A Discussion Of TheDevastations Kind

Mon 18th Apr, 2005 in Features

After completing band practice and a quick trip to get home, Melbourne trio The Devastations’ lead vocalist and bassist Conrad Standish jumped on the phone for a free-form chat with FasterLouder about his band’s spectacular critical reception and superlative live show.

The band came into being in Melbourne around September 2002, born out of the ashes of Luxedo, an altogether rockier affair. Three musicians – Standish, guitarist vocalist and key player Tom Carlyon and drummer/percussionist Hugo Cran – came together to explore the more nocturnal end of the musical spectrum.

“Well, we started to play a lot in Melbourne. We were offered to support Tindersticks very early on – I think that was our fourth show or something,” Standish explains.

Landing such a prestigious gig proved to be deceptively easy: a good recommendation and the support slot – which introduced the band’s style of melancholic music to a wider audience of like-minded listeners – was theirs. The process of scoring the support wasn’t, according to the singer, very exciting, but it proved to be a natural meeting of musics.

“Then we just played a lot – for the next year, I suppose,” continues Conrad. “Our album came out in March or April 2003 and we went up to Sydney a couple of times, and played some shows in Adelaide. All that shit that you do – the relentless grind. Then in September 2003 we went over to Europe. There was interest there, so we went over. We had about six weeks’ worth of shows organised, and we just hung round. The record label in Madrid approached us and said they wanted to license the album from us, and so they released it in Europe, we played a lot more [and] got a lot more exposure.”

The band’s pace didn’t slacken – another jaunt around a couple of countries with Tindersticks and a spate of side-projects and film scoring work kept them busy until January of this year, when they returned to Australia.

Somewhere along the line, they managed to pick up another member, augmenting their on-record three-piece setup. Live, the band now boasts the sounds of Augie March’s keyboardist Kiernan Box. “He came over to Europe last year and did 20 or 30 shows with us… he’s been playing with us ever since,” explains Standish.

Those who’ve seen The Devastations’ live show are usually in awe at the energy level of the band. For all the subdued grandeur of The Devastations, when the tunes are reworked in a live setting, they take on a new, more edgy life. The question arises: which of the two states of band being – live or studio – is more important to the group?

“They’re probably just as important as each other,” says Conrad. “I really love recording and just working out things and ways or recording things – I find that very exciting. But live is a completely different proposition. They’re just as important as each other and just as much fun, really.”

Would that mean that the live show’s a little more hell-for-leather?

“Yes. Not like meat-and-two-veg rock kinda stuff. It’s a lot more physical. I can get kind of violent, live. All of us really appreciate having that outlet.”

The sort of music the band plays is difficult to pin down. There’s threads of gypsy, rock folk and country. Standish elects not to categorise, giving the tunes a more simple description – that of sad songs, of the Will Oldham or Nina Nastasia vein. It’s fitting, given the way regret flows throughout The Devastations, and it could be wondered whether this side of life is inherently more interesting, or more meaningful to songwriters.

“Sure,” says Standish. “I honestly wouldn’t know any other way of approaching a song. You know, it’s when you feel the most inspired to write songs, when you’re going through a period of some kind of turmoil. When things are fine in your life, you don’t really feel like you have anything that you have to purge. And even if you did, it’d be ‘I feel fantastic – la la la,’”

It could be suggested that this sense of lament is something that other Australian bands – Dirty Three, Hungry Ghosts or Crow - have picked up on, dealing with the ideas of sorrow, shot through with flitting moments of hope. It’s a theme that Standish warms to.

“I have a pretty vague ten cent theory about all that,” he says. “I think that Australian musicians generally have this kind of innate regret or sorrow. And I think that half of that is because most of us are either born or were raised on the coast – facing outwards into this giant fucking ocean. And on the inside is just this vast emptiness. I think the actual physical geography of Australia has a lot to do with the way we sound – all the while looking out to sea for some kind of hope.”

The exploration of hope and loss that’s recorded on The Devastations is shrouded in an instantly memorable musical cloak. I pressed Standish for the reason why more obscure musical instruments – the harmonium and the optigan amongst them – were roped into the mix, to create an atmosphere of which 16 Horsepower would’ve been proud. It turns out to be quite simple.

