Now three albums into a career, Melbourne-based trio My Disco have managed to cultivate huge respect among independent music communities both locally and internationally, for their take on droning, repetitive, abstract noise-rock. They’ve never been radio-friendly, and Little Joy does little to shrug the trend – the first single, ‘Young’, for example, is a near nine-minute-long epic. After a spate of EPs and vinyl splits throughout the mid '00s, the band pared down their post-rock leanings and established a more minimal aesthetic on their 2006 debut LP Cancer. 2008’s Paradise further pushed the hypnotic sonic template, and was recorded by the legendary Steve Albini in the US, a tack they've returned to with their most recent album, Little Joy.

This time however, My Disco made the perplexing decision to mix with Scott Horscroft, whose recent production credits include commercial fare such as Silverchair, The Panics and The Presets. TheVine broaches this subject with the band’s guitarist, Ben Andrews, but first we revisit My Disco’s last performance in Brisbane, at the Sounds Of Spring festival.

MY DISCO'S 'LITTLE JOY' IS OUR FEATURE ALBUM ON THEVINE. LISTEN TO IT HERE.
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The last time I saw you play in Brisbane was in the middle of a dust storm at Sounds Of Spring about this time last year.

I remember, that was crazy. The weather was really weird.

It was sweet, because your music can be somewhat apocalyptic and it really did feel like world was ending at the time.

We really enjoyed that. We were in Sydney for a one-off show and then we had that show and kind of flew up...did the fly in on the day, checked into the hotel, played the show, ate some food, and flew out early in the morning. It was pretty funny.

You headlined that stage, yet I'm not sure if many people knew who you were.

Especially at that kind of festival. It was pretty random. There were so many bands. I think there were a bunch of stages and they had different names and stuff, and it was just a bit of weird a call for us to headline. Considering there were some bigger names and shit in the day. We were along for the ride, really.

Are you surprised by how popular the band has become?

Sometimes. We often do well in Melbourne, but outside of Melbourne it kind of depends what's happening [at the time]. We're the kind of band that can't just book a gig and have loads of people show [up]. We still need to do a lot of work around it. Sometimes it's pretty amazing the amount of people that come, especially a couple of the shows we've done at The Zoo over the years that we've headlined; people have been like "Wow, this is interesting." Brisbane was one of the last places that we did that step-up to a bigger venue. It's been good to see.

So, Little Joy. I've been listening to it for a few weeks now. I must admit my surprise when I saw Scott Horscroft's name on the press release.

Are you familiar with his work?

Yeah – I know he mostly works with pop artists. I'm interested to know how that relationship came about?

We met him because we got flown up after winning this Qantas SOYA [Spirit of Youth Awards] thing a while ago. They had mentors of each division: design, architecture, or music or whatever, and they had these leaders in the industry. He was the music guy. We hadn't met him before but he got really wasted and was hanging around us, and we were like “I wonder what’s going on here?”. And then he's like "I gave the award and money to you guys". So obviously Qantas’ whole thing was young Australians in the arts and “we want to put back in the community”. They obviously didn’t understand that we were in it for the money, and he didn’t understand that. He said "I'll do you a favour; if you ever want to record at BJB [Big Jesus Burger studios], we’ll test some stuff," so we did a single with him, that ‘Young’ 12 inch with him. That went really well. He was relaxed to work with and we're like "This dude’s fucking awesome." We were always going to record it again with [American engineer, Steve] Albini, but we were like, “Should we get the best of both worlds and record with Albini and mix with Horscroft?”. Which is what we ended up doing.

Had Scott heard of you when first met him?

Yeah, apparently he’d been a fan for quite a while. He’d seen us a few times in Sydney. He was totally familiar with our work, so we played at that Qantas thing which was pretty funny. They handed out earplugs, and there was a note on the thing saying “These guys are loud!”, or whatever. Scott is pretty switched on to what we're doing so it wasn't like we went in and he'd never heard us and was shocked or whatever. He'd kind of gotten notoriety for doing Silverchair and The Presets’ production. Basically it's laid out like an indie studio, like some dude's apartment. It's pretty cool. It was kind of cool to have Albini's raw approach mixed with Scott's subtle production work. That really worked, in the end, for us, especially having a gap in between the initial tracking, and the vocal and mixing stages.

I've been curious about the Albini thing for a while because I know he calls himself an engineer, not a producer. He's not very fond of the term ‘producer’.

True.

What does he think of your music? What’s the relationship like there?

It's extremely vocal. I think a lot of people think he's just this dude who presses record and pushes up the faders and doesn't say two words about your music. That's not true at all. He's quite vocal. He's the kind of guy that is like, "Don't do it too much and don't think about it too much". And less is more, and no point going for perfection because it'll end up sounding shit, which works for us because we sometimes need a kick up the butt when we're recording and getting too involved in it.

