Hands Like Houses

They’re probably one of the most prolific post-hardcore exports Australia’s ever had. A mainstay on the Vans Warped Tour circuit, Hands Like Houses have racked up an impressive 15 full US tours and nine full UK tours, stats only the most hard-working of bands manage to achieve. 

It’s interesting then that their new album Anon. works off the idea that you don’t need to have an emotional tie to an artist, to have an emotional tie to the artist’s music. I feel like that’s often the point of this column – you may not know who an artist is, but sometimes these stories resonate, stick with you, remind you of your own past, or at the very least make you laugh.  

Given they’ve done their fair share of hours on the road, singer Trenton Woodley’s stories are unsurprisingly about the road and the many mishaps they often faced. And the St Petersburg Triangle.  

Truth 

Trenton: We have a tendency to lose people in St Petersburg – the one in Florida, not Russia.  

Uppy: I was gonna say, in Russia?! 

T: We’ve played Warped Tour a number of shows there and I think THREE times, I’m trying to remember the third instance, we’ve lost someone at least twice after shows. Just completely disappeared off the face of the planet. 

U: Wuuuut!

T: It took a while to find them again. So first time, it was Warped Tour and Joel’s brother was actually riding with us for a bit. And um we were kind of hanging out, as you do on Warped Tour, and we kind of got to bus call time and we were all rolling out to the next show which I think was Palm Beach, and we just realised, ‘Hold on, where’s Danny?’ And we went up and down the park because it’s next to this little seaside park and up and down and back and forth, just calling for him and looking for him, and couldn’t find him. We ended up having to leave and he turned up two shows later! 

U: WHAT!  

T: He’d left his phone and wallet on the van and everything, so he had a bit of an adventure to hitchhike around!  

U: Oh. My. God. 

T: I think he turned up the next night but I’d gone to bed by that time so just two days later he rocked up! Somehow managed to hitchhike his way there, fell asleep on a park bench outside the van which is how we missed him.  

U: Oh man… I can’t believe you were like, 'Man down, let’s keep moving!’  

T: Well, it was one of the brothers and not one of the band and the next day, we had to go and we were like, ‘Well what do we do at this point?’ [laughs] We certainly didn’t leave him with no stone unturned but yeah, we kind of did our due diligence and did the best we could and couldn’t find him and we were like, ‘Well what do we do?!’ Hope he turns up and get on with it.  

U: He found his way like a lost puppy! They sniffed… snuffed?!... you out! 

T: It felt a bit like that! Even then, it wouldn’t necessarily have been the story except for the fact that the next time we were there on Warped Tour two years later, Coops went missing! 

U: Oh no… 

T: Yep, same place, same night. 

U: Same venue? 

T: Same venue. Basically we’d gone for beers at the local pub, and Coops had maybe left 15-20 mins before the rest of us at the bar to walk back to where the buses were parked, and everyone else got back and thought, ‘Hang on, where’s Coops?’ Basically did the same thing – walked up and down the park, back to the bar, looking down every street, every bar still open, asking security if anyone had seen this guy… 

U: Oh wow. 

T: We’re like, ‘Shit here we go again.’ In both instances it was like, ‘Shit, what do we do? How do we deal with it?’ It’s gotten to the point where we don’t know what else to do. We ended up calling the local police and as it was, because I think we’d initially called and there was nothing there, but they called back and said, ‘Hang on there is someone here.’ As we were leaving St Pete’s to go to the next show, we figured Coops had gotten drunk and befriended someone or something but we turned around to pick him up and apparently he’d been arrested for jaywalking which is one of the most ridiculous things in the world, and even then the definition of jaywalking was him walking onto the road just to go around a crowd of people building around the club.  

U: WOW. 

T: And the cop arrested him for jaywalking but then put on the ticket, ‘drunk and disorderly’ which has created a few challenges for us every time we go through security now. It always comes up on his record.  

U: Oh no way. 

T: Every time trying to get in and out of the US he was always getting flagged and taken aside and we’re laughing, ‘Oh here you go again Coops.’ So we played St Pete’s one more time on Warped Tour last year and we were very very particular and I don’t think we lost anyone that time. 

U: You were like, 'STICK TOGETHER GANG!' 

T: Pretty much – head count, buddy system. 

U: That’s kind of funny, it’s almost like there’s a Bermuda Triangle type shit going on there. 

T: Yeah maybe, I mean Florida’s a pretty scary place, I definitely wouldn’t wanna get lost there myself.  

