Batrider's Playlist

Thu 29th Sep, 2011 in Features

Melbourne/Kiwi three-piece Batrider have just released their fourth album Piles Of Lies. Described by Mess+Noise as “chaotic, loose-ended brilliance”, Lies sees Sarah Chadwick take her band back to three-piece to create a truly developed sound.

Ahead of their launch at The Tote in Melbourne tomorrow night the band took some time out to tell us about the music that has soundtracked their lives – from Bon Jovi to Veruca Salt.

FIRST ALBUM YOU BOUGHT

Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet. I LOVED Bon Jovi when I was a small girl and took mum to the shops to pick out a tape to buy with my birthday money when I was about six, and she was like “realllllly?”. And then I had a Bon Jovi poster in the back of my wardrobe behind my clothes to spy on because I felt embarrassed by my tastes. I also loved Ice House Man of Colours at the same time. And I won a Peter Combe colouring in competition and got me a free copy of Newspaper Mama. Gold era.

FIRST ALBUM HANDED DOWN TO YOU

My brother is about six years older than me, and when he finished high school he gave me ALL of his CDs because he wasn’t into music anymore, so I got heaps of Britpop, which I didn’t heaps care for, apart from The It Girl by Sleeper. But most of the gold in my bro’s collection which became my genuine favs were Weezer’s Blue Album, Portishead’s Dummy, and The Tankgirl Soundtrack. Amazing.

FIRST BREAK-UP ALBUM

Hmm, I reckon for most sad times in general I have turned to Elliott Smith, in particular Either Or and later New Moon. And I’ve listened to just the song My Shell by Smog on repeat when shit got real one time. Not that I’m crazy or nuthin…. err. Actually, there are a lot of bitter Smog songs for breakups. I have a playlist of Smog, Elliott, Gillian Welch, early Cat Power, Sebadoh, Yo La Tengo, and others at the ready for downtimes.

GUILTY PLEASURE ALBUM

Oh ma gad, I’m the queen of guilty pleasure albums. I have sooo many. I love The Cardigans Long Gone Before Daylight, which I can even tell is a really shit album… but it’s so easy to listen to! I got Sarah (from Batrider) into the Cardigans too. I did a DJ set on a Sunday afternoon at the Hotel Metropolitan in Adelaide recently where I basically played the worst music of the 90s under the banner ‘MTV style mainstream alternative’ – which sounds like it would be great! It was mostly made up of stuff like Soundgarden, Alanis Morissette, Veruca Salt (_American Thighs_ is still amazing), Tori Amos, The Tea Party, Stone Temple Pilots, Spacehog, Reef, Prodigy, Rage, Ammonia, Nada Surf, The Mavis’, Marcy Playground, Luscious Jackson, Local H, Kristen Hirst, NIN, Foo Fighters, Goldfinger, Faith No More, The Cranberries…! They’re all songs that everyone knows off by heart and they go “yeah!” and then “ohhhhh noooo”. I got a lot of hate from the bar staff that night. But I genuinely enjoyed my set!

FAVOURITE AUSSIE ALBUM

I will always love albums that meant something to me when I was 15, so I’m going to say Magic Dirt’s Friends in Danger. Sam and Sarah don’t really get it, maybe because they’re from New Zealand. When I first heard that it was so loud and so dark, and so…. guitary. I love the guitars on that album. It was the heaviest album I’d actually been able to get into by that stage of my life, and I was so proud and in love with it. And I like that Adalita was singing, but not having to be ‘singery’, and not having to be ‘screamy’. She just sounded natural. The first gig I got rejected from for being underage was Magic Dirt too. There’s a lot of good Australian albums out now though, like Peak Twins, Friends, Panel of Judges, Kitchen’s Floor, Per Purpose, Dirtbag, The Avant Gardeners and Rites Wild. Bandcamp.com has been awesome for finding Australian albums that they don’t sell in our measly Adelaide record shops.

MOST OBSCURE ALBUM IN THE COLLECTION

Well if ‘obscure’ means hard to find, then I have a million little limited edition CDRs and one-of-a-kind live recordings from local Adelaide bands over the years, like Ianto Ware, Lenin Simos and I can’t even remember who else, and I also have a copy of 2 Batrider albums that got recorded but were never released. I also have a pretty sweet Heart 70s Australian live bootleg with handmade artwork on vinyl, but is that obscure? If you just mean ‘weird shit’, then I guess I back in the day when I was obsessed with collecting the back catalogues of bands I liked, I got lots of obscure side projects on CD and vinyl. I have some of Mirah’s awful side-projects that were hard to find once upon a time, and maybe Dusty Trails – the side-project of Josephine Wiggs from the Breeders… I don’t know if I have anything really obscure.

ALBUM YOU ONCE LOVED

Ohhh soooo many albums that I loved when I was a young teen. Veruca Salt’s American Thighs, Juliana Hatfield’s Bed, Hole Live Through This, Liz Phair Exile in Guyville. Are you noticing a trend here? Oh, and Weezer. HA! I still secretly, uhhh, openly, love all of these.

LAST ALBUM YOU BOUGHT

Tamaryn The Waves. I bought it on iTunes because someone gave me a voucher for my birthday, and I really want to get a hardcopy so I can stare at it and listen to it places other than my ipod. It’s a good recent kinda shoe-gazy album, and I felt like a cool guy for not pirating it.

YOUR ALBUM – Piles of Lies

This album was written in London and we carried it around with us on tour for what felt like years before returning back to Adelaide and finally recording it, and then it took another year to come out. It’s pretty special to me and I’m really proud of it. Great fun to play live too. I can’t believe I haven’t gotten sick of the songs after playing some of them over 200 times in the past 2 years in Europe, USA and Australia. Looking forward to our final Australian tour gig in Melbourne this week, and then maybe moving on to some new stuff!

Batrider play The Tote in Melbourne tomorrow night with The Native Cats, Absolute Boys and Lady Dreams.