Interview - Children Collide

Posted in MUSIC by Andrew on Oct 14, 03:00PM

Into the space where psychedelic fuzz meets jittery post-punk comes album debutantes Children Collide. After two EPs, years of accumulated praise and multiple drummer malfunctions, guitarist/vocalist Johnny Mackay is chuffed to introduce his band to the Fluoro Kids as well the Heritage Rockers.

Is The Long Now is a chance to completely rebirth the band?

The first EPs were just EPs and didn't really sell a lot. We really have to treat this album as a proper introduction. A lot of other people like Wolfmother and Midnight Juggernauts did the same thing, got songs from their EPs and put it on the album. There were a lot of newer songs that didn't make it just because we wanted to make it an introduction. It's a bit weird, I feel like I've just given birth on the weekend.

Producer Dave Sardy (Wolfmother, Jet, Oasis) isn't cheap, is he?

I think Noel Gallagher said in an interview about whether they'd do a Radiohead's In Rainbows, 'We didn't get the most expensive producer in the world and use the most expensive designer in London to give it away for free.' [Laughs] He wasn't too expensive for us because he really liked the band and we worked with him for a year to make it happen. And he approached us in the first place, I always forget to mention that. We played South By Southwest and his manager saw us and knew Dave would like it. He said cool things to us and namedropped a lot of bands that we like and the way he spoke about our music and what he wanted to do with it sold us on it.

The bands he mentioned were acts like Suicide and Krautrock bands. They're emotionally very cold and don't seem to line up to your music.

I've spent the last six months listening to that music and it's funny Dave mentioned them. It's not really about the emotion, but musically, the tones, the way that those bands put you on a ride. The way Dave stretched out (first track) 'Across The Earth' into such a hypnotic journey; it was like that. It was more core essence stuff like that.

Well, people have suggested that you're a neo-grunge outfit...

[Laughs] "We don't go for a particular sound. What comes out is just the result of the three of us. The fact that we have distortion, I scream a little bit and I sing a little bit, how our songs are a reasonably normal structure, we are going to get attached to things like that. We draw in a lot of different music we like from post-punk to early punk to '70s psychedelica to stuff from the '90s and stuff from now to dance music. I don't know how it all combines. We're just being ourselves whether people hate it or love it, at least we're not going to feel like we faked it.

One thing I noticed watching the band live is that most songs would be almost unrecognisable if you took just one instrument out.

Yeah, we're definitely doing our own thing. That's what it's always been about in this band. We don't all dress in the same sort of clothes, we're quite different people, musically as well.

Was it hard to find a complimentary drummer?

To find someone as focused as we are on what we're doing, that also played well, we found the combination of those two in Ryan [Caesar]. We actually had a tryout. Ryan was the person that we chose out of that.

It must've been strange to pick a stranger and then have to live in each others laps

It's like sharing a room with a brother or sister when you're a kid. He joined and we went straight into touring, we did two around-the-world trips within a couple of months, then the album. It's been non-stop since Ryan joined.

How did you go doing the national Hoodoo Gurus support?

We actually played with them at SXSW and they asked us to play the tour. That's the thing we've enjoyed – playing with so many different bands. When we started we played with Midnight Juggernauts, bands like that. We've toured with Grinspoon, The Wombats, Evermore, Faker. We've played to a bunch of different demographics, I guess. To have a white-haired 50-year old bloke with a VB in his hand pat you on the back and love your music as much as a teenager at a festival, it kinda makes me realise that we're doing what we want to do and not really aiming at a target group of people. I'm just as happy for a fluoro Modular kid to come and like us as an old bloke.

Andrew Tijs

The Long Now is out...now