HUP: A lot of Hamiltonians haven’t seen you before. What should they expect?

Bob: It’s pretty simple: I take a guitar and turn it into a party. There’s a lot of ways to do that, and I’ve figured out most of ‘em, ha ha haaa! Having fun with my guitar is the ultimate goal in every song: “This is a really fun thing to play on guitar, oh my god I love playing this thing on guitar! How can I make this thing more fun?”

Then I add some drums to it. With my drumming it’s electronic beats, but not a whole song programmed, so it can change at any time. Then I also play real drums on top of that. I’m trying to sound like two drummers, and one of my drummers is good and the one of my drummers is terrible and they absolutely hate each other! And I finger-pick on top of that and sing into a telephone in my helmet attached to my head.

The basic idea is I’m doing this fun thing with my guitar and making it as fun as possible until people spill their drinks and someone loses a shoe. If there’s one shoe on the ground, and it’s totally wet because of the puddles of spilled drinks, then I‘ve done my job right.

HUP: For a guy with no rhythm section, that’s a lot of work.

Bob: Yeah, who needs a rhythm section? They say drummers are crazy, guitar players are idiots and singers are assholes. And I gotta be all of ‘em.

I’ve been a one-man band for about 22 years now. I came up with a new way to play drums, a different way to play guitar and a different style of singing and I’ve kinda been sticking with it ever since 1996.

HUP: Is it possible to disguise how good you are at guitar by putting on a great party?

Bob: There’s no disguise. It’s all there, believe me. When I make a record, it’s all about the guitar. You’re not seeing me riding a boat, and I’m not making you drink out of a duck, it’s just guitar and drums. So the records are designed to put on at a party, and your party goes up a notch. 

Then I try to add to that in a live situation. But the guitar parts are all there and you will notice, if you’re at the show, what the guitar is doing, because there’s nothing else making any noise. You can’t be all jumping around and not playing anything. 

That’s probably why so many clubs are having me back, because it’s not just about drinking out of a duck or a dogbowl. The guitar part is in front of all that. I get invited back so many times because people are still tryin’ to work out what the hell I’m doin’.

HUP: Have you played Hamilton before?

Bob: I’m not entirely sure. I played a bunch of places with Cortina and I don't think Hamilton was on that list. This would have been 15-something years ago - and I wasn’t driving, so sometimes things got a little hazy.

I get a new stop almost every tour, I insist on it. All my agents know they gotta give me some adventure show, or things get weird.

HUP: You’re playing Raglan’s Yot Club, too, where you’ve been before.

Bob: Yeah, this’ll be my third time to Raglan. There are some places that will always be an adventure no matter how many times, and Raglan’s certainly one of those!

​HUP: The number of shows you play, like 37 dates already this year already, is ridiculous.

Bob: I’ve toured about half the year, every year, for at least 30 years. I’ll go back to the States and Canada in June and July, there’ll be Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam hopefully around November and back to Europe sometime before then, I think.

HUP: What happens to you when you stay still?

Bob: I do both. I tour for about forty days, then I usually go home for about the same amount of time and tour around on my motorcycle, drive my daughter to dance class, cook lasagne - I try and cover all my bases. I’ve been living in Melbourne for about 13 years now. 

There are a million places to play in Melbourne. It pretty much never stops here - there’s something going on all the time. In some ways I’m glad I didn’t grow up here.

HUP: Where did you grow up? 

Bob: I grew up in Tucson [Arizona, USA] where there was nothing to do and you had to make your own fun, which can go a lot of different ways. 

HUP: That’s why you start a band, right?

Bob: Yeah, man, when you’re bored out of your mind! There’s a couple of ways to invent something, and it’s either sheer panic or absolute boredom. And I’ve had a bit of both in my life.

Tucson’s funny, like when they write about me in the New Yorker they just assume I have two teeth because I’m from Tucson. I got all my teeth, we all got all our teeth! But New York City is like, “oh, Tucson, you must only have two teeth.” I don’t know if Auckland would think that of Hamilton…

HUP: Oh, yeah, totally. When you get here you’ll discover what the crowd is like at a rural supply village that outgrew itself.

Bob: Ok, man, well it sounds like we’re all kinda from the same place here. 

HUP: And you’re touring with Labretta Suede and the Motel 6... 

