Basement Birds interviewBasement Birds

Fri 16th Jul, 2010 in Features

Kevin Mitchell (Bob Evans, Jebediah), Steve Parkin (Vinyl and Autopiolot) have joined Eskimo Joe’s Kav Temperley and Josh Pyke to form the low-key supergroup Basement Birds.

With a mutual love of vocal harmonies and lilting alt-country, the group has just released a self titled debut album and are about to hit the road to tour the album in August.

Before hitting the road, Mitchell and Parkin took a moment to quiz each other exclusively for FasterLouder about the Basement Birds project, the merits of musical theatre, Josh Pyke’s spooning and beard growing abilities and the future of the music business.

Kevin Mitchell: When the Basement Birds idea first came up, how confident were you that it was going to work and that you wanted to be involved?
Steve Parkin: I didn’t know if it was going to “work” as such, but I really wanted to be involved. I liked and respected the other guys as people and as musicians, and was very excited about the idea of all four of our voices working together in one band. I just blindly assumed we’d all get along….and luckily I was right for a change!

Steve Parkin: Before you joined Basement Birds, did you have any of Kav, Josh or Steve’s songs on your iPod?
Kevin Mitchell: I had Josh’s album and an early EP of his on my iPod. His second album hadn’t come out at that stage. Of Kav’s I had the song Liar from Eskies first album. I had recently recorded a cover version of it. As for you Steve, I had your solo album, Sandy Town. I must admit to listening to your soon to be released follow up more.

Kevin Mitchell: Who do you want to room with on tour? Who DON’T you want to room with?
Steve Parkin: Ah, c’mon now! It’d be unfair to answer that. Although, I’ve roomed with both Kev and Kav but not with Josh yet. It’d be nice to get the chance to spoon Pykey and stroke his full beard lovingly as he hums me to sleep with his nautical lullabies. I actually hope that we’re all staying together in a big tent, our most comfortable terry-towelling jammies on, making scary torch-lit faces and telling horror stories over our marshmallow hot chocolates, snuggling into the wee hours together as the owls hoot and the wind whistles mournfully…

Steve Parkin: Which one of us would make the best werewolf person, and why, Kevin?
Kevin Mitchell: That would be Josh. He has the facial hair and the ability to get angry very quickly.

Steve Parkin: Which Basement Birds song is your favorite at the moment? Mine’s Ghosts. Coz it’s creepy and very un-pop.
Kevin Mitchell: Ghosts was my favourite before it was yours Steve so I think you could just be copying me. My other current favourites are Skin Of The Sky, Holly and Hamilton Hill. I agree that Ghosts is very un-pop and sounds more like I would have imagined the record to sound at the beginning. It’s much more of a pop album thatn a folk album isn’t it? I guess when we all do our things that’s what comes out. We are all pop kids at heart.

Kevin Mitchell: What was the last record you bought/downloaded and tell us about why it’s cool.
Steve Parkin: I bought LCD Soundsytem’s new one because it’s literate, funny, sounds like Bowie and you can dance to it. Plus there are some awesome freaky analogue synth sounds going on.

Kevin Mitchell: Should it be acceptable in 2010 to drink wine from a cask and indeed to take a cask of wine to a dinner party, considering the technological leaps and bounds the viticulture industry has made?
Steve Parkin: Acceptability and necessity don’t have to be mutually exclusive. At your own house, cask away! My recommendation for the “soiree” is to find the glass bin behind a gold plate restaurant, find a few empty bottles of a respected 2002 Shiraz, fill ‘em up with your Chateau Cardboard and no-one would be the wiser! HOT TIP: add a few drops of Ribena to give it those “blackcurrant undertones”.

Steve Parkin: What is your favourite musical, Kevin. And, why?
Kevin Mitchell: My favourite musical of all time is Les Miserables. I saw it in London when I was 12. Some rich family friends got us front row seats and I spent most of my time teetering on the edge of mine as I was so enthralled. Strangely I don’t remember the songs as well as I do the ones from Cats. This may well be because we had the T.S Elliot book at home and mother used to read it to us.