I remember at the end he said "You guys have made something really special here," or words to that effect. That's kind of cool because I'm pretty sure he wouldn't love everything he ever records. I'm pretty sure he probably doesn't like most of it but on both records we've done he's said some favourable things. He's also pretty lenient when it comes to bands like us, who save up hard-earned money and go and record with him [at Electrical Audio], in terms of helping us out. He definitely doesn’t look at his watch and say “day over”, or that sort of deal. It's essentially up to us.

He's real easy to work with, in that respect, and he definitely has a lot to say. Especially when doing guitar stuff. The guitar, he'll be like "I really like that section, and here's the reason why," or "I like that overdub". I did a long, elongated Neil Young-ish intro to one of the songs that we did separately to the track and we'd done it a few times and he was really vocal and guiding me into what I wanted to make that piece of the song. He's got a lot of good things to say.

What was his first reaction when you first contacted Albini? The name of the band obviously has a relationship with his past. ('My Disco' is the name of a song by Big Black, Steve Albini's mid to late '80s punk band).

He never really had a reaction to that, I suppose. We're friends with all the dudes that run the studio now, and they always come see us play in Chicago. It's kind of like this guy, Steven Sowley, who's kind of like Steve's assistant/reception/booker/accountant and everything at the studio, he pretty much runs the place from a business perspective. We're always like "Hey man, what's up? Want to book in some dates, cool?" He's like "Yeah, that's great." It's pretty casual. It's not like you have to write to Steve directly and go "It'd be cool if we send you a demo." It's a business like any other recording studio. You want to record there and [they] want to earn money. There are a few exceptions when it comes to massive bands that want to record there for six months and stuff.

I remember one time we were there, I think they got a call from Velvet Revolver or one of those projects that Slash was doing. They wanted to book in four months straight and Albini said “No”.  I think his words were, "That would be kind of like working with the enemy”. [laughter] Which is kind of cool. At the same time, from a business perspective, that's like four months of an awesome income. From what I saw of the Electrical Audio calendar, they don't actually ever have four months booked solid. They're a busy enough studio considering it's a dying art form, the analogue world. At the same time, he was like, "We could do that, we could pay off some of the debts and stuff but we could also, in that four months, record a whole bunch of more exciting indie bands and not have to put up with record label, and management bullshit from some corporate man from L.A." The man has integrity, for sure.

I know it’s quite well-documented, his distaste for that sort of stuff; but it was cool to see it in real life.

Have you ever played poker with him?

Yeah, we played one night;  I bailed out really early but Liam played, and lost a couple of hundred I think. That's how [Albini] rolls. He's pretty good. Every Tuesday he has poker night at his place, which is [where] all these nerds come around and hit him up. I think he's pretty good on the global gambling circuit. I know a friend of mine who's a professional poker player and plays online a lot. Played through all the Vegas casinos and whatever, travelled through America and Europe playing it. He reckons that Albini is quite well respected in his own right as a poker dude on the forums.

At the All Tomorrow's Parties festival, either in New York or England, he's had his secret poker games going on.

I'm sure if he does well in them, he probably makes a couple extra grand in his pocket.

Let's move on. What do you attempt to achieve with My Disco's music?

I guess we're always doing the same thing: we're putting out records, touring, playing, making it the full package. Getting involved in the art form of it all. What we've achieved already is definitely beyond what we ever thought about. That's because when we started the band we didn't have any expectations. It was just a jam thing that we did one weekend while I was back from overseas. Something just clicked and you kind of know that everything converged at the right time. It sounded awesome, and it sounded better than anything we were doing musically and otherwise in our lives at the time. We were like "Shit, let's just do this more," and it kind of formed that way. Everything has been really organic. It's not like we've set goals for 2010 or whatever; it just happens how it happens. It seems to happen quite regularly nowadays. It's good.

Are you three getting more serious about the band as it evolves? Is it taking up more of your time?

Yeah, there's more work when you… increase things, I suppose. With an album tour there's a lot of hard work involved, including doing nine hours of interviews today for me, that kind of thing definitely steps it up just from doing the odd house party, and into doing four global tours and kind of thing. That's a full on business and it takes a lot more work and planning and a lot of people involved. We've got a girl that books stuff for us and pretty much takes care of that, plus labels all over the place [with] Australian publicists. We still kind of take it in stride but I guess not doing it more serious but more involved I suppose, work wise.

You've done nine hours of interviews today?

Yeah. We were in the Shock office, which is really near my house – me and Ange, our publicist – and they gave us a little office there so we can do them all from the Shock phone. Except your one, because it was out of hours. I got to go home for a little bit.

I'm surprised I'm getting such lucid and lengthy answers from you, considering you've been talking all day about the band.