Bob: Yes. We’ve played together quite a few times. Every time I play with them, one of their songs, ‘Mexican Coke Bottle’, gets stuck in my head for weeks!

They brought me to New Zealand the last time, and I went all over the place with them. I returned the favour and they came to Australia. We played some fun shows in Melbourne and around Ballarat and other places near here. Tiny mining towns are my specialty.

HUP: When you record, do you play everything all at once like you do live?

Bob: I do most of it live, because as a one-man band I can slow time down, I can speed time up, I can take time out to dinner, I can buy a piece of cake and shove it in time’s mouth and shove some bubblegum in there and make time chew it all at the same time! I can do anything I want to time and this is the most addicting thing about being a one-man band. 

Being the complete master of time is the advantage of being a one-man band. So when I record, I can’t go back and adjust my acoustic sound to match up to my electric sound [Log’s guitar is equipped with two pick-ups] and get that kick drum slowing down at the same time. You have to do that live.

I will sometimes sing the song after the fact, but the music itself has to be done live because of the way I turn time into a rubber band.

HUP: I’m thinking of Bump Pow, Bump Bump Bump Pow which slows right down and comes right back up again.

Bob: The Bump Pow single I made with this guy in Spain. He had two kids, about 6 and 4, and he put Bump Pow on the stereo and the kids went absolutely ballistic! They broke a lamp! And he’s like, “See? This music is for children!”

I take that as a compliment. When I sometimes get to play for drunk people and kids at the same time, they do the same exact thing. When I’m playing guitar, I’m actually trying to become that 11-year-old kid I was when I started, like, “Oh my god, this is so fun!” 

Little kids just innately know what’s fun. If you put on a complain-y  folk song to a little kid, they’re not going to do anything. But if you put on AC/DC to a little kid, they are going to move. Kids innately know what’s a party, and that’s why I’ll test my songs out on little kids.

HUP: Is your daughter too old to be your song-testing kid?

Bob: My daughter’s 12 now, it’s unbelievable. She’s still my test kid on some of it, but she’s heard too much of it at this point. There was a time when I was playing a little too much banjo, and every time I picked it up she’d be like, “Papa, no!” 

I learned to play banjo while running away from her. So I play running banjo now.

HUP: Is it harder to play running banjo or crowd-surfing-in-a-boat slide guitar?

Bob: The boat is much more prone to injury, and much more difficult, depending on the drunkenness of the crowd. People keep landing me on my head. C’mon people, you’ve got the choice of killin’ me or not killin’ me, hahahhaha!

HUP: You do bring your own helmet, though.

Bob: Yeah, they think I’m covered, they’ll make me live for days. Don’t you make me live for days, Hamilton!

HUP: Which leads to this question sourced from a fan - How many helmets you have been through?

Bob: The very first one, I tried to cut earholes in it and that was a disaster. The second I used for years and years, but the foam in it started to disintegrate and at the end of every show I was coming out all bloody. Now I’ve got two, a gold one and a silver one, and that’s it. Four. I have done a couple of one-offs, like when I wanna go purple tonight or whatever.

The faceplate can change, depending on damage and, umm, amount of spit.

HUP: Is it still easy to find telephone receivers to stick into the front of those faceplates?

Bob: Hell no, man! I’m old, and when I started doing this we used to have these things called payphones, hahaha! So when I started, you could just go up with some scissors and boom. Then one day I went to get one and the payphone cable was now metal. Do you remember that? I feel partially responsible for that change to payphones, but I didn't take that many. 

Phones were a dime a dozen, too. Nobody cared about them, so you’d get ‘em at thrift stores no problem. Now they’re all in antique stores for fifty or a hundred bucks. Buying a phone like I used to use because I couldn’t afford a microphone is now more expensive than buying a microphone.

HUP: Another fan question, from a guitar nerd: What is your tuning? Because it is looooow.

Bob: A lot of people ask me that. Think of an A or an E chord, then just put on big, bad strings and go way low.

I have two different tunings; both of ‘em are an open chord. One is like an open A chord, but the lowest string is a baritone string tuned all the way down to an octave lower A. It’s almost like a banjo tuning. A banjo goes donk donk donk donk...dink, whereas I go dink dink dink donk...whomp!

Now, I say it’s an open A chord, but I’m tuned down almost an octave from that, to C. So the whole thing is tuned way lower, but in the shape of an open A chord.

