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Northern Highway

A Fireside Bat Chat

By Paul McKessar

The Bats have ambitious plans for a world tour next year. But doing a world tour Bats-style doesn’t involve limos, Lear jets or cocaine.

by Lesley

Like everything else the Bats do, it’ll be a kinda humble affair. A very friendly world tour I bet, because the thing everybody likes about the Bats is that they’re a friendly pop band. Me, I like to stand on dancefloors and wobble about to ’em as we 11...

Talk to singer/songwriter Robert Scott and you can’t help but marvel at how the magic roundabout of rock ’n’ roll success means so very little to the Bats. He's just as happy to talk about an exhibition of his paintings at Dunedin's alternative art centre Chippendale House, making a comic or releasing tapes under assumed names as he is to tell me about blowing away the Housemartins in front of Bats-adoring Germans in Frankfurt. He'll admit that this Bats phenomenon is marvellously fun and rather weird, but he won't get caught up in all the hype. Robert’s musical career began with the Clean, playing bass and writing about five songs for the band on that instrument. The Clean broke up in 1982, he picked up the guitar and began writing. The Bats started at the end of that year and the flow of songs from the acoustic guitar didn't stop. He says he writes a lot of

songs because he hasn’t got much else to do. "The way I do it," he says, “is to just sit down and keep writing songs. Every tenth one will be good, so I go back to that one and work on it a bit more. So to get them out of my system, I just keep writing them — nine real shit ones, then maybe a tenth that will be okay.” w U ere you apprehensive bringing your songs to a band at first? “Yeah, a bit. But the band never really started off like that; it just started off with me playing guitar in a flat and then Kaye, who was living there as well, was starting to learn guitar so we started off playing together. Then Paul and Malcolm joined, so it was all quite a natural sort of evolution and didn’t require ‘bringing songs to a band 1 that much.”

That situation quickly changed however. Scott left Christchurch to return to Dunedin, and now records his songs onto cassettes with simple guitar accompaniment, which he sends to the others in Christchurch. New songs are tried out at practice before the Bats play live. “Some,” says Scott, “will work really quickly and easily, so they’re the ones we tend to do, leaving out the other ones if they don’t click. They’re pretty simple songs and we’ve been playing together for a while so it’s relatively easy for them to come together quickly.” Is that process an incentive to keep things simple? “I’d quite like to write some different kinds of songs, some more complicated ones, but every time I try and write them, I just get bogged down. Some of the newer songs have got a bit more in them than the earlier ones, that’s for sure, but it’s a pretty slow process of change. ” A toughening up of the Bats’ recorded sound is evident both on last year's single ‘Made Up in Blue’ and the new Daddy 's Highway album. Tracks like 'North by North’ on the album could even be described as "ominous." How do you personally perceive that process of change? “Songs are changing a bit in that I can play the guitar better.

When I started writing, I could only play G, C and D chords. Now I can play things like minor barre chords which gives me more scope in songs and eventually a better sound — they don’t all sound the same! Kaye’s a really good guitarist; as soon as I’ve got the chords for a song, she’ll think up a really good guitar part for herself [she “let’s rip some pretty meaty licks on the old axe," according to the Bats’ record company, Flying Nun] and Paul will come up with a really good bassline. We're all improving all the time. ” Was it hard for you, initially being a novice guitarist? “I can’t remember what I actually thought at the time, but I was probably quite happy to struggle away at those songs,” says Scott. “You can tell they’re getting better all the time. I stuck with it because I knew I

was improving. You can get away with it with our sort of jangly guitar sound, it’s like from strumming an acoustic anyway.” inhere are 12 songs on ■ here are 12 songs on Daddy's Highway. Four were recorded in an eight-track home studio in Scotland and the other eight, plus the two songs on the B-side of the single ‘Block of Wood,’ were recorded at Christchurch’s Nightshift, Studio. The band are credited as “producers," but Scott confesses to being unsure as to what the term actually means... "I think it’s someone who picks the songs and says how they're meant to be played or something,” he says. “We had Rob Pinder, our soundman,

