The Drones

Fri 7th Oct, 2011 in Features

The coarse voice of one of this country’s most significant bands has called 10 minutes early from his rural Victorian property. A dog barks in the background and reception falters a little every now and then, but Gareth Liddiard is in a warm, relatively talkative mood. He’s spruiking The Drones’ new DVD, though he’s happy enough to discuss the band’s formative years, their future, Matt Damon, and how hard it is being an independent musician in Australia.

So, the DVD- I’ll let you do the promo – why should people buy it, why are people going to buy it?
[laughs] Because we could all be.. Qantas don’t maintain their planes as well anymore, so the four of us are going to be dead soon, so that’s the only way you get through life.

It’s only business then?
Yeah it’s business, it’s business as usual you know? I mean, we can play pretty good live.

I think so
And it’s like, we, I like watching live stuff and it’s fun to make live stuff. Ultimately you make what you want to either hear or see. Well, that’s what we do.

Some of the footage on the DVD is taken from a run of shows at the East Brunswick Club last year- The first of which, well, it wasn’t the best Drones show I’ve seen. I think an amp blew and there were some pretty persistent sound problems. You kept going but at any stage did you think “shit, we’ve got all these cameras here, this is our money on the line, what if this all goes to shit”?
Yeah yeah don’t worry about that- if the crowd had of said “forget it, you can go home,” we would have been like “cool, thanks”. It was fucked, you never blow an amp. I mean, you do, but they’re Marshal amps. Like, Marshal amps blow. That thing – “I blew my amp” – Marshal invented that phrase. I use Fenders and they don’t fucking blow because they’re so stupidly overpowered.

And then, the minute you get all them fucking cameras there and all that recording gear the fucking amp blows… I was quite shat

Did you at least know in your mind that most of what was on the DVD was going to come from the [Fairfield] warehouse stuff anyway?
Yeah but it’s always nice, if you bother filming anything at all, you hope it works. The main thing with the East Brunswick was to raise money to do the whole DVD thing. We’re indie- you know when people say, “ohh we’re indie”- we’re fucking indie. We pay for everything, The Drones pay and do everything, so those three shows were for raising money and then we filmed them too, just in case they were okay. The second one was okay.

Yeah it was quite good. Natalie [van den Dungen] has become something of a go-to videographer for the ‘indie’ music world. With the Tote Doco- that started because she used to ask if she could film bands that played there during the week, right? Was that where the Tote footage of The Drones comes from?
Yeah yeah. I mean we’ve known here pretty much since then. I mean, that’s why we got her. We’re good mates- she knows the score. That sort of Tote thing- we are kind of a Tote band in that sense, and that’s where she hangs out, so when we needed someone to do it, we went to her first.