The other guitar is tuned to an open E chord, but again I’m using baritone strings and I’m tuned down to A on that one.

HUP: And that’s your bass taken care of.

Bob: If you finger-pick with it, which is what I do, then it sounds like there’s a bass player and a guitar player at the same time. That’s what I’m going for. So I try to sound like two guitar players, two drummers, and one guy who’s trying to sing through a phone.

HUP: Have you ever worried that the phone makes lyrics hard to hear?

Bob: For me it’s never been about the lyrics, but I spend more time writing lyrics than I do almost anything else, which is crazy. When I listen to AC/DC or the Rolling Stones, I don’t know what the fuck they’re saying. I’m listening to the guitar and drums. That’s what I’ve always listened to. But you kinda know what they mean, and some words you get, some words you don’t. 

That doesn’t mean that I don’t want my vocals understood, it just not up front. 

Auckland-based noiseniks Swallow The Rat is a band making big noises on the music scene both here in Aotearoa and beyond, with their delicious slabs of discordant post-punk. Having recently returned from the prestigious SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, the five-piece band is about to tour Aotearoa in support of the release of their debut self-titled EP, and, happily, it all starts in Hamilton this coming Friday, April 26th, with a show at Nivara Lounge. HUP caught up with Austin-native Brian Purington (guitar) ahead of the show.

​HUP: First of all, congratulations on a pretty exciting few months! Playing SXSW is kind of a big deal…how was it in reality? It looked kind of hectic…did I read it was nine shows in a week or something?!

Brian:  Yeah, we played 9 shows over 8 days.  I think we had 6 shows booked when I flew over and added a few more last minute. We closed out the Shifting Sounds party and a band on the bill (Ex-Optimists) invited us out to Bryan Texas (about a 90 min drive from Austin) to play another show with them the next night.  So the following day after playing a house party in the late afternoon we headed out there, arriving around 10pm, played around 12:30am, and drove back to Austin after the show ended.  I think I made to bed around 4:30am...

HUP: How did you guys go down over there? Were there any stand out shows? Would you do it again?

Brian:  Believe it or not all of the shows were good but I would say the stand out gigs were our Official Showcase at Barracuda, the NZ Music day party at the Parish and the Shifting Sounds party at the Hole in the Wall. We were lucky enough to share the stage will a number of great band.  Everyone we worked with over there was super welcoming, supportive and seemed to have a genuine interest in what we are doing. I think we would certainly do it again if given the opportunity.

HUP: Congratulations also on the EP! Releasing it on vinyl is pretty special too, what can you tell us about that, how did it come about/where was it mastered/pressed etc?

Brian:  Essentially we were invited to play SXSW and didn’t have any merch to sell!  So I did a limited run of 7”s, which includes the 3 singles we have released thus far, on a label I co-run with a friend/collaborator back in Austin (Headbump Records).  The UK label, Reverb Worship, also did a small run of CDs for the release.  It was pressed through A to Z Media, recorded/mixed by Nick Abbot at Northwestern and Mastered by Alex Lyon at the Bubble.  All the artwork/design was done by our drummer, Hayden. We have a few copies left that we will be selling at our upcoming NZ shows.

​​HUP: How do you find the music scene here compared to the one you grew up with back home in the US? 

Brian:  I wouldn’t say it’s fundamentally any different.  It’s just much smaller and you don’t have the same volume of touring bands coming through New Zealand.

HUP: What are the plans for the rest of this year, any more writing/recording/shows etc?

Brian:  We just finished our debut LP and are looking to release it later in the year and that will be followed by some NZ/Aussie touring.  We are also looking to get back to the USA sometime early next year.  In the meanwhile we are working on some new material and hopefully get to recording it soonish.

Catch Swallow The Rat at Nivara lounge this Friday,  April 26th, with two amazing support bands – Taurangans Threat.Meet.Protocol, and Kirikiriroans Cartoon Villain.

