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I Rock

Mon 3rd May, 2010 in Features

I Rock is a new eight-part, half-hour dramatic comedy series about the misadventures of a band, Boy Crazy Stacy, led by wannabe rock god Nash Taylor.

Filled with the all-too-true-stories of the struggling rock band, I Rock features share houses, drunken drummers and hot lesbian bass players, and while the show does drift into cliché, there’s plenty of comedy and drama fodder in the form of pretentious poseurs, bogus bloggers and arrogant leadsingers.

Series creator, writer and lead actor Josh Mapleston once made it to the NSW finals of the National Air-Guitar championships and along with stints writing for Home and Away and McLeod’s Daughters has appeared at the comedy festivals in Sydney and Melbourne.

FasterLouder caught up with him days before the launch of the I Rock to chat about the challenges of making a show about music, avoiding the mistakes of Garage Days and the blind criticism the show has received from some in the music community.

Are you getting a bit stressed, with the show about to launch next week?
Man, I get stressed at every little new thing that comes up… actually watching the show being one of them. Being in it myself, it makes it extremely hard to watch without feeling a little bit nauseous! I can only hope the audience doesn’t feel the same way.

Sure, just that punters are very protective of their little music scene and you’re coming in as a bit of an unknown…
[laughs] So, what you’re saying is they actually want the show written by Daniel Johns, not some Sydney TV writer! I mean absolutely, the response from the music community is definitely important to us.

Ever since I first moved to Sydney I’ve hung out with musicians, and I thought it would be a good idea for a TV show. It was all about telling the story of what it is actually like to be a struggling band in the Noughties and everything that goes with it. All we can go from so far is that the musos who were involved in the actual show really enjoyed the script, and thought we were doing a pretty good job of telling their story. So fingers crossed the music community feels the same way!

The series features cameos from Tim Rodgers, former triple j presenter Scott Dooley, Laura Imbruglia, Snob Scrilla, Cassette Kids and The Lovetones. Was there anyone who knocked you back?
Oh man, everyone knocked us back!

Care to name any names?
[laughs] No, but even if I did, in a way it would be a compliment to them… you know, we approached people because we love their music and we wanted them to be involved. The musicians who did get involved, we were lucky enough to talk to them in person, and bypass the managerial side of things.

Did you do a lot of research, and was that just hanging out at the local pubs?
Absolutely. It’s the best research job in the world really, just getting drunk and going to gigs! That’s exactly the research schedule, it was just getting drunk in pubs week after week, and collecting the receipts so hopefully I can claim them at tax time – I’m writing about rock’n’roll man, and this was all necessary expenditure!

But as far my credentials go, I think it’s more my stand-up and TV experience that’s given me some knowledge in the field of being a struggling, poverty-stricken creative type trying to take their work to the next level. So I think I was able to draw upon that as much as anything, to illustrate a struggling rock wannabe.

I was briefly in a kind of cover band in Brisbane, for about six months I think, before I realised how incredibly difficult it is to actually become good enough to perform gigs and do it properly. So when I wasn’t very good at it I decided to quit, and stick to learning Beatles songs in my bedroom, and annoying the occasional girlfriend with a hastily written ballad…which probably led to a few break-ups, in hindsight.

You’ve mentioned that some of your work on Home and Away had a bit of an influence on the show. Were you ever tempted to bring any sort of indie rocker characters down to Summer Bay?
[laughs] Well, that would be overstating my impact on Home and Away, the work I’ve done for those guys has been very much as a gun for hire… so I’ve never had any say whatsoever in the storylines in Summer Bay, I should make that clear!

This is where my interview inexperience comes in, I start mentioning things like Home and Away, and probably immediately turn off half the potential audience for I Rock!. So maybe I shouldn’t talk about that [laughs]. No, I’m happy to say that Home and Away was part of my TV apprenticeship, as it is for many young writers in Australia, so I don’t think I’m in such bad company there.

There’s a bit of an assumption that an Australian TV show that’s about a struggling band is going to be something like Garage Days: The Series. Did you go back and watch the movie, to avoid repeating some of the things they did wrong?
I love watching Garage Days, because it’s so terrible, and you’re right, it is a perfect illustration of how not to make a film about a band! It wasn’t just a bad movie, but felt like it had been made by people who had never even been to a gig in their entire lives, which is probably why they didn’t have any gigs in the actual film.

There was a great little forum exchange; I think it was on Mess & Noise a while ago. Someone put up our press release and then someone else said ‘Oh man, this looks exactly like Garage Days the TV show,’ and they even mentioned Love is a Four Letter word, and someone else said it’s not really that much like Love is a Four Letter Word, and the guy said ‘It’s set at the Annandale, which is ten minutes’ walk to the Courthouse, where Love is a Four Letter Word was,’ and another guy responded with ‘I’d like to see you walk that in ten minutes!’ The next guy was like ‘Google Maps says twelve minutes,’ and put up a little map of the walk between the Annandale and the Courthouse. [laughs]

So you’re always going to get compared with other things, and all we can hope is that the haters, who’ve bagged us out for being ‘_Garage Days: Part Two_’, are the kind of haters that need to actually watch the show as well just to prove all their own prejudices right. If they watch the whole series and they still think we’re like Garage Days then there’s nothing we can do about it.