“We just had access to them. Certain songs you can imagine things in. You can say ‘That would sound fantastic if there was a harmonium or xylophone in there.’ It makes it more interesting, you know? We’ve all heard the standard rock formula, so if you can do anything else – other than that – to make your sound a bit more varied, then I think it’s always worthwhile.”

While their first album – reviewed here on FasterLouder – was influenced by an in-studio diet of Lee Hazlewood and Roy Orbison, their upcoming release proves to be an altogether different beast.

“We’ve nearly finished it,” says Conrad. “I can’t really talk about it just yet, but we’re all really excited by it. It’s a big progression from the first album in absolutely every way imaginable. I’m really, really pleased with it so far. I think it’s great. We’re improving as songwriters and as a band. Lots of the new songs are more concise; the arrangements a bit more sharp. It’s less ethereal, but I’m pretty sure that we’ll always have that sense of loss or of melancholy. I think that’s just in us. But I’m certainly very pleased with the songs that we’re writing at the moment, with the new songs we’ve written.”

Will it be the sort of album that will have Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs singing its praises, as The Devastations did?

“We’ll see,” says Conrad. “I was just actually in America – I worked on her new solo album, so we’ll see. On one hand, there’s absolutely no difference at all between her saying she likes the album and you saying you like the album. But we were very flattered. Having it in such a large magazine certainly helped. It was pretty amusing after that – we had all these emails from giant record labels saying ‘I’m really interested in your sound – send us your album,’ except we never heard anything back. But it’s amazing how far it actually went on her just saying that she really liked the album.”

While they were in Europe, the band played the legendary Bada Bing festival, at the behest of Einsturzende Neubauten’s bassist, Alex Hacke, who’s since become a friend to them. I ask Conrad what that experience was like.

“That was a lot of fun. When we first moved over to Berlin – because that was where we kind of lived – we kinda met all those [Einsturzende Neubauten] guys really early on and things just went from there. And then we did a film soundtrack with Alex and it was great. We made these other recordings with him. But at first, we were very wide-eyed and thought it was amazing. [Berlin] was very welcoming for us. We were looked after really well there for a really long time. It’s an amazing kind of world over there. It’s not like any other place I’ve ever been to. It’s just like a funny outpost, in a way. It’s almost like an island, and it’s completely lawless, like the Wild West.”

Of course, playing through Europe often meant that the band were performing in front of audiences who weren’t familiar with their works or the language in which they were performed. But this didn’t stop The Devastations – their shows were, usually, received in a manner that Standish only describes as “amazing”.

“We toured pretty heavily in eastern Europe. We went to places like Sarajevo. They have this innate sadness too, over there. I think sometimes that even if they couldn’t understand a lot of the words, they could understand the sentiment. Although on that first album, you know, some of it’s quite childlike, lyrically. There were some shows where there were some people in the audience who were singing along and stuff with the album, which was amazing for us.

After such a response, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the band wouldn’t want to return to Australia, to come back home. But the singer believes otherwise.

“Well, home’s home. And I really like home, you know? You can’t compare the two, but I really, really like Australian audiences. I think Australian people and musicians are incredible. And there’s not that many fantastic European bands. Even though they have this voracious appetite for music over there, they aren’t really producing an alarming amount of interesting bands. There’s just truckloads of third-rate electroclash and shitty post-punk bands who haven’t realised that it’s all over. It seemed like it was all very… they were just a bit late, over there.”

The band scored a film, Sehnsucht, under the auspices of Alex Hacke while staying in Europe. The recording process was, as Conrad relates, a little different.

“The way we worked… I’m sure it wasn’t like most other film scores. We were basically thrown into a room by Hacke and just had to come up with the shit on the spot and record it round at his house. So we watched a rough version of the film and Alex said ‘Right, this needs a theme here, that needs a theme there – think of something,’ and we just had to come up with something pretty much then and there. But it worked well. It was weird, and I would’ve really liked to have had a bit more time. But it was fun. And it’s something I really want to do a lot more of.”