HUP: As a co-host of HUP and The Hum 106.7FM’s Tekau Nga Waiata Pai Top 10 show, and as a frequent gig goer, we know you have a love of new music, and particularly that from New Zealand. How did your interest develop in garage punk/garage rock, freakbeat and psych from the ‘60s?
​
Phil: I grew up loving ‘60s music. Even in my teens I was all about the Beatles, then The Who, Stones, Kinks… and naturally dug deeper. I got stuck on the Velvet Underground for a good few years, then Beefheart.  In a previous life I worked in libraries, and an old mate Terry Bishop was the music buyer for Hamilton’s libraries. We’d pore over catalogues, and he’d turn up with all sorts of cool stuff, as many of us around in the 90s will attest!  One day Terry added an amazing compilation called ‘Everything You Always Wanted To Know About ´60s Expansive Punkadelic Garage Rock Instrumentals But were afraid To Ask’ to the collection, then a few more ‘60s garage and psych releases.  They didn’t get borrowed much and ended up in my collection, to which I soon added the legendary Lenny Kaye-curated Nuggets box set, and then there was no looking back.

​HUP: What are some of your favourite songs from this era?
 
Phil: Wow, hard question.

As actual songs, I’d list:
​
‘Gloria’, by the Van Morrison-fronted Them. The perfect song, and one that was widely covered by garage bands. At last count I have versions by well over fifty ‘60s garage bands; faves being Los Temperatios, Los Sharps, Los Young Beats, and Delfini from Zagreb.

The 13th Floor Elevators’ debut single ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ and ‘Slip Inside This House’.
​
The Who’s ‘My Generation’ – not so much the original, but weird covers such as Zlatni Akordi’s, an Italian freakbeat band called The Geordies, and Som Beat from Brazil. And Los Shakes’ Spanish version ‘el Mugroso’!

​HUP: How long has ‘Retrospect’ been going?
​
Phil: Somewhere around 7 years
 
HUP: How frequently do you make new shows? Are you still discovering plenty of new songs to play on the show? How often are you now having to repeat content?
 
Phil: Weekly. It’s produced and aired at Free FM before syndication across New Zealand, and via a handful of selected Canadian stations and one in California.
Yes, I am discovering new stuff all the time. It’s all about the hunt!  Just this week I’ve scored new stuff from [old] bands The Bojax, The Muldoons, The Bucket City Distortion Racket, a bizarre LP by The Four Skins, which seems to be a bunch of medical students [?] singing about STDs, and one useful track called LSD, and global garage tracks from Hector et les Mediators [French freakbeat], Norwegian band Firebeats Inc., and a psychedelic Czech band Blue Effect.
​
I have somewhere around 15,000 tracks to play with, so I only repeat things I really want to. I still have a backlog of 100 or so full LPs to sort through, yet to be played.

​HUP: What kind of following does the show have, and what sort of feedback have you received from your followers?

Phil: Social media makes all the difference – I share artist and song info there, and also the podcast links. That generates a heap of feedback from all over the world, and a bunch of stuff I can’t translate. Retrospect has over 7,000 Facebook followers and in a good month has over 10,000 podcast listens.
 
It’s cool having loyal listeners keep in touch. In fact, this month I invited one of the biggest fans to select all the tracks [episode 358] and co-host from North Carolina.
 
HUP: How much New Zealand and Hamilton content is there among the songs?

Phil: A fair bit, although a lot of the NZ ‘60s stuff is more soul or R&B rather than real garage punk. There’s a few good comps for sure [Wyld Things, A Day In The Mind’s Mind] and I do have a few faves including some early Ray Columbus material that is reallllly good, a super-obscure cover of The Who’s ‘I’m A Boy’ done by Wellington’s The Rising Sons featuring Denis O’Brien [owner of Slow Boat records and brother of RNZ’s Phil O’Brien], who doesn’t even have a copy. In fact, they hadn’t heard it for many years until I played it.
​
Not much Hamilton content. The few bands I do have are a bit ‘pop’ for my podcast, with one exception – the incredible ‘Belly Board Beat’ by local band The Music Convention! That’s totally WILD and someone should get the rights for their local government election campaign ads. LOL!

Retrospect 60s Garage Punk Show is available from:
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Free FM's website

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​I N T E R V I E W
Nod your Head and Shake it at the Same Time: an Interview with Peter McCall of ‘Fazed on a Pony’
with Ian Duggan
 
Dunedin’s ‘Fazed on a Pony’ released their fantastic EP ‘That’s How the Light Gets In’ late in February.  We have featured a couple of the tracks on our HUP/The Hum 106.7FM Top 10 of new New Zealand songs, including ‘Natural Toast’ - which made our #1 a couple of months ago. We talked to front-person Peter McCall about his musical influences, the artwork of the release, the meaning of the band's name, and more!