It's fine, because I've had like half-an-hour break, so I think the last two, I can't remember what the hell happened. I think I had to cut them short or something, we were running over time or something, but it's all good man..

What sticks in your mind, after nine hours of interviews? I'm sure you get the same questions over and over.

I think I found myself once going, “Oh, I’ve said this a few times today,” but to be honest, they've all been… The more people are involved or have a history with the band, the more interesting the questions are. It's people where they've been given a job by an editor that end up looking at the Wikipedia page and streaming a song on MySpace for 30 seconds, that drives me nuts. It's real boring and pretty difficult to answer. The stuff where people have a knowledge, history, and an actual relationship with the band's music, which has been 95% of people today, that's actually pretty easy to answer without making myself sound like a broken record.
 
I first came across the band during the last record, Paradise. One of the things that drew me in was the artwork, Warwick Baker's photography, which blew my mind because it's like nothing I'd seen before.

The album cover?

Yeah, and the few press shots that were going around, which came from that session. I want to ask about that session with Warwick.



The ‘desert sessions’, as we like to call them? It was fucking crazy. The day after Christmas we drove out to Coober Pedy, which, from Melbourne, you go to Adelaide, and then you go about 1,000 kilometres pretty much north. Maybe a tiny bit north-west of Adelaide, but pretty much straight up. Adelaide's like your last bastion of a city, or whatever. From then on you take the roads that tourists take all the way up to Darwin. It's like nine hours to Adelaide and then another 11 hours or whatever on this road, up to Coober Pedy. I remember we hired a new car because it's pretty rugged out there, a 4-wheel drive, and it was the middle of December so it was really fucking hot. The A/C in the car uses a shit load of fuel but there's not very many petrol stations out there. We got to one turn and it was like, “Darwin - straight. Perth - left”. That was the only instruction. It was pretty crazy.

The shoot was full on. We had these vinyl capes, and we wore stocking and black gloves. We were actually 20 minutes outside of Coober Pedy, by this dingo fence. It's a crazy old open mining area that's… I remember we read on the sign that it can get up to 65 [degrees] Celsius where we stood. It was in the middle of summer, so middle of December it's 50 degrees up there, but if you go by the rocks, it's like 65 degrees.

We drove down there. The road had closed because it had flooded the month before, but it was dry as fuck, so we just drove down this desolate path in the desert and went down amongst all those rocks. We did the shoot for five or six hours one day. It was so fucking hot, probably 60 degrees celsius. Every 10 minutes we had to drink another litre or two of water each. We had it bad because we were wearing our suits. Warwick had it really bad because he was busy fucking around with the camera. One of the film shots he took, the actual analogue film shots, the film was basically disintegrating and drying up because it couldn't handle the heat.

Because he was dealing with all that he forgot to drink water. He pretty much got heat stroke the first day. We went back to the town and stayed in one of those bunkers that are 12 feet underground because it's like natural air conditioning under there. We stayed in one of them, drunk a slab of Corona and met a few locals. It was a pretty crazy experience.

The day after Christmas.

There weren't that many people up there but there was a bunch of Swedish or German backpackers who had just come from Darwin. They'd come from Darwin and apparently Alice Springs is only six hours north of Coober Pedy. It looks way further on the map. They were like "Yeah, but the road is straight and there's no one on the road so you can drive like 160 km an hour if you want." I think looking at the kilometres is irrelevant when you can drive as fast as you want, because there's no speed limit or nothing to crash into.

Was that shoot Warwick's concept, or yours?

We wanted to do a shoot in the desert and I think he came up with the capes idea. I came up with the gloves and stockings. He knew someone who'd done a shoot just outside of Coober Pedy before. He showed us photos and it totally looked like the moon. It's all these white and red… The red colour up there is way different. It's like nothing you've ever seen. It's like this crazy, scorched, orange-red. He showed us photos and we were like "Shit yeah, it's going to look like we're spacemen or something". The initial concept was that we looked like these extraterrestrials who had just been dumped in the middle of this desolate planet. That's kind of what it looks like because it doesn't really look like anywhere else on Earth.

I’m interested to know which arrives first for the band, is it the music or lyrics?

Up until this point it's the music but I guess on this record it's both at the same time. We kind of started writing the record with vocals as a fourth instrument, jamming along as we practiced, which we haven't really sought [to do] before. Normally we write all the music and kind of worry about vocals afterwards. That's always been - not a point of contention but a bit more stressful because it's seemed like an afterthought, even though it's an integral part of the band. This time Liam was jamming along with us and the vocals came out; we had a lot more time to work on them, and all that kind of thing. Lyrics played a big role in the recording process because we stopped paying such attention to detail and [began] double and triple layering the vocals, and working on effects while we tracked it, so that Liam could utilise some of the longer reverbs and delays on the instruments. Which shape his vocal style and ideas.