Truth 

T: In very early touring days, we had this old bus that we nicknamed Thor. It was an old shuttle bus – if you’ve ever been to LAX, you would’ve seen these big white shuttle buses. 

U: That take you between the terminals? 

T: Yeah, and they’re obviously a very different shape than in Australia but we had one of those that we kind of converted into a touring/campervan/bunk vehicle. We bought that early on, thinking we could hire ones and do that but it would be so much money and not very comfortable, so we thought we’d buy one for tour. 

But unfortunately being a band on a budget in the early days, we basically had to buy something cheap and that came with its fair share of mechanical problems. So we landed for the tour in LA, had to get through to somewhere in the middle of the country to start the tour. We were driving up through the back of Arizona in the mountains and we went up this hill, our signal dropped out, and of course halfway up this MASSIVE hill that we didn’t even know was there, but it just went up and up and up. And the van packed it in. 

U: Oh no, and you had no cell phone service. 

T: No service, middle of absolute nowhere. Just out in the woods in the back of Arizona. 

U: Was it daytime or nighttime? 

T: I think it was like, veryyy, very early morning. We had to stop, check it out and sleep for a few hours.  

U: Yeah. 

T: It was thankfully just a busted fanbelt, not the end of the world but when you’re in the middle of nowhere… [laughs] We kind of sat around waiting for ages until a car came past. My brother and I think Matty our drummer hitchhiked into the next town which was about 50 miles, about 80 km away. 

U: Shiiit. 

T: With this lovely, lovely Mexican couple. American couple as much as anything but the only reason I identify them as Mexican is because they didn’t speak TONS of English. So basically the boys jumped in the back of the ute to the next town and about four hours later, we’re pretty hungry, pretty bored. 

U: So did they bring back a mechanic or?  

T: They managed to get the parts we needed but even then, getting the part was [a mission], like one mechanic would go, ‘Oh I don’t have that part but this guy in the next town might!’  

U: [groans] 

T: They had a bit of their own adventure. The rest of us basically sat in the back of the van, we had a table set up and we were playing cards and trying not to think about how long we could be. Absolutely remote.  

U: And when they got back you fixed it yourselves? 

T: Yeah, thankfully, they knew what was wrong and were able to get the part and the tools. We’re very lucky in that regard that it wasn’t more significant because that has happened to a lot of bands. I don’t think we’ve ever driven that way again! I think it was a random little route we had to take from like Nevada to Oklahoma.  

Lie 

T: This is not so much a lie but very not true.  

U: [laughs] Perfect! 

T: This is from the very early days of the band. I had a studio rig back in those days that I had up in my bedroom back in 2010ish? We were writing our first record and demoing stuff, all that fun stuff. We were almost midway through a demo and writing some vocals, and we heard like a knock-knock-knock at the door. 

U: Mmmmmmmm? 

T: My housemate comes to me and he’s like, ‘Ummm Trenton. The police are here.’ I’m like, ‘Whaaaa?’ Like, we haven’t been working that loudly to get a noise complaint. So we go out the front kind of sheepishly and go, ‘Heeey… what’s going on?’ and the officer says, ‘Out of curiosity… we’ve had reports of a women screaming coming from this house.’ 

U: Whaaaaat! 

T: ‘We just wanted to make sure no one was being held here against their will…’ and I’m like, ‘Uuuuh…’ I just had this moment of, ‘What the hell,’ then I had this realisation that, ‘Oh you are kidding.’ 

U: What is it you screaming?! 

T: Yeah! I was recording vocals and screaming one of the higher parts of the record, trying to figure it out and somehow my neighbour interpreted that as, ‘Let me out,’ which to this day I haven’t figured out what the actual lyric was. Apparently they thought someone was being held in the house and the police did a bit of a walkthrough.

U: Yeah, wow! Did you have to kind of, prove it to them? Like were you like, ‘Here, this is the vocal take!’  

T: I mean, they had a walkthrough and I said we were recording vocals in here, it’s kind of metal-ish music so it’s loud and high but… 

 Hands Like Houses just released their fourth record, Anon., which you can listen to now. They’re currently on the road in the UK and US but will be back in Australia for a headline tour in February 2019.  

If you’re a musician and have some stories to share and some secrets to tell – be it hilarious or heartbreaking, humiliating or honourable – send us an email at twotruthscolumn[at]gmail.com. 

We might be telling the whole world about the time you accidentally killed your brother’s pet snake and replaced it without anyone knowing in no time.