Their sound check finished early. Tim Rogers and drummer Rusty Hopkinson are relaxing on a couch inside The Croxton's band room. Hopkinson is empty-handed, but Rogers nurses a stubbie. "We're pretty notorious for quick rehearsals as well," Rogers observes. Bassist Andy Kent comes in, smiles, looks in the fridge and then leaves the room. You Am I are performing at tonight's relaunch of The Croxton and Hopkinson recalls a brag-worthy gig experience from this venue pre-renos: "I came here when I was living in Melbourne in the early '80s, about 1984 I think, and saw Sweet or Suzi Quatro - one of the two. I saw both of them that year, one of them was at The Croxton. I was a little punk rocker at the time, too, so I remember thinking I was gonna get my head punched in, basically [laughs]." 

You Am I's tenth album, Porridge & Hotsauce, was recorded at Daptone Records in Brooklyn and Hopkinson casually explains, "I've sorta worked for them for a while and, yeah! The studio's just there and they've always said, 'If you ever wanna use it, come use it.'" Rogers admits that prior to booking in studio time at Daptone, You Am I's "impetus started going" when they found themselves "socialising with each other and forgetting about making records". "And then Russ said, 'Hey, look, there's a weekend [available] at the studio and how about it?'" 

"One particularly nice one is that you catch up with people of a similar age, and even if you were a bit of a prat 15 or 20 minutes ago, there's just a shared understanding that, 'Oh, well, that's just the way you are...'"

Hopkinson swoons over "a nice old 8-track tape machine" they recorded on at Daptone, adding, "It was really just cool to stand in that room and make music." The band started recording the day after they landed and Rogers enlightens, "You know, traditionally, we went out and smashed it a bit when we arrived, and we felt really, really intimidated. And then as soon as you're in a room, and you're plugged in and you look at each other, and you think, 'Ah, we've been doing this for 23 years, that's right. One, two, three, four - bang'..." 

"It's kind of a long way to go for it not to work," Hopkinson admits, which cracks Rogers up. The drummer continues, "So we were sweating on it a little bit at the start and it sort of all came together, and it was a lot of fun and quite successful, in the end." Hopkinson labels their engineer Wayne Gordon "a real sweet'art" and, "the most handsome person I know". Rogers confesses he was distracted by "how handsome [Gordon] is". 

Final mixing took place back Melbourne in John Castle's studio "out in the Eastern suburbs", Rogers shares. "Aesthetically I think it would've been displacing if we'd gone from [Daptone] and then had kinda mixed or did some vocal stuff in a big office block  studio... The fact that you're at all times in danger of spilling drinks on the mixing console - it kept us on our toes, you know? To get this right."  

Hopkinson acknowledges, "We just got in there and bashed it out and, you know; the way we do that." He then singles out some of the guests You Am I recruited for this album: "Stevie [Hesketh] our fifth member you could say - our keyboard player, fifth member of just about every band in town, ha ha - played some keys and then some of The Wolfgramm Sisters sang on it so it's nice that there was all these friends." 

"Not one stranger, I think," Rogers stresses. "Just within the kind of extended family." He attributes this to the fact that You Am I have "25 years of playing" under their belts before clarifying, "But it's not really that extended, because they're probably 30 people around the world that are in the gang and now that Russ and Andy are looking at overseas stuff and releases; it's people that we've been dealing with from ten or 20 years ago and I'm not quite sure we've been lovely to everyone, but I think we've been ok with most people we had relationships with.  

"One particularly nice one is that you catch up with people of a similar age, and even if you were a bit of a prat 15 or 20 minutes ago, there's just a shared understanding that, 'Oh, well, that's just the way you are...'" Hopkinson offers, "Style o' the times." Which Rogers flies with, "You know, style o' the times: whatever you're up to or just, kind of, if you're lost in it all and not knowing how to behave... You come across other bands our age - or kids or 70-year-olds - who feel the same; it's being aware of when, someone you know: they wanna climb up that totem pole and they're very careerist. And I applaud ambition, but I think - in music - to keep your ambitions musical is a really good thing, um..." 

"Yeah, it's good to temper the ambition with a little bit of humility sometimes," Hopkinson posits before Rogers chuckles, "Yeah, there's plenty of opportunities for humility." Hopkinson: "Yeah, That can come later!" Which gives cause for Rogers to praise "the guys from Rocket From The Crypt" who the You Am I gents caught up with individually when the San Diego rockers "were out [in Australia] a little while ago". "They were such icons and then heroes, and so amazing to us and really avuncular as well in taking us under their wing in a way... We'll always be friends and I've seen them play to not that many people in a club, and they're a force of nature." He then observes, "And we've done enough of that." 

This scribe's often wondered: Do bands get warned, before they hit the stage, that they may not be about to perform to a full house? "I refuse to listen," Rogers illuminates, "but you get a feeling; you know, when you're going to a club in the country and the car park's pretty empty. 

"If you're gonna let crowd numbers get to you to that point where you're not going to enjoy yourself - it's a wasted opportunity to have a good time. I think the best show we've ever played in our lives was at this joint, a ballroom in Cleveland; it's the one I feel the most affectionate about. We had a big gig the night before in Philadelphia with The Strokes - a big ol' night - and we're all driving to the gig feeling shithouse... The point is: We had more fun than we did in Philadelphia the night before. Ryan Adams did have some great coke that night, but then he started to talk... If you worry about whether there's gonna be a full house in New York or not, it's sort of missing the point of it." 

"I'll be thinking of that on Monday; I'm playing in Milan. I think it might be quiet," Hopkinson predicts.