Wolfmother

Tue 15th Sep, 2009 in Features

“Two nights ago,” Andrew Stockdale tells me, “we went to Them Crooked Vultures in Amsterdam with Josh Homme and Dave Grohl and then we went off…”

“Wait a minute!” I yell down the line to LA. “What about John Paul?!”

Stockdale adds as an afterthought, “And John Paul.”

I would have thought, readers, given the music Andrew Stockdale creates for his outfit Wolfmother, that he would remember whether or not he’d spent any time with John Paul Jones, the bassist from Led Zeppelin. But we digress.

“Dave Grohl’s like, – œOh there’s this bar that’s next door to a squat that I used to sleep in when I did gigs with Nirvana,’ so we’re walking along this street in Amsterdam, along the canals with all these dudes, drinking. It was like this kind of carnival and people were, like, making offerings…that was pretty wild.”

Wild enough, explains Stockdale, that “one of the crew guys got slightly too excited and went missing in the night. I had to wake him up and make sure he got to the airport, so I became like the veteran traveller.”

It’s fair to say Andrew Stockdale is a veteran traveler. It’s been nearly ten years since Wolfmother formed, in its original three-piece lineup, and nearly five years since the trio accepted the J Award, a couple of ARIAs and a Grammy for their self-titled debut. If there was a top, they were at it. In 2008 the cracks weren’t just showing; they were irreparable. Word of the break-up was made official after the not-unexpected meltdown at Byron Bay’s Splendour In The Grass festival that saw Chris Ross and Myles Heskett quit after months of deliberations.

Twelve months later, Stockdale has repopulated his band – Ian Peres plays bass and keys, Aidan Nemeth is the second guitarist and Dave Atkins handles drums. They’ve recorded follow-up record Cosmic Egg, supported The Killers and are about to kick off a world tour, after which the boys return home to support AC/DC.

So. Wolfmother, the brand, doesn’t seem to have suffered any. But how’s the band, personnel wise?
“There’s a lot more freedom, hey,” says Stockdale in his soft, almost child-like voice. “The guys have so, like, got their eyes open to everything and [have] just given me a kind of excitement. It’s contagious I guess: I feed off their energy. It’s been a good year. A good, sort of, journey – for lack of a better word.”

Given the very public demise of your original lineup – and the assumed disintegration of your relationships with Chris and Myles – you gave off an air of stoicism. Surely, that whole debacle was more personally confronting than you let on to fans?
“I guess, yeah. It was definitely difficult. But it was more difficult when we were in the band, trying to work it out, trying to push to keep the band alive. But then once we sort of accepted that it wasn’t gonna happen, by that point it was just a relief.”

For the second album of any mildly successful artist there’s a fair bit of pressure. I feel there was more on you than perhaps other bands who reached the same success off a debut – especially given that there would have been some conjecture in-house over the rights to the name and songs.
“Yeah, I guess the name [Wolfmother] brings a whole lot of expectation with it; keeping the name creates that angle toward this record and how it’s interpreted. I just tried to write some songs and get a band together. We [the new lineup] did those shows as White Feather to just try and break the ice and play some new songs and, for me, to try and start a band and be a band. Then, once we could play the old songs, play the new songs and [saw] we could actually do it, it made me think, I guess, that going forward as Wolfmother was a real thing.”

And? There’s no question that Wolfmother is your band: it’s your voice. So what of the new songs?
“I have a studio under my house, I just built this studio last year and I go down there, play the drums, layer it all up, work it out myself and give the band demos. That’s the way, with the first band…” he corrects himself, “when Wolfmother started I’d bring in, like, riffs and ideas to get the ball rolling so it’s kind of always been that way where I’ve presented ideas to the band, but now I guess I can sort of see it through to the final step.”

You’ve got more control.
“Yeah, yeah.”

Alan Moulder, the British producer who has worked with artists including The Jesus and Mary Chain, Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails, was enlisted to go into pre-production sessions with the new-look Wolfmother. Were you open to his ideas, or were you going in with defined ideas and saying, ‘This is what we’re doing’?
“It was funny. Some of the songs that I thought would need a lot of treatment, and that I thought should be built up in big production, Alan played a big part in stripping them back and making it more like classic rock. I was kinda surprised by that and it kinda reminded me, as well, of the appeal of what we did on the first record. Big songs, but it’s actually just guitar, bass and drums. It’s got that raw quality to it.”

And it has. Just good, old-fashioned classic rock. Which must be a nice departure from the surreal nature of your everyday life. Are you even endeavouring to return some semblance of normalcy in your life? Do you actually pop down the shops and get some milk, or pull out the mower and do the lawns?
“I tried to do that, hey. At the end of the first tour I was like, – œI’m gonna buy a lawn mower. I wanna do the lawns. I’m gonna do all these things to stay grounded. To stay real.’ So I went through that whole thing of: I’ve gotta stay grounded, how do I stay grounded? But, now I don’t worry about it so much, hey.

“It’s like Bob Dylan: don’t look back. At some point you gotta say – well, what is a normal life? This is it now. I’m gonna play music and travel the world and I’m just gonna embrace it.”

Cosmic Egg is due out 23 October through Universal Music. Wolfmother kicks off its September tour this week.

Thu Sep 17 – The Tivoli, Brisbane
Sat Sep 19 – The Enmore, Sydney
Wed Sep 23 – The Capitol, Perth
Thu Sep 24 – HQ Live, Adelaide
Fri Sep 25 – The Palace, Melbourne
Sat Sep 26 – Pier Hotel, Frankston