JUMPING OUT A WINDOW

Rip It Up, Issue 242, 1 October 1997, Page 24

JUMPING OUT A WINDOW

We’re sitting in the Virgin Records boardroom, as their label IWi WiMIWI Antenna is now licensing its records ■fJTOTTKnrwXTTM to this, one of the honchiest of head BiLllilai I > I'honcho record companies. Seeing iII KH!BRKiIiPB this surely means better distribution, M ’ U l l/‘B Vol* Fl I cWTI definitely means a better view, and i U j rv, i let’s not forget the smiling service of (t/fi/O A*/! (Mi ifi/i orange juice and coffee to our table, flt what could there possibly be to get Tnnm l W-V ! W X Jil upset about? MadJJUi Bl lf MM “I’ve kinda had it with saying, BHu[BI iwlljTiilß We used to be the Nixons,’ drummer Luke Casey begins. “When I joined the band and it was kinda apparent that a name change was gonna happen, that was March 1995. Well, that’s over two years ago now, [it] isn’t really relevant anymore. It’s just such a long time.” Singer/guitarist Sean Sturm says he certainly sees the name change that first graced a recording cover with last year’s ‘lmmaculate’ single as a rebirth for the band. “It was a change from conceiving of the band as me and Mike and our old drummer [Mark Pollard], to thinking of it as a totally new thing. With Luke coming in, it added about another 50 percent to the band, in terms of the fact we could work much, much more closely together, and it was a much better unit. The whole thing for us was almost like, ‘OK, let’s start again, only this time we’re serious,’ which was good — but not serious as in ‘do a serious’, sorta for real. There’s obviously going to be continuities between Nixons stuff and Eye TV stuff — those are good — but people have got to keep moving along. “It’s hard for bands because everything for the band seems to move at 90 miles an hour, and everyone else, they only see a single, and then they wait another six months and they see an album, or whatever. For us, because we are constantly working on what we’re doing, it seems as though there’s so much more evolution from point to point. For us, between Luke joining and now, we’ve probably written 50 songs, and toured America twice, toured Australia, toured New Zealand, recorded an album...” And the latter point is what they’ve had enough of — it’s recorded now you see, and using it as a strong set of wings, these leapers are sure to fly. Luke offers an analogy from Alan Parker’s 1984 film, Birdy (which inspired Birdy-O’s title track), to describe where the band feel they are currently at... “The point where the guy leaps off the building, which is very poignant in the film, when he’s actually convinced himself that he can fly. Taking risks and not looking, just stepping off.” “You’ve gotta have a lot of faith to be in a band,” Sean elaborates. “You’ve gotta have faith what you’re doing is good, and people are gonna like it, and it’s a good thing to do with your life — the fact you’re in a band with other people who you’ve gotta have faith in, who’ve gotta have faith in you — and you’ve also gotta take chances, and you’ve gotta make imaginative leaps as well.” The main recording sessions for Birdy-0 took place at Airforce

Studios over that block of smudged real time between Christmas and New Year’s last year. For work on days that are hardly days, Sean opted for an approach of concentrating without concentrating. “Generally you’re really concentrating really hard, but you’re trying not to concentrate at all. That’s the thing about music making, it’s got to get to the point where you don’t think about anything, it just can come out. “That’s the jumping off thing: there’s a point when you’ve just gotta let go of the song, and the song plays you in a kind of abstract way, without being too Zen about it. There is a certain point when instinct has to take over, otherwise you’ll just vanish somewhere very dark.” “Up yer ass!,” Luke interjects, by way of destination rather than rebuttal. Nevertheless, that’s not to imply the odd rebuttal session doesn’t go down between the three members of Eye TV. Take the task of ordering Birdy-O’s track listing for example. Luke explains: “Me and Sean spent ages in the studio putting down different orders, and we were trying to do it like a live concert, so that it had peaks and troughs. We mastered it one way, and we got it back, and we didn’t like it. It didn’t flow how we wanted it to: it was great at the beginning, great at the end, but it just kind of lost it in the middle.” “Originally I had ideas of it having a conceptual development throughout the whole thing...,” Sean begins, only to be drowned out with a quantity of sniggers and groans that suggests some dispute lay here. “So, basically they said, ‘OK, Sean, go back to your books, let the rock ‘n’ roll rhythm section decide the order.’”

But bassist Michael Scott jocularly says this is not the way all band disputes are resolved. “No, normally these guys come up with ideas, and I come in and [growl], ‘No, we’ll do it my way!’” It’s no wonder they’re thinking of decking the guy out as Chuck Norris, “armed to the hilt”, for the video to the album’s second single, ‘Dynamite’. That one will follow current single ‘Snakes and Ladders’, the release of which was a seemingly unanimous decision. “We thought it would make a nice kind of, urn, obvious sell-out to Flying Nun sentiments from the past,” says Sean slyly. Luke: “Here we go!” Sean: “No, no, no. We thought it was quite good. We wanted something that wasn’t gonna freak people out too much.” Mike adds, “I also thought the song itself has a bit of everything we do, without being sort of thrown together or piecemeal. But it’s like, there’s a lot of sort of jangling guitars on this record, and that’s something I’ve always enjoyed. It’s such a bad word, but that sort of arpeggiated, Byrdsy sort of inspired thing.” Sean predicts ‘Dynamite’ will blow out the cobwebs for people if ‘Snakes and Ladders’ doesn’t, “then we’ll start with the unbroken run of five ballads, a la Oasis,” he joshes, for there are hardly enough ballads on Birdy-0 for Eye TV to even try making what questionable good they could on that claim. The Nixons may have snatched victory from the jaws of a potentially defeating robbery when they released the acoustic mini-album Special Downtime in 1995, but Eye TV have kept the experience for paint, rather than solely palette. “It’s only one aspect of what we do, the acoustic thing,” Sean explains. “It seemed to be extremely successful, that whole acoustic venture, in a kind of roundabout way. We were never sure if it was because it was the right time, or because we’d been playing for a long time, or whether it was because they were kind of songy songs, or whether it was just because they were a bit more easy listening. So, it was nice to see that, but we really had to go back to what we do mainly, which is play electric music.” Mike adds, “It was nice, Trevor Reekie [Pagan/Antenna] said it was the best thing we could do, and when it came out I think everybody was taken aback because the expectation was that we were a rock band. We sort of completely defeated that, and opened up the whole spectrum of what we could do — and that was the best thing about it, ’cause you find these days, more so than ever, a group gets pigeon-holed into doing one particular thing. There isn’t that sort of breadth of style you might have been able to get away with, for example, in the 60s. So, it was kind of nice for us to open up different avenues for us to explore in the future without feeling selfconscious.” Of course, that future is now, and that past experience has indeed benefited the varied textures of Birdy-O. “I think the thing with the album in some ways was that we always went with ‘what was needed’, what was gonna suit the song,” Mike offers. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we can’t do that because that would be too folk.’ It was like, ‘This song requires 24 Marshall stacks, so be it. This song requires one acoustic guitar, that’s what we’re using.’” It’s that kind of talk that’s gonna push Eye TV through any windows they find on their path, and to paraphrase ‘Snakes and Ladders’, get them ‘on their way’ once and for all this time. Lean out your own window come this summer, and you just might catch them en route to a gig near you.

BRONWYN TRUDGEON