HUP: My first, second and third impression on first hearing ‘Natural Toast’ was how much the song reminded me of Pavement. I, and the other primary contributor here at HUP, grew up on different sides of the world, but we were independently obsessed with Pavement in the ‘90s, so for us this is a great thing! Listening to an interview you did on Radio One, you confirm the Pavement, and also Silver Jews, influences. How did you get into these bands, and why do you think Pavement still has such an influence on you and other bands 20 years after they split?

Peter: I had a friend in high school that was into a lot of 80s and 90s guitar music and was always trying to get me to listen to bands like My Bloody Valentine, Slint, Dinosaur Jr, etc. He must have given me [the Pavement album] ‘Slanted and Enchanted’ on USB at some point and it probably sat on my computer for a couple of years before I listened to it. When I did finally put it on – one summer afternoon back at my parents place, cleaning my old room – I listened to the first half thinking that I didn’t really get it. Then ‘Here’ came on and I just thought it was the best thing I’d ever heard. It was sad, catchy, nostalgic, clever, messy and mysterious. I suppose it expressed something, or a combination of things, that I’d felt but never heard before.

After that, Pavement was really all I listened to for a long time, searching out every b-side and live clip, learning their songs (there’s an amazing website called slay tracks, which has tabs for every Malkmus song, including Jicks stuff). I found the Silver Jews through the Malkmus connection, around the time they put out ‘Early Times’. David Berman has his own thing going on and is one of my favourite lyricists. ‘Starlite Walker’ is, to me, a perfect album.

I think what I find compelling and inspiring in Pavement and in the Silver Jews are their contradictions – that the music can be ironic and sincere, epic and pathetic, tight and loose, often within a single phrase. It’s profoundly pathetic country music that makes you want to nod your head and shake it at the same time.
 
HUP: It isn’t just the music I love with your EP; the art work, featuring ponies galloping in front of a mountain range, is also fantastic. Who painted it? What else can you tell me about it?

Peter: My partner, Rosa, did the painting of Aoraki with galloping horses in front of it. I think it was initially a somewhat ironic attempt at making a stoner art poster – with all the bright colours and cliché beauty of mountains and water and horses running. She had it at her brothers flat and would go to his place once and a while to hang out, adding a bit more to it each time. Eventually her nephew, two at the time and completely obsessed with horses, saw the picture and freaked out – started jumping on it and kissing all the horses - so she finished the painting and gave it to him.

Around that time I had decided to really lean in to the pony vibe of the band and thought it would make a good cover. However, what you see on the EP cover is me holding a photo copy of the image sticky-taped to another piece of paper that has the band name added. It was the stencil for a screen we made up to print t-shirts with. While making the t-shirts I realised I like the look of the stencil more than the original art. The orangey-brown paint around the top of the mountain is paint-stopper from the screen. [continued below]

HUP: What is the scene like in Dunedin currently? Are there still good numbers of people – and students in particular – interested in live, original music? What other bands from down there should we be checking out?

Peter: It’s hard to say, really. From what I can tell, there’s the student scene, which consists of a few student bands that play pop music and draw huge crowds, and then there’s everyone else, who sometimes get a great attendance and sometimes don’t. I don’t go to as many shows as I used to and would not consider myself an authority on the state of any scene.

Some of my favourite current Dunedin bands are Wet Specimen (led by Lucy Hunter of Opposite Sex), Tiny Pieces of Eight, Koizilla, and the Rothmans.
 
HUP: What are your aspirations for the band? Should we expect more songs soon?

Peter: I don’t have any careerist aspirations; I would just like to keep going for as long as it feels good. I’d like to put out a full length, which will be the next project and one I’ve started working on. We’re taking a short break from playing to write. Hopefully we could have something out by the end of the year, maybe sooner.
 
HUP: What does the band name, ‘Fazed on a Pony’, mean?

Peter: I’m not sure, but perhaps Malkmus or Berman could tell you. It was a phrase written on the insert from ‘Early Times’.
 
HUP: You toured the release of ‘Light Gets In’ in January, including Auckland, but you had no Hamilton date included. Do you think you will make it up here at some stage?

Peter: I would’ve loved to have played Hamilton and hopefully we can at some point in the future. It was the first tour I’d organised so I tried to keep it simple – we also all have jobs and had to do it over a couple weekends. Perhaps next time we can take some time off and go to a few more places in between the big cities.