Techtones' Talk

Rip It Up, Issue 45, 1 April 1981, Page 4

Techtones' Talk

George Kay

The four Techtones, Steve Roach, Chris Burt, Jimmy Juricevich, Peter Solomon and sound man Doug Hood are grouped around the inevitable formica table in a Dunedin motel. The tape recorder's switched on and immediately the conversation becomes more guarded, more self-conscious for a while. Sheerlux taught them a few things:

Steve: "We had a lot of difficulties songwriting as we were going about it the wrong way. We wanted to get into songs not the bloody chants we were writing. We wanted something with a bit of melody and that wasn’t happening and we were sick of the hype and the frontman scene.” Resolutions were made?

Jimmy: "Yeah no frontmen, no lead singer, no gym shoes and jumping up and down on stages. Just an understanding of the sort of music we really liked and wanted to write.” When the Techtones formed out of the ruins of Sheerlux- the social disaster horrorshow bands were still in ascendance. Times must’ve been hard 9

Steve: “Oh we got arseholes for a while from the kids.”

Chris: "We were classified as kind of pappy

Jimmy: “Yeah but we couldn’t afford to stop playing for the first few months so we just had to sort things out while we were playing.”

Let’s talk about 'That Girl

Steve: "To record ‘That Girl’ we had an eight track tape recorder but we found we needed an extra one to put on the backing vocals and so we rigged up this other four track. Then when we were mixing and it was all manual so we had to keep the two tape recorders synched all the time and this was four o’clock in the morning and they kept on going out of synch at the very end and you’d hear ‘f**k it’s out' and you’d go back to the beginning again.” After two all night sessions recording and producing 'That Girl’ the Techtones have brought in Doug Rogers to produce their next single ‘Shed A Tear’, a laid back ditty. Was it a wise choice as the next single?

Jimmy: “We thought a long time about this and maybe a slower, softer song has a chance of being played on the radio. There’s no point in getting a new song played only on Barry Jenkins’ show. It would be okay if you were a punk band but we want to be popular, successful.” The band reckon that ‘That Girl’ sold about 800 copies, hardly a 'White Christmas’, but undeterred they plan to tackle an album in a few months. But are doors opening? Chris: "Yeah they’re opening now. We’ve gone through the pissed off stage and we could’ve split like anybody else but it’s just a question of hanging in there.” So the Techtones are persevering, patiently, with realistic horizons and music that owes

less to fashion than to their ability to delve perceptively into established pop structures. But they’ve gotta make it soon.