In 2006, as a support band, The Nation Blue played to thousands of Foo Fighters fans across the country and seemingly (and admirably) converted none of them, although Dave Grohl himself was impressed.

They are a divisive Australian rock band. As such they do not sway people, or impress them - they don’t work an audience. They can’t. What they do is play their songs and embody them onstage and I’ve always found that some people can connect with it - they can hear it, find themselves in it, see the beauty in it - and most people can’t. At a recent show here in Brisbane, half my friends left the venue, the other half stood at the front screaming. To me, they are the archetype of Australian underground noise-rock in 2009.  

I sat down to talk to guitar/vocalist Tom Lyngcoln about their new album and the band’s thirteen year history. I’m not sure if Lyngcoln himself was sitting down when he answered my questions because we were using computers to conduct the interview.  

It’s only been two years since your last album Protest Songs but I feel like the band has been on a bit of hiatus?

The Nation Blue is an obese beast. We never really generate any momentum, it’s always start/stop and when things do come together, it’s for brief periods. These moments of activity are becoming increasingly isolated to the point where it’s not really a band anymore, it’s more of a 'lord of the flies' style arrangement where three individuals attempt to eat each other musically. Only the strong survive.

The benefit of this ‘life choice’ is that you get to see other people. We are all willing participants in that soul-destroying system of overqualified minimum wagers shackled because they like music and therefore need to make severe concessions in order to occasionally get time off (to play it). In recent years the realisation that this theory is total bunk has soured in my guts as I look back on the best part of a decade spent knee deep in oil or captive in the warehouse.

I made a decision a few years ago to do something positive – I now work with my Dad as a joiner - and that has actually helped my outlook on The Nation Blue. So apart from endless work responsibilities, we have all been very busy in other musical bands as well. For Dan (drums) it’s Blacklevel Embassy and Margins and for me it’s Lee Memorial and Cold Cluster. Matt (bass/vocals) is working on a massive project that will see light of day eventually. It’s non music-related, he’s the smart one.

I like the new album Rising Waters. It’s the sort of album bands can only make later in their careers; confident but not bombastic or overwrought. It is, for want of a better term, more introspective. You’ve described it as a catalogue of all the bad things you’ve done.

It started as the aforementioned catalogue but really only continued as a theme when the cup overflowed. Turns out we’re jerks! After smashing out a pretty overwrought and bombastic album like Protest Songs, we were a little cornered thematically and had to make some drastic decisions on subject-matter. Despite the personal-is-the-political paradox, we wanted to base our lyrics more on experience as opposed to ideology.

Basically we didn’t have any more political juice left. The change in government yielded little by way of broad-sweeping social and cultural repair and affirmed our two-party politic as suffering from the tweedledee and tweedledum analogy. So singing about ideology and political change is pointless if things don't change systemically. And we would just be repeating ourselves because what is true of one, holds true for the other.

So once that option was removed from the immediate horizon we came upon the blood diamond in our souls. And we polished that turd and it emerged rich in Nation Blue asbestos. We have been fortunate enough in that nobody has really challenged the premise or asked for more explicit detail, because as a theme it’s pretty inconsistent. But maybe if we had followed that path unflinchingly we would have fulfilled our potential as the “suicide music” that Dean Turner (of Magic Dirt) once overheard us described as whilst taking a piss in regional Australia.


The Nation Blue - 'I'm Inbred' w/ Ben and Geoff Corbett of SixFtHick

Why did you call the album Rising Waters?

I can’t fucking accept that people don’t think that water levels are rising and that what we’re doing to the earth isn’t having any effect. We’ve got about fifty years to grow gills. I am actually a pretty positive person but if you are going to title a record that is essentially an exercise is bleakness, that sense of being powerless and overcome is an apt title.

I think the new one is the best thing you’ve ever done vocally. How do you and Matt work on the vocals?

We ignore each other until about five minutes before laying down the final version and then we cram the thing into shape so that the bi-polar themes sit together harmoniously. This record is probably more cohesive because we didn't breach jurisdictions; one person would pretty much nut out the thrust of the thing and the other would just sing as a point of difference aurally. Song wise, this one is pretty much my bastard. We didn't jam much at all for this record so I wrote the majority of it in isolation on a property away from the city where I work. I had plenty of time on my hands because the locals didn't take a shine to my head. One tires of solitary games of pool and talking to the bus driver.

Matt's got a pretty keen ear for things and in hindsight this record lacks his frustrating ability to do in five minutes what I take two months to fuck up. We just didn't have the opportunity to thrash things out democratically this time. Dan is Dr Death and he drags suspect riffs and chord progressions and anomalies – things we dub “Lyngcolnisms” - kicking and screaming out into the car park and puts one in their skulls. In the band, we each have a particular skill-set that as we spend less time together unfortunately becomes more homogenised and predictable but after thirteen years together what can you do?  

Has being in the band gotten easier or more difficult over the years?  
 
Easier for sure because the brainless reaching for something unattainable has become increasingly absurd. We came to the realisation after too long on the industry cock that it should be, at all times, fun. Tours became booked as holidays and more people were invited to join us and it was less about the three of us trying to bash out a legacy and more about enjoying playing music with friends. Obviously this meant that we did less to remain in the public eye. But it also meant that we no longer fell asleep at the wheel doing 170km an hour on a luckily straight piece of road.
 
The flip side of that little love-in is that the logistics of playing in a band have increasingly become a fucking nightmare.  

The band always seems like it would have to be a very tight personally. Does the band have to be getting along to function?

We like each other a lot. But there's always weirdness in these things. Bands are the most fucking retarded relationships you can enter into aside from being locked under the stairs like the fifth Corr they never talk about. No matter how much you get shat with each other for whatever reason, there is always still that point where you cross paths in a social setting and there is that little grin when you first see each other where you independently recall some ridiculous shit that’s happened over the years.

And that carries over into the band chemistry and how we interact sonically. There's too much history. Dan McKay and me go all the way back to school and Matt Weston to last century too. We know what each other is thinking. Hell, despite being a fair bit younger than us, Weston has been responsible for ironing out some pretty fucked up ideas that were allowed to fester in early years. So I reckon we have gotten to the point where our brainwaves are in synch and no matter how long we neglect the relationship it’s always there on call, on demand.  Although some nights it’s like yelling at the sea.  

Ian Rogers

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The Nation Blue play The Corner Hotel October 28th