twiddling the knobs in the studio because he’d done the JPSE in there a few weeks before. He r really knew what he was doing on the desk and we just set up all together in the big room and played about five songs in a row. If we were happy with the versions we’d just go back and do overdubs [guitars, vocals, some keyboards from Kaye and violin from Alistair Galbraith] over them, so it was pretty easy to do. So I suppose we produced it ourselves, but it is a weird word... “New Zealand bands are used to having to do it themselves, I think. Usually someone like Doug Hood was around when the Clean was going, setting up the machines and saying, ‘play that song,’ or 'do it like this, ’ but no one was like, putting their mark on bands, or telling them exactly what to do.” (Talking later to Paul Kean, who was credited as producer of the first two Bats’ EPs, suggests that his job was basically to organise finances and studio, etc. Mixing is sometimes a bit too diplomatic for him; he’d prefer a focused idea rather than “a bit of this, a bitofthat” —“I like to capture the feeling of the music, which can gel smoothed out when the technical side of production takes over,” says.) D fUr ats songs always seemed perfectly suited for New Zealand radio. They’re good songs and shit, they’re hardly the sort of thing that offends your mother. If Neil Finn can do it ... Ironically I was to learn from Paul Kean that Sydney biggie Triple J-FM playlisted both the sublime ‘Made Up in Blue' and a test-pressing of new single ‘Block of Wood.' I never heard either of ’em here. Scott agrees that both ‘Made Up in Blue' and

the LP Daddy's Highway are of a high enough production standard for radio airplay. Has there been a learning process involved for the band insofar as the sound of their records goes? "Yeah,” he says. “At the time, we thought they [the first two Bats' EPs] were okay, but now we're quite amazed that we could get away with what we did. The first two were d^ nQ on an eight-track and it’s a .salty thin sound. The guitar souno s totally fucked, and the vocals... there’s urn, a lot of out-of-tune ' singing on it. Like I never learned to sing properly till about a year ago, to actually hit a note properly, so a lot of the singing is out of tune, which I can't bear listening to. But it’s just a learning thing where you raise your standards and each thing you do has to be better than the last one. As long as you can see them improving, it's okay." The singing on Daddy's Highways much improved. Kaye Woodward’s backing vocals are highlighted more, and the harmonies are consequently a lot stronger (as well as being more in tune). Scott's voice is not nearly so harsh as on previous efforts, which he refers to as “cringeable.” “On this one,” he says, “there's quite a lot of close, breathy style vocals on a couple of songs; not half-spoken but not yelled like a lot of the earlier stuff.” Have you had singing lessons? “No. I did quite a bit of singing at school,-but it would probably be quite a good idea to have lessons — I know people who have, and it's helped them a lot. But it’s just a thing you learn over a period of time, I suppose; listening back to live tapes and realising how bad it is, concentrating more the next time and realising what you have to do and remembering that on stage, because often you get completely lost and carried away. You forget what you're doing!” w ■ Where do your lyrics come from? Often the emphasis appears to be on odd characters or simple images... “I don’t consciously think of anything when I’m writing songs. The important thing is the melody, so I’ll just start humming that, and then sing any word that comes into my head over and over while I'm getting the song together. Later I’ll maybe develop that idea into something and build around it.” . Like'Mr Earwig’? “I don’t know how that one came about! It must’ve just been in my brain and come out! Usually though, it's not a very well developed story and a song can often mean three or four different things. I don’t spend that much time on lyrics, which isn't too good really—l should put a bit more work into them. “Often there won’t be any set lyrics for a while and I actually sing different lyrics for up to a year for one song each time I do it. Then we go to record and I have to have a set of lyrics to actually sing forthe recording, so that’s when they really get written. After that, they have to be sung that way because everybody expects the same words. But if it’s not a recorded song, then often they can change, which can be fun, but it’s scary when you go to sing and there won’t be anything there. Usually something comes out at the last minute. ’’ Even though he is singing a lot better nowadays, Bob’s garbled words aren’t what fills dancefloors. What consistently does achieve that aim though, is the rolling rhythms provided by Paul Kean and Malcolm Grant. Dancefloors big... and dancefloors small, such as the Bats will encounter on their

