A headband party with Mink

Mon 25th Dec, 2006 in Features

If you feel like you’re undergoing Chinese water torture and about to slip into insanity, whack on a headband, put on some music and dance like your sanity depends on it. It worked for Mink.

Reaching a point in the recording process where the band was spending 24/7 together in the small town of Weed in California, they had to devise ways to amuse themselves. “We seriously had days where we all wore headbands, because you can’t really get upset or take anyone seriously when they’re wearing a headband,” bassist Grant Fitzpatrick says.

Another attempt at self amusing was by skipping. Carlson even managed to skip through the entire town, which was all caught on video and now sits proudly on the band’s MySpace page. Set to some gay (in the merry sense) 50s music, and you have a short film worthy of an Oscar nomination.

The skipping idea came about when the band walked to the grocery store. To make the trip more fun, they decided to skip like schoolgirls. “How many cities can you skip through?” Carlson asks. On the downside, “It was very tiring, very tiring.” But it provided him with a great cardiovascular workout.

“As much fun as [recording] can be, when you’re living in a house together and you’re going to work together, at some point, you just start to crack. But in a good way,” Fitzpatrick says.

Although the cracking point was there, Mink say they didn’t want to smash each other in the faces Gallagher brother’s style. Fitzpatrick says instead, they wanted to rub each other, but not in a sexual way. More like brothers. That like to rub each other for affection. Or something.

Mink is sitting around a table on the patio area of the Point Hotel in Brisbane. There’s a lukewarm wind blustering around us, making hair messy and knotted.

Carlson is wearing a belt-like headband around his head. His skinny frame is even more pronounced in his sleeveless black tank top and black jeans. He has touches of the hardened rocker about him, with grey hair spread all around the crown of his head.

Drummer Stella Mozgawa is a rock chick with attitude in her oversized white sunglasses, black vest and white t-shirt. Her brown hair sits wavy around her face. She sits casually, leaned back in her chair, full of comfort and ease.

Carlson says having a female in the group doesn’t change the band dynamic. “We don’t want it to really be an emphasis. We don’t say Grant our male bassist. We just say Grant the bass player and Stella the drummer,” he says.

Mozgawa says it’s social conditioning that puts emphasis on women in bands because men have traditionally been the ones beating the drum, so to speak. “People think men play music, so it’s a bit left of the middle when there’s a girl, but I don’t think it’s a big deal,” she says. That said, Mozgawa recently added some vocals for a new song, which Carlson says added a new level to the music and made the song sound really honest and genuine.

Guitarist Nick Maybury is indie cool with his blonde hair cut asymmetrically, the left side longer than the right. There is a boyish excitement and wonder on his face. And mischief and playfulness, like he’d be the kid at school who sat up the back playing pranks on the teacher and trying to smother his laugher in the corner.

Fitzpatrick is the friendly one, despite the several day’s worth of stubble that gives him a touch of the vagabond look. His brown hair is cut short but stylish. He would have been the guy in school that everyone was friends with.

Guitarist David Lowy is the serious and quite one – he’s not outrageously loud or extroverted. His curly blonde hair hangs just above his eyes, and his weathered face has seen years of rock in the past, previously playing with Oz rock legends Doc Neeson and the Angels and Red Phoenix.

With Carlson living in New York and the rest of the band in Sydney, the logistics of getting together was tricky at times, with Mink splitting their time between New York and Australia. So, are they an Australian band or a dirty rock New York band? “It depends on which country we’re in. If we’re in Tokyo, we’re a Taiwanese band,” Fitzpatrick laughs. “If we’re in Australia, we’re a New York band.” Lowy says the band’s geographical reference point is irrelevant because Mink is a universal band.

With the help of the WWW and WWT – world wide travel – Mink have managed to stay intact and retain that connection as a band. They originally met through the “musician’s network” of friends. A friend of Fitzpatrick’s introduced him to Carlson, Fitzpatrick knew Mozgawa, etc. But the band only became complete in around April of this year when Mozgawa joined the band. Then the music began in earnest.

Mink come at music from a range of different influences, from Maybury’s interest in soul and blues legends like Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King and John Lee Hooker, to Carlson’s interest in Michael Jackson and Hall and Oates, all the way to Lowy’s love of the Angels and Australian music. Oh, and Kelly Clarkson and Justin Timberlake. Yes, KELLY CLARKSON and JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE.

