melodic ideas and chord changes for songs as well.”

"The who’s who of whatever coming down and his mum’s still coming out and hanging the washing on the line"

“I’ve had a jam with Keith Richards, but no one is cooler than Lance Ferguson,” Rogers gushes. “I’ll throw some lyric at him and then he’ll go [nods serenely], and then about half an hour later he’ll go, ‘I really like that lyric, Tim.’” Rogers points out this is a contrast, “‘Cause I’m so girlishly enthusiastic about everything, you know, ‘Oh, fuck, Lance, fuck! This sounds like this and this sounds like this, and I didn’t know you liked The Police – wow!’ 

“For a songwriter like Lance, and for the band, [to] ask you to do something, it’s intimidating, of course, but also you think, ‘I don’t wanna fuck up a band I love,’ you know?” Rogers then shares some internal dialogue: “‘But if they asked me, it must be something about me, you know? They don’t want me to be a rhythm and blues singer, or a soul singer, it’s just me!’ And you go into this deep, dark hole of thinking, ‘What am I?’ A bit self-evaluating, which is never good for a mentally ill person, and then you think, ‘Well it must be something,’ and then you go in and do your thing and Lance AutoTunes it all.” Ferguson interjects, “I did not!” 

Ferguson confirms he has now made 21 albums with producer John Castle. “No shit!” Rogers exclaims. Then Ferguson clarifies, “Over the last 17 or 18 years or something.” And what’s Castle’s studio, The Shed, like? “The Shed is literally a shed that is just in John Castle’s backyard in the beautiful, leafy green suburbs of east Melbourne, Canterbury. And he grew up in that house, The Shed was there and then I think his dad bought him an old four-track reel-to-reel when he was 14 or 15, and he set it up.” Ferguson commends, “And now, you know, he produced Vance Joy’s number one triple j Hottest 100 track [Riptide] and all this shit, and it’s still in that same shed… He has everyone from Tim Rogers to the who’s who of whatever coming down and his mum’s still coming out and hanging the washing on the line, and his dad’s cutting up some timber.”

“I’ll stand on the side, possibly sketching them [laughs]”

When The Bamboos started, Ferguson recalls, “We were trying to imitate a band from New Orleans called The Meters.” This was around the time when bands began promoting their music via MySpace and Ferguson shares, “I wouldn’t say ‘rise’, because we haven’t ascended to any, haha, great level, but, look, the rise of The Bamboos as a band kind of mirrored this whole time where musicians started realising there was a need for boring things such as self-promotion. I remember setting up MySpace pages, like, that was essential. In some ways I’ve watched the arc of this whole [social media] thing and, it’s funny, 15 years later and I’m a little bit sort of jack of it… If you talk to people now, everybody’s like, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta social stuff’.” 

“Social?” Rogers enquires. “I thought that meant just going to the pub.” 

To this pair of ears, the album’s title track calls to mind the wonderful Boogie Shoes by KC & The Sunshine Band. “That’s my favourite track and it should’ve been the single, Lance,” Rogers teases. After claiming he can “find a way of dancing to anything apart from electronic dance music”, Rogers adds, “I like music with pockets for people to move to and that’s what I love about The Bamboos, ‘cause it’s dance music, it’s fucking music and god forbid if I’m gonna be a singer who’s gonna step on that, you know? So it’s my job to keep out the way and let people dance or fuck. I’ll stand on the side, possibly sketching them [laughs].”