Issue #2

by Emily Lebetzis

29/3/2002
This is not really an interview. It’s more of an impromptu conversation that ended up being recorded and transcribed. Since returning from six months overseas I had heard some of my friends speaking highly of the St. Albans Kids but I had never asked who they were. Then last week I heard that something was happening outside Missing Link records, Melbourne’s only specialist punk store, on Good Friday at 5:55pm. No one was quite sure what it was, but I heard the name ”St. Albans Kids’ mentioned. I thought they were from the eponymous western suburb of Melbourne and had an image in my head of some kind of tough-guy street punk band. How wrong I was!

As I discovered when I arrived at Flinders Lane earlier today (along with 150 other curious souls) St. Albans Kids are an explosive band from Adelaide. Each of their songs is a short, loud and fast burst of anguish, despair and pure chaos. The music is a defiant call to the crowd to dance as uninhibitedly as a three-year-old - a challenge I wholeheartedly welcomed. After the second band, George W. Bush had played and I had garnered as much info as I could from various members of the now-dispersed crowd, I approached SAK’s singer to ask him about his influences. After a couple of minutes of talking, I decided that it sounded like an interview. So I asked him if I could record our conversation. What follows is what we said from the moment I turned on my Dictaphone. All heckling and interruptions from those around us have been left in at the request of the singer.

Hello! My name is Emily.

Hi, my name’s Tom.

Emily - How are you Tom?

Tom - Um, quite tired.

Emily - Why are you tired?

Tom - Coz I was dancing till 5 o’clock in the morning and I just danced even more and screamed.

Emily - And that was because you were playing outside Missing Link.

Tom - Yeah, and I get kind of tired every time we play.

Emily - Well that’s understandable because you give out a lot of energy.

Tom - That’s why we only play 10-minute sets. I wouldn’t be able to do it for any longer.

Emily - Do you have enough songs to be able to play for longer?

Tom - We do but we don’t want to play them. We’re in the process of writing a heap of new stuff. Because since we moved to Melbourne we got a new drummer and we chose the best songs of the stuff we wrote with the old drummer and ditched the rest and now we’re trying to do new stuff.

Emily - If you had to describe your music to someone who had never heard it before, how would you describe it?

Tom - Loud, noisy, all over the place but rock at the same time. Lots of screaming and loud drums and guitars going everywhere.

Emily - So, when you say rock do you mean there’s structure to it?

Tom - No, as in ‘rock’ guitar riffs and with rock…

[interrupted by Tom from Vial8 - Don't you hate it when you're recording stuff (and) someone comes over with a loud voice?]

Tom- with rock drums. It was kinda like [undecipherable] Mandi yells - Em! Are you catching the train home?]

Emily - Yeah. Cool, I’ve got a train buddy! Sorry.

Tom - When the band started, Lachlan started listening to a whole heap of rock like Entombed and another Swedish band called Hellacopters. So, that’s kinda natural (that St. Albans Kids have rock-style guitar). Some kid told us once that we sounded like this Norwegian band called J. R. Ewing. And then in a really good German accent, he said: “But you’re more rock like AC/DC”. I thought that was kinda cool.

Emily - Oh, that’s awesome! And I just said you sound like Mohinder.

Tom - Well we do. It’s kind of like this weird amalgam of the chaos stuff but with really cheesy rock roots going on at the same time.

Emily - Who writes the lyrics in the band?

Tom - I do.

Emily - Could you say what you cover in the lyrics?

Tom - Ah, whatever I feel like. A lot of it is really personal king of stuff but at the same time directed personal stuff so it’s not just like, “Oh, woe is me!” It’s kind of like, “Woe is me and here’s the reason for it.”

Tom - Oh, okay. Yeah, so I kind of like writing lyrics that leave a bit of open interpretation.

Emily - Yeah, that’s always good coz then people can take what they want out of -

Tom - Those cops have got pizzas.

Emily - Hey, that’s why they were walking past! We thought they were checking us out to see whether we were loitering with intent. Do you plan on all moving to Melbourne?

Tom - No, I don’t finish uni until January and so we’re pretty much going to exist as a cross-border band until then. But that’s cool because I don’t mind taking the bus or driving over or hitching or whatever. We’re going on tour in a couple of weeks, so everyone has to travel for that. (The band will be playing their first Brisbane shows in April).

Emily - I’ve gotta ask you: You usually play in really strange venues. Do you have a philosophy behind that?

Tom - Yeah, yeah, we do. One of them is that when we first started we were really crap and we needed a gimmick for people to like us!