“We like pop. I love Justin Timberlake. I love Kelly Clarkson. I appreciate it and I like the fun. I think we all appreciate that side of it, and it’s fun music to take the piss out of as well,” Fitzpatrick says.

I’m sitting in Mozgawa’s hotel room with her and Carlson. Mink has just played at the Ding Dong Lounge in Melbourne and it’s the last night of a three-night tour in three different cities. As Mozgawa pulls her silver shoes off and relaxes into the carpet, Carlson sets to work making us cups of green tea. He hands them to us and takes off his black cowboy boots. “It feels good to take your shoes off at the end of the day,” Carlson says.

The usual songwriting process for the band is through collective involvement from everyone – no one person is the principal songwriter. Someone might come to the band with an idea, and the rest of the band will then work on it.

“We all know how to play guitar, so we all have ideas and stuff. But at the end of the day, it’s Neal that has to deliver that,” Mozgawa says. “There’s no point playing a song that Neal doesn’t believe in or anyone else in the band doesn’t dig,” Mozgawa says.

In past bands, Mozgawa has not had as much involvement in songwriting, mainly due to the fact that she’s a drummer. “It’s usually like that because in most instances that I’ve been in, there’s one very strong personality in the band. I’m not saying there isn’t in this band, but there’s always someone who’s like, ‘Okay, this is my band, these are my songs and you’re playing these songs’,” she says.

This works some of the time, but in Mink, there has been a conscious decision to say we’re all in this together.

When people think of rock music, they think drugs, sex and attitude – the typical drugged out rocker who stumbles on stage, performs a show and then drags himself off stage to down more drugs, guzzle beer and sex up some girls. Neal says whether this really happens depends on what style of rock a band plays.

“There’s not really too much of that in indie rock. It’s more about the vulnerable side of a band’s personality or their emotional side,” he says. “Whereas a band like Motley Crue was very theatrical and had a larger than life presentation.”

Throughout the three day tour along the East Coast of Australia, there was no evidence of any of those things. Another thing lacking was a decent crowd at the Brisbane and Melbourne shows. Despite this, the band still put on shows full of energy and passion, because in the end, it doesn’t matter how many people are in a room.

“You can have 10 people in a room that are really vibing, and it’s better than having 4000 people who are sitting on picnic blankets eating crackers and camembert and not listening to a fucking note that you’re playing,” Mozgawa says. “You just go out there and you play with passion.”

“Plus, those kinds of shows are really valuable and they’re important to do because they sort of test the character of the band. If there’s four people in the room, the easy thing to do is just not really care and just piss off the rest of the gig,” Carlson says.

“But the mark of a successful band is one that generates energy and excitement from within the core of the band, regardless of what the audience is like. That’s something we always talk about – just having fun and not really relying on how many people there are out there.”

For Mozgawa, the highlight of the tour was at the Ding Dong when her and Carlson hit the dancefloor for some hip shaking dancing. Midway through a song, they decided to wheelbarrow each other around on their hands. When it came to Mozgawa at the handles and Carlson with his hands on the ground, he lost control, his feet spasmed a bit and legs went ass up for a second. The result was a kick in the face to Mozgawa, drawing blood from her nose. “I’m going to say it was the worst [moment of the tour] when you kicked me in the nose. It was also the best,” Mozgawa says to Carlson.

“Did you get a tear?” he asks her as they both sit laughing.

“It was like an involuntary tear,” she says. “You were going backwards and forwards and I’m thinking, ‘This is amazing, this is such a different sensation for me, feeling that my nose is about to collapse’. At the same time, I was on the dance floor listening to what was the Pixies or something, and I turned to Neal and said, ‘I’ve got a broken face’.”

So, a bloody nose might be the Mink experience for the band themselves, but what does the Mink experience feel like for the listener? The band says it’s buttery, like mayonnaise (with application to the nipples optional), magic, passion, sensuality, comedy, romance and philosophy.

Yes, it’s all of those things, but it’s also pop-rock that has your feet and arms flailing about in an unco fashion; it’s ears being assaulted by loud music that seeps into your body and pushes out skin as it belts away inside you; and it’s the wild abandon of feeling young, free and like nothing in the world can harm you as long as you’re moving and listening to this music.

Yes, that’s Mink, and so much more.