It was kind of interesting to do it in that concept, where we'd never really used vocal effects at all before. We've always been just real dry and sparse. We did this vocal idea and were like "Fuck this sounds awesome. Let's utilise this". Especially on the track ‘With Age’, where Liam ended up pretty much making a monotonous drone using the reverb that we put on the vocals. That almost becomes like this dark synth, or minimal guitar line throughout the whole song. It's pretty subtle on the album but we wanted it that way. Listening back to it when it was that on its own, it sounded really haunting. I think it gives the song a certain depth that we never would have experimented [with] without Scott's ideas.

I remember at that Sound of Spring show, you played ‘A Turreted Berg’ for the first time. Now it's on the album as the last track. The first time I heard it on the album it sent shivers up my spine because I think that's the best song you've ever done.

I love it. I love the way it came out and I actually see it as really different to every other song on the record. It's actually one of the oldest songs we wrote and it wasn't going to make it because we thought it didn't fit in. But we ended up changing it a bunch so now it has this nice resolution. It wasn't going to be the last song on the record but our label guy in the U.S. was really adamant about it, and I'm really glad that he was. It sounds pretty awesome on there. It's probably got the best drum sounds, in that straight, dry manner that Ro plays, that we’d never had before. It's got a real '70s, '80s AC/DC sort of vibe.

I hadn't thought of it like that.

The reason I say that is when we tracked that song...Albini is a massive AC/DC fan. It's a bit funkier than them, obviously but this rumbling one-note bass line that's on every beat. Then you've got this kick and snare pattern. Albini stopped us and was like, "If you really want it to be like AC/DC you'll do the kick under the snare, not just kick, snare, kick, snare. It's like kick, kick, under snare". We didn’t end up doing that, because Ro’s got his own style, obviously, but it was kinda cool. From that we started fucking around with covering an AC/DC song at a gig a while ago.

Which one?

We did a version of ‘Live Wire’. It was pretty funny.

Will we be seeing it in the album tour at all?

Oh, nah. We did it with – you know the band Eddy Current Suppression Ring? We did it with Mikey [Young], he played second guitar, and Brendan [Huntley] sung it for us. It was a one-off thing. We did it pretty hideous, but it was fun anyway.

When I see you live, you seem like you're using it as a kind of catharsis. You seem to be a bit ferocious in your delivery. What do you feel when you're playing live?

If it's going well, kind of like almost - I don’t know how to say it, but [it's an] emotional, almost teary sort of thing. It all comes up. It depends on the song, and depends on so many things, but for the most part I get really nervous before playing and then it goes away midway through the first song if everything's good. It's bottled up nerves; I can't eat before I play. Liam and Ro don't get nervous. They can eat like a fuckin’ horse and still play, but I can't really eat. And also you don't want to jump around on stage for an hour and have food in you, I don’t reckon. But anyway, it depends. It's quite mixed. It's emotional and pretty intense and fierce, especially with the volume stuff. Sometimes it's a blur though, depending on your state of mind.

From that Sound of Spring show, I remember there were maybe 50 people there. They had a couple of security guards in front of the stage standing there, arms crossed. At the time I was wondering; what do you think those security guards would say to their partner when they went home that night, after your show?

One of them said to me "Why do you have to be so loud? You'll be deaf by the time you're 28." At the time, I was already 30, so I proved them wrong. That was pretty funny. I don't know; who knows what goes through security dudes’ mind. Sometimes, at shows that I see - like when I work at Meredith or whatever - the security dudes are really friendly, but you never know with that sort of crew. I’d imagine the Sounds Of Spring security dudes probably get hired working casinos and that sort of thing as well. They probably don't have much empathy for the music or understanding of it, but each to their own.  

Andrew McMillen

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Little Joy is out now via Shock.

MY DISCO 'LITTLE JOY' TOUR DATES 2010

Friday 19th November - Fowlers Live, Adelaide
With special guests Robotosauras

Saturday 20th November - The National, Geelong
With special guests Divide & Dissolve

Wednesday 24th November - ANU Bar, Canberra
With special guests Hoodlum Shouts and Spartak

Thursday 25th November - The Cambridge, Newcastle
With special guests Alps and Bare Grillz

Friday 26th November - Manning Bar, Sydney
With special guests Dead Farmers, Laurenz PVT

Saturday 27th November - The Zoo, Brisbane  
With special guests Slug Guts

Friday 3rd December - Hi Fi Bar, Melbourne
With special guest Robin Fox

Saturday 11th December - Amplifer, Perth
With special guests Eleventh He Reaches London and Injured Ninja

Sunday 12th December - Mojos, Fremantle  
With special guests The Tigers and Erasers

Saturday 18th December - The Brisbane Hotel, Hobart
With special guests Native Cats

Little Joy is out through Shock Records on the 15th of October