I was wondering about the name of the band ‘Boy Crazy Stacey’...
Boy Crazy Stacey was a band name I actually had in my head before we even started writing the show, and it just seemed to fit somehow. We’ve since come up with a little bit a backstory for the creation of the name in the show, which doesn’t get revealed in series one, and hopefully if I win Lotto and can bankroll series two, we might reveal where Boy Crazy Stacey the name came from.

But band names are incredibly difficult as well, and we had a limited amount of time to write the show; the ABC were very generous but we still had a limited time, as everyone does. So I think if we hadn’t had the band name already there, we probably just would have spent the entire scriptwriting process arguing about what the band name should be. I really do think band names are important, so whatever you think of Boy Crazy Stacey, it seemed to fit for us at the time so we went with it.

[ Boy-Crazy Stacey is also the eighth book in the Baby-sitters Club series and boasts the plot: Stacey and Mary Anne are baby-sitting for the Pike family for two weeks at the New Jersey shore. Things are great in Sea City. There’s a gorgeous old house, a boardwalk, plenty of sun and sand… and the cutest boy Stacey has ever seen!]

The lead character is described in the show’s advertising as an ‘A-hole”, were you worried about pushing that too far?
It’s always a concern, making a character likeable is something, that as a TV writer, I’ve heard a million times across story tables and in script meetings. But I guess it was a case of wanting the character to go through a journey over the course of the series, so we tried to illustrate his insecurities in the first episode and then take him on a bit of a journey. That’s true of all the characters.

We wrote someone who was mean, but hopefully in a fun way, and we just hoped people would stick with it. Because they’ll see all the characters go through a bit of a rollercoaster ride, and maybe come out a bit different in the end, and you’ll see different sides to the characters the more episodes you watch. So we were concerned about Nash’s likeability, but we also knew that we were going to make every episode very different, and none of the characters are one-note; they all have lots of different sides to them.

Are the band members based on particular musicians?
I’d love to say they are, but most of them are just based on aspects of my personality more than anything else. Unfortunately I know there are a lot of misanthropic, self-centred, egocentric musicians out there, but most of the ones I know are actually pretty nice, and maybe save their egotistical rants for when they’re in the rehearsal space or after a gig when I don’t get to talk to them.

I can’t really say I’ve drawn on anyone in particular for those characters. They probably come more from the awful people I’ve met in TV-land, who I have had the opportunity to work with. But again, naming any names might cost me work at some stage! [laughs]

Surely there’s a little bit of Ash Naylor in ‘Nash Taylor’?
Sorry, I’m going to reveal my ignorance here… who’s Ash Naylor?

From Even… Ash Naylor. That wasn’t a deliberate reference?
No, not at all! [laughs] How funny, Ash Naylor… I fucking love Even as well, I saw them play what they were billing as their 16th birthday show at the Annandale a few weeks ago. They’re awesome, but no, I’ve never met those guys. That’s crazy, I had no idea it was Ash Naylor, but there you go. That’s the thing, there will be all these people thinking that I’ve based it on that guy. Is he the frontman?

Yeah.
Ash… oh, that’s crazy. I can honestly say I had no idea.

There’s also a lot of material that goes along with the show; there’s the MySpace, Facebook, Twitter account, blog and an Unearthed page. that part of your vision when creating the show, or is that all just stuff that’s come along later?
I think that’s definitely stuff we talked about. We’ve had a bit of fun with it since the show got made, and it’s all part of making it look as much as possible like a real band, and these are the ways we’re making them look like a band that’s actually out there trying to crack the Aussie music scene. For people who are interested in the show, like a lot of other shows are doing, there’ll be extra stuff that people can check out; behind the scenes stuff, ‘making of’s, interviews and things that we put up on the site. So hopefully it’s just a bit of extra little snacks for any fans of the show.

With all that extra stuff, making the band seen more ‘real’, are we likely to see Boy Crazy Stacey up on a live stage anytime soon?
[laughs] Oh man, if anyone wants to pay me or any of the actors pretending to be musicians in the show… if anyone wants to pay us to do a gig that’s fine, but the difference between how we sound with the help of professional musicians and music producers in the show, and how we would actually sound on stage, I think is fairly massive.

So who performing the music we hear in the show?
We have two really amazing young music producers, collectively known as Silencio [Piers Burbrook de Vere and Jeremy Yang], who wrote all the tunes for the show. Although some of our actors can play really well, most of them can’t, so we left it to the professionals and let the magic of television do the rest.

Just finally, any advice for the people who have been judging the show before they’ve had a chance to see it?
I want the haters to keep doing what they’re doing. If all they want to talk about is how shit they think our show is, that’s up to them. As far as I’m concerned, no publicity is bad publicity, so I want them to do whatever makes them happy!