Kevin Mitchell: What is it about musicals you don’t like Steve? Do they make you feel emasculated? Tell us about your own experiences with musical theatre.
Steve Parkin: I once auditioned for We Will Rock You... it was a mistake. I can act. I can sing. But not together. With choreography. In all seriousness, I don’t hate ALL musicals. I can kinda suffer through Little Shop Of Horrors. Does the Rocky Horror Picture Show count as a musical? I love that one. I also thought Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd was pretty cool. Maybe it was all the bats and Helena Bonham Carter’s eyebrows.

Steve Parkin: Would you ever consider writing a musical of your own? What would it be about?
Kevin Mitchell: Of course! I would love to write my own musical! Who wouldn’t? I would also like to write a book, a screen play for a film and a world wide smash hit song. I guess the first question one would have to ask ones self before writing a musical would be, do I want to write an original story or base my story on actual real life events?

I think I would like to write an original story. Perhaps I could write my version of a rock opera, except it would be a folk-pop opera, a “Folkpopra”, if you will. Perhaps it could be my auto biography. The story of one mans rise to mediocre success and the inevitable downfall back to being something slightly more mediocre. I might have to jazz the story up a bit for the stage.

Steve Parkin: If we filmed a “wacky” Monkees/ Hard Days Night -esque rock movie, where would the locations be? Would we be secret agents? Or mystical vampire hunter/werewolf people?
Kevin Mitchell: I think we would be educators and the setting would be a college. I would be the drama teacher always rehearsing the next school musical. You would be the stuffy English professor, with patches over the elbows of your tweed jacket. Josh would be the gardener, always watering the gardens and driving around on his ride on lawn mower. Kav would be the home economics teacher who ran an after school class on fashion to aspiring models. In each episode we would all be going about our day to day educating business until suddenly one of the kids loses faith in humanity and we have re store it through song.

Kevin Mitchell: Would you ever get a tattoo? If so what? If not, why? If when, now! Sorry, I started feeling a bit Dr Zeuss then….
Steve Parkin: I was under the impression we were getting Basement Bird tattoos if we sold out our tour?? There you go folks, there’s an incentive to buy our tickets! We’re gonna get some fully sick skulls!

Steve Parkin: How much longer do you think we, as professional musicians and songwriters, will be able to pay our rent and bills in the face of the current decline in physical record sales? 2015? 2013? 2020? Will they invent a new “Super 3D Soundspective” music helmet using “MaserDisques” which you can’t download or reproduce on an iPhone app, and which also directly feed the euphoria centre in the human brain? Will humanity, in our lifetimes, ever invent (non-polluting) jetpacks for the civilian population?
Kevin Mitchell: I think as long as you are an artist that can perform live to an audience they will always be able to pay their rent and bills. That has been the way of the minstrel for centuries. Musicians survived before recorded music and they will survive after it. Besides, I’ve sold plenty of records over the years and never made any money out of it.

This whole “Second Life” thing is a bit worrying isn’t it? People go online and have virtual lives. If that trend continues then it could open up a whole new income stream for us as we too have virtual lives as musicians in cyberspace, playing virtual gigs and selling virtual albums and promoting them on virtual talk shows.

As for the jet packs, they were originally invented by the military and they had high hopes for the use of jet packs in combat situations. Of course, when people caught wind of the jet pack they naturally assumed, much like engine based technology that they too would one day be able to experience the joy of jet pack travel over short distances. Alas, as a military experiment the jet pack was an abject failure and was tossed in the bin, along with the civilian dream of jet pack ownership.

FasterLouder proudly presents the Basement Birds tour:
Thursday 12th August – HQ Adelaide
Friday 13th August – Astor Theatre, Perth
Saturday 14th August – Forum Theatre, Melbourne
Wednesday 18th August – Newcastle Uni
Thursday 19th August – Wollongong Uni
Friday 20th August – Enmore Theatre, Sydney
Saturday 21st August – The Tivoli, Brisbane