Lushburger

Rip It Up, Issue 204, 1 August 1994, Page 6

Lushburger

CAMPBELL WALKER

Lushburger are one of those bands lots of people have an opinion on but most of them haven’t heard. They’re hardly high profile because of an antipathy towards playing in the traditional rock setting or doing the traditional rock thing — but they do what they do with a rare single minded passion that produces singular results. For almost the last two years what they’ve been doing is recording. While founding members Peter and Simon were working by themselves, live performances were very scarce. Since new members Gillian and Dave joined last year there has been the odd gig. But mostly they’ve just been single mindedly recording and what’s come out of it has been their new CD, Slabneckeiy, 74 minutes long and a completely independent recording.

“We bought some recording gear and it just evolved,” recalls Simon, over a curry and cider at the Lushburger HQ, Burgerdyne. “We didn’t think we were popular appeal enough to get a release and we couldn’t really be bothered chasing one so when we had enough stuff, and when we’d had a gutsful of recording, we just thought ‘fuck, we’ll sell the gear and release a CD’. I reckon it’s got a really nice synchronicity to it, selling all the gear you made the recording on to press the CD and you feel clean afterwards.”

Much of Slabneckery was recorded in the old NZSO recording studios in Willis St. “It was like an enormous gymnasium that had been acoustically perfected, and we had it all to ourselves for about ten months, it was like heaven, all night in the dark in this huge room, it was lovley, but now it’s like a carpark,” recalls Simon, “which says a lot and the front of it is a cafe which does really nice breakfasts.” Now they’ve finished the album and sold the gear they made it on, the band are keen not to record themselves in the same way again but to concentrate on performing. But, like the recording, they don’t want to do it by halves.

“We want to perform, but we know we’re not suited to the pub circuit, we’re not really a rock band and if we play in a rock venue we get really frustrated because our aspirations of ourselves are so much above what we can achieve ina rock venue.

“But we’ve got to get sack into performance, because we really tended to get absorbed with the recording, we really get kind of drunk on whatever we’re doing — we end up neglecting other areas so we’re really hanging out for some performance. “We want to put on a big production so that people can walk in and just swim ... in a little rock venue you don’t have that kind of freedom.”

The album is the result of a similarly large scale way of looking at things. “This album is the product of incredible passion and tension on our part. Everything goes into the music, we’re really finely tuned as to whether it floats us away or not, if we don’t love it then we kill it, we just want to be swept up in it, we want to be at a point when it just takes over, you beam off in it,” says Simon with a huge and infectious enthusiasm. “For me, I have periods of high anxiety when I listen to it and then there’ll be a time when we’re playing it on stage or something and it’s just completely its own entity, it’s the real stuff of dreams and nightmares, there’s a song that just transports me to golden hills and dark valleys and I just want to be swept there andif I’m not then I’m not interested.”

More reticent, Dave agrees. “The moods to the songs are evoked, they’re brought out and nestled in the palm of the band — evoking those feelings are what it’s all about."

“Yeah, we just like to race, to race ourselves ..." Simon interrupts.

“We’re right into using something once, in a piece, and there’s an element of selfdenial somewhere in there, like we really get hot on finding something that really turns us on, and then hinting at it and turning back and that pulling back is just pleasure ...”