(laughter all round)

No, that’s bullshit but, um, a lot of people told us that it was the reason why we were doing it. But, no. The real reason why is the whole notion of reclaiming public space for people to choose what they want to do with it rather than it being defined by various structures -

Emily - I’m gonna be a real wanker at the moment and mention Situationists.

Tom - Yeah, well I guess it’s vaguely related to that kinda stuff. It’s not like I’ve been reading Debord books and going, “Yeah, I’m gonna go and do -”

Emily - Well, I do (laughs)

Tom - “…go and do a dérivé” or whatever. I think it’s kind of stuff that was in our heads anyway but I guess if you wanna define it, that’s where the roots of it are.

Emily - Yeah.

Tom - Yeah. But we’ve been labelled ‘CrimethInc. Faggots’ a lot of the time. That kind of element of stuff id there as well but that wasn’t -

[interrupted by Emily from Plea of Insanity - see ya Em!]

Emily - See ya Em! Where’s my hug? [Sound of Emily POI squeezing the life out of me as she lifts me off the ground. We both laugh.]

Emily POI - Oh, your hat fell off.

Bridget (still hanging around) - Hey Emily! Is that a fez? Emily - Yeah, it’s from turkey. Bridget - Yeah, is it called a fez?

Emily - It’s a fez. But the fezes have got the little tail thing.

Bridget - What’s that called then?

Emily - It’s just a hat with Arabic on it or something. I dunno. Bridget & Emily POI - See ya! Emily - See ya! This is gonna be really interesting.

Tom - You have to transcribe all of that shit as well.

(We spoke a little about where this will be published and who is involved in Pretty Ugly zine)

Tom - I met a really cool girl while I was away who does a pretty cool zine in the States called Smear. Do you know that one? It’s sort of like a riot grrl zine. She was really nice. [Interrupted again by other members of St. Albans Kids muttering and yelling stuff about poofters, boofheads, hessian faggots and green meat and saying "get away"]

Tom - I guess you want the context of that shit?

Emily - Yeah, I’ll write that down. What’s it all about?

Tom - Hessians and green meat: Adelaide is quite a narrow-minded community for kids who are involved in hardcore and punk. Last week we did a show at out house in the hills in Adelaide and we advertised it as having free food and decided to mention that most of it would be dumpster food - just to put it out there that it’s something that punk kids do, rather than people looking at it as being something that bums do. Yeah, anyway, Adelaide is kind of notorious for being this guestbook shit-talking haven -

Emily - Yeah, that’s why I don’t like Adelaide bands.

Tom - So we put it up on one of the band websites and within about five minutes there were people proclaiming us as hessian faggots and everyone should boycott the show, and that the only food we would be serving would be green meat and sour yoghurt and all this kind of stuff. One band actually pulled out because they were freaked out by that notion and also because there wasn’t going to be a PA at the show.

Emily - No PA. So how does that work?

Tom - Just sing through your amps.

Emily - Oh! Alright.

Tom - I didn’t really see it as a problem. I think we’ve played one show with a PA before.

Emily - Yeah, I heard about the show at the multi-storeyed carpark.

Tom - See ya Andrew! Oh yeah, that was The St. Albans Kids Mk I. This is sort of the rebirth now. We’re pretty much a different band.

Emily - Is there anything else? Oh, I have to get your contacts.

At this stage I turned off the dictaphone. What came after is at the very bottom. From what I remember of the pre-dictaphone conversation, the band started 5 months ago (ie. November) and played for two months before a 3-month hiatus. Today’s show and last week’s Adelaide show are their first with their current line-up. Also, some trivia: ‘St. Albans Kids’ comes from the nickname given to the students in the classic 80s Australian movie, Flirting with Noah Taylor and Nicole Kidman. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve yet to see that film.

I should also mention that this band is musically one of the most intense live bands I have ever had the privelege of witnessing. I rate today’s performance alongside the first time I ever saw The Nation blue, who came up from Hobart and Syndicate, who came down from Sydney, as the tightest, most interesting and all-encompassing sensory experiences I have had. The only Melbourne band I can put on the same level as having impressed me so much when I had no idea what they would sound like was Heartfeltself Marks I and II.

I’m really looking forward to the next happening/event/situation/spectacle tomorrow night at sunset. In order to find out the location, I had to e-mail the band George W. Bush. The ‘event’ was also publicised today. We have to meet at this ’secret location’ at sunset tomorrow and my inside source informed me that the two bands will be playing in a nearby alleyway soon afterwards. It promises to be refreshingly different.

St. Albans Kids’ debut MCD ‘tales of late night excursions into urban wastelands’ was launched at the Corner Hotel on August 25th