Features April 3, 2016

Q&A: Violent Soho on the elephant in the room

Former Editor

Brisbane post-grunge quartet Violent Soho may be best known for theirsuburban anthems and on and offstage antics, but as TMN finds out from drummer Michael Richards, on the release day of new LP WACO, the band are unafraid of how forthrighttheir polemic against local issues sounds.

In your social media postcalling out ticket scalpers you said you try to keep ticket prices as cheap as possible. Are there any disadvantages to doing this?

Do you mean, do we want to make more money as a result of charging more for tickets? No, and I can’t really see any further potential disadvantage than that. We want to be able to give people the opportunity to come to a high quality production that has as sweet a line up as possible and we want to make it affordable. For us, we feel we’ve ticked all those boxes here.

Have you noticed a decrease in ticket scalpers for the WACO tour since your Facebook post?

Not really, but I don’t actively go seeking them out. I just don’t have time, unfortunately. We did limit the number of tickets per transaction from 10 to 4, so hopefully that has had a positive effect in deterring the number of tickets that might get scalped. The hard thing to cop is you know that no matter what you say, people will still try to take advantage.

Money is money to these people and they have no sense of ethics around how the music culture works. These people are outside of the spectrum of people who actually care about music in the first place. They are just trying to cash in.

By speaking directly to our own fans though, hopefully we can try and affect a culture that decides not to pay. It’s worth missing the gig in order to stand up against these bull shitters who want to take advantage of you. That’s what we were trying to communicate to our fans by that post. Our message to the scalpers was “Fuck You”. Simple.

It seems like this is a transitional time for Violent Soho in terms of increased popularity; does it feel that way?

I guess when you have a new record there can often be a buzz around you at the time and so having a bunch of songs on the radio and stuff like that is probably drawing in a new wave of fans for us, which is great! We don’t really measure where we’re at personally this way though.

It might be the case that we’ve been granted the opportunity to grow our fan base or whatever and to get our music in front of more people, but for us it’s always been about picking up our instruments and playing because that’s what we love to do. The rest is all a very happy bonus.

The band had this air of rebellion and off-kilter debauchery surrounding it for its last few tours. How accurate is that now?

Haha! Off-kilter debauchery is probably a great way to describe it. It’s not like full debauchery, it’s off-kilter. We try our darndest, but you know, these old kidneys aren’t getting any younger. We got DZ Deathrays and Dune Rats as supports on this next tour for a reason. We might need some motivation now. Most of us get up at five in the morning to change nappies and stuff these days. We’re raising a new generation of off-kilter rebel weirdos so it’s a bit of a transitional phase you might say.

[Frontman]Luke Boerdam described WACO as more about control and illusion than Hungry Ghost. Can you elaborate?

My take on it is that Hungry Ghost has a lot to do with confronting the self-destructive side to human nature, where-as WACO confronts our inability to maintain self-control. The issue of illusion has to do with systems both external and internalised that we either create or conform to in order to maintain a feeling of control. So the illusion is that we mask our own inability to control our lives in any meaningful sense.

Is there one narrative that informed the songwriting?

I don’t think so. Each song seems to run its own course. The themes aren’t inserted intentionally into the songs or anything like that. We just write what we want to write.

Boerdamalso said Hungry Ghost “dealt with the spiritual skeleton we’ve become from this spoon-fed reality.” What do you think the biggest repercussion from that will be for young people?

It’s hard to see the future however I think the repercussions are already pretty evident. Look at how the status quo exists for young people today. It’s very uniform, almost a sense of being told how, who and what you are. The youth culture rebelled in the ’50s when Rock and Roll was invented out of a suppressed collective sense of identity loss.

I think 70 years later the same pigeon-holing has returned in a more violent way. You can probably recognise it in the huge overwhelming increase in people now being victimised through body image crisis, like kids on steroids, kids with eating disorders. Also look at the rate of suicide for teens, it’s shocking and it seems to get worse. It’s a repercussion of being disconnected from any real sense of existence.

The album cover art is a little bit neo-noir comic reminiscent – what’s the inspiration behind it?

I guess the artwork is giving a sense of pent up rage. It’s very static, but it’s waiting to jump out and explode. That’s like the elephant in the room, the thing, whatever it might be, that will destroy you.