The filmic nature of the band’s work would seem to make the perfect for more soundtracking. I mention this to Conrad, and he points out that the work of a musician and filmmaker has had an important impact on the group thus far:

“Emir Kusturica. He’s a Yugoslavian guy. He’s made films like Black Cat White Cat, Time Of The Gypsies and several others. He’s also a musician and writes incredible songs – he was a big influence on us when we made the first album especially.”

But while Standish is keen to point out the pull and importance of earthy gypsy music to The Devastations, he’s keen to point out the pitfalls it brings, also.

“I really like it, but you have to be really careful when you play it, or else you can sound like a real sub-Tom Waits. You just have to be careful. I’m not sure it’s something I’d want to capitalise on too much.”

One part of the band’s existence that the media in particular has capitalised on is their connection to the legendary Australian performer Rowland S. Howard, who has long been a vocal supporter of the band. How did he become aware of the work the band was doing, and how did he come to write his piece on the band for Beat? Conrad explains:

“I’ve known Rowland for a few years. We’re just fans of each other, I suppose. How did it happen? Well, when our first album was released, he offered to write an article about it. He’s an amazing writer, which is something that most people probably don’t know. So we were very honoured that he would want to do something. And he just kind of wrote that as a friend and a fan of ours. But it’s amazing how far that went – all over Europe people were asking us about Rowland.”

The band has gone on to record with Howard, and with German electropunkers Cobra Killer. While discussing this, it seems apropos to mention Konkurrent’s In The Fishtank series to Conrad. It’s a long-running series of recordings that throws two artists together in a studio to record whatever comes to mind, with participants including The Black Heart Procession, Low and Dirty Three. Would the band ever be interested in something like that? In teaming up with another band in a short-timeframe no-holds-barred musical match?

The answer’s affirmative.

“I’d love them to invite us on to do something. That would be fucking great. Maybe us and someone obviously pretty different. Maybe someone totally psychedelic like Oneida,” He pauses. “Yes. Like a really fucking heavily psychedelic thing.”

One of the band’s earliest recordings was a split single for Bang! Records. It saw them take on The Beasts Of Bourbon’s The Low Road and Bob Dylan’s Tomorrow Is A Long Time. I put it to Conrad that these two songs make strange bedfellows – was there a particularly occult reason why the two were selected for recording? Or was it something as simple as the fact that they’re just great songs?

“Yeah. That’s all, really,” he admits. “We’d been playing The Low Road in Europe, live, as an encore – this big explosive song. And Tomorrow Is A Long Time is a really great song. But we had to shorten it. The original version we recorded was eight minutes long or something and didn’t fit on one side of a seven inch, which is unfortunate.”

I suggest that maybe the uncut version should make an appearance at the upcoming gigs, and Conrad wryly suggests that maybe the band will have to come up with a couple of extra verses and play a half-hour version.

Which begs a good question. When asked what exactly people can expect from the live incarnation of The Devastations, Conrad chuckles. “That it’ll probably cost about ten bucks. What can people expect? Predominantly new stuff, but the first album will be well represented. We’ll just try to make it a really wonderful show. Intense and kind of cool… You know, we rarely write out a set list for a show. Things are always quite off-the-cuff. We usually don’t play the same thing twice.”

The future looks busy for The Devastations. As well as having a second album almost ready to go – Standish tentatively fingers June as a release date, but makes no promises – the band’s self-titled disc will receive a release in the US, which will see them touring widely. Where will they be?

” Well, all over the place,” says Standish. “Our first album will be released in America in August or September, so when that happens there’s every chance that we’ll head over there to try and tour and promote it.”

It doesn’t mean, however, that local audiences will be bereft of the band for long. “I dunno where we’ll be, but once our new album’s out in Australia, we’ll play a lot more here. But you know, the world’s a big and exciting place. In some ways all of us are very certain of what we want to do in the future. But I suppose it’s just a vague idea, if you know what I mean.”

As the interview comes to a close, Conrad has a question for me – a reversal of the usual way these things go. “Just out of interest, seeing that this is a web interview,” he asks, “how come this is a phone interview?”

He’s got me there.

The Devastations play Spectrum, Sydney, on April 21 (with The Holy Soul and Loene Carmen), and Ric’s, Brisbane, on April 23 (with SixFtHick) and April 24 (with Rowland S Howard). The band’s debut album is available now.