proposed summer tour of “out of the way places." Playing somewhere different is a lot of fun, says Scott. Do you think that the Bats’ rustic “New Zealand flavour," a j curious amalgam of pop and C&W, Gore-style, would enable them to reach an audience better than, say, other Flying Nun bands?" “Yeah,” says Scott, “because some bands rely on complex songs, but ours are kept simple. We just play acoustically sometimes and it’s still been okay. Our music is pretty easy to relate to; it doesn’t have any pretensions or big ideals about it.” Is that a major part of the band’s appeal? "I don’t know, it could be. There’s a lot of music around where people think they have to do big special things and make big special noises to impress people, but we don’t do that. I think melody is the key, a good tune. There’s not a lot of good tunes around." Q after the interview, the Bats are due to leave for their Australian tour. Australia’s an unknown quantity, but the thrill of heading overseas with your songs can’t be beaten: “It’s incredible," says Scott. overseas, seeing us just playing our guitars, ordinary people from the other side of the world. But it’s great taking your songs from here and playing them in front of different people, like Germans . How do Germans react to the Bats? - “I wasn't sure, because in between songs I was abusing them in English, and then I realised that most of them could speak English anyway! We got away with it and were cal led back for an encore: 'Ja, ja, gut!’ “We played with the - '. Housemartins in Frankfurt, and they were amazed that there wasn’t a record company paying for us to get there. They asked if we were on WEA or CBS New Zealand, and we said, 'Naah, we just saved up some money and came over. They couldn’t believe it. We just got told that if we turned up at this place where they were playing and asked to support them, they might let us. They were so boring—all their songs sounded the same!” Is there a point where the Bats change from being a group of friends into a “professional” band? “That happens to a lot of people, but we try and feel among ourselves that we’re a group of friends. We don’t treat each other like working partners. I think it would be pretty horrible if it got to a stage like that, and I know we’d stop. A lot of bands do slave on, too scared to stop.” Bob Scott after the Bats? A record producer? “Yeah! Putting my own stamp on records: ‘Do a G there, you need a G! ’ I dunno, there's not many openings for that sort of thing here. Stay unemployed... get a job... play more music!” A ■ Hnd so the Bats depart from our shores. A month passes and I get hold of Paul Kean on the line from Christchurch. Post-Bats, Australia battles to pull itself together. The band have come and gone, gigs have been played, dead kangaroos have been inspected on roadsides. Now the furore is over whether Daddy's Highway will get pressed at EMI; it’s due to be one of the last records pressed at the plant, and Paul Kean's fingers are crossed, hoping that there will be no hiccups.. “Australia went brilliantly well," he says. “We started off

expecting it to be lowkey, but over 200 people turned up at our first gig, practically filling the place to capacity. “It was a good start and the gigs kept building, getting a cross-section audience, not just expatriates. It culminated in a ‘Flying Nun showcase' with the Verlaines and Max Block at the Sydney Trade Union Club, which is like a prestigious gig. It’s a place with three floors —- bars and one-armed bandits everywhere. We got 600 people there.” Rounds of interviews kept the band busy, and most of the feedback from the Australian music press was positive, including some very enthusiastic reviews. Critic Mark Mordue instructed RAM readers to “see them soon before they go home back across the Tasman Sea, leaving you to wave, cry and say goodbye. ’’ The Bats observed that the major trend in Australian bands seemed to be moulded in a Hoodoo Gurus vein. There

were plenty of venues, including lots of small corner pubs with PAs strung up in their ceilings. Kean found the most appealing thing to be “a lot of good community radio—public radio like Tpie-J has a very : high profile, a real high audience rating and no advertising. “In Melbourne the crowd was enthused almost to encore .. status," he says, “but that’s not done for support bands. [Relative indie “giants” the Go-Betweens were the main act.] There was a very . industry-minded roadcrew, but I suppose you couldn’t really do that here either...” H ■ How do you feel about “pioneering” Australia for New Zealand bands, being the advance guard? “I hate the idea that’s built up

about 'following in the Chills' footsteps,’us being a second-rate Chills. The point is to explore and be able to give advice." Paul Kean’s previous musical jaunt to Australia had been as a member of Toy Love. That was also the last time a major “alternative" New Zealand band has appeared touring across the Tasman. “I got the feeling from a lot of questions that we made more of an impact then than we actually thought. A certain mystique has built up because of the time lapse in bands coming over of an alternative nature. I think Chris Knox put a lot of people off Australia, because we did have such a difficult time there, but having seen what’s going on now, we're keen to go back in April next year.” How did the Australian tour compare to last year's European trip? “It was a lot more intense and organised than Europe," says Kean. “We’ve learnt a lot,

gained a lot of knowledge. On our next tour [the world] we’re going to approach it that way. We’ll go to Australia, America and then Europe — basing ourselves there, rather than in London. They are more enjoyable audiences and you get treated with more respect as a musician in Europe.” Phew. How does that ad go? “Don't leave home till you’ve seen the country?” Maybe I could modify it to say something like, “Don’t be a fool: seethe Bats while we’ve still got ’em here, and seethe Bats because they’re a New Zea/ancf phenomenon, not some computer-generated monster backed by LA session musicians.” Paul Kean always judges a band by whether you can dance to them. The Bats have been refining and maturing their pop craft for five years; they’re the best they've ever been right now, and yes, you could spend a whole lifetime dancing to them. e

This article text was automatically generated and may include errors. View the full page to see article in its original form.I whakaputaina aunoatia ēnei kuputuhi tuhinga, e kitea ai pea ētahi hapa i roto. Tirohia te whārangi katoa kia kitea te āhuatanga taketake o te tuhinga.
Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/RIU19871001.2.29

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Rip It Up, Issue 123, 1 October 1987, Page 20

Word count
Tapeke kupu
2,938

Northern Highway Rip It Up, Issue 123, 1 October 1987, Page 20

Northern Highway Rip It Up, Issue 123, 1 October 1987, Page 20

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