The New Year belongs to TheVasco Era

Fri 5th Jan, 2007 in Features

Hawaiian shirts, lays, cocktails, Elvis and The Beach Boys are all in this summer. They were brought back into fashion by The Vasco Era at the recent Falls Festival in Lorne.

The trio donned tropical trees to get the crowd into the party mood and it worked. Beginning their set off with an Elvis Presley song from the film, Blue Hawaii, The Vasco Era demanded the stage as usual with frontman Sid O’Neil’s erratic vocals.

Having grown up only half an hour away, The Vasco Era consider themselves veterans of The Falls Festival. It was the third time the Apollo Bay trio have performed at the three-day event held simultaneously in Lorne and Marion Bay, Tasmania.

Backstage before going onto the Valley Stage, The Vasco Era gave nothing away about what they were about to do. Instead the band – consisting of brothers Sid and Ted O’Neil (bass) and good mate, Michael Fitzpatrick (drums) – joked about how they prepare for such a big crowd.

“We normally put our hands in and do our own little chant,” Fitzy said. “It’s just amazing. It’s mind blowing. Its something like ‘Quack, Era, Quack, Era, Quack’, that’s it. That is what pumps us up for our show.” It’s obvious that Fitzy has watched Mighty Ducks way too many times as the band has no pre-show rituals of any kind.

In between playing at Australia’s biggest festivals, The Vasco Era travelled to London in July last year to support Wolfmother at The Astoria before playing their own sold out shows in London, New York and Los Angeles. In September the band put aside time to record their long awaited debut album in America with renowned producer Jeff Saltzman (The Killers, The Black Keys). The as yet untitled album is due out in April and features the lead track When We All Lost It, which went to radio in October last year.

Sid said he found the month-long recording process at Different Fur Recording in San Francisco nerve-racking, as he is well aware of how harsh critics can be. “It was real stressful,” he said. “I didn’t like it. I didn’t have fun because I was real stressed. But we are happy with the end result. It’s a concept album, so we had to get it all good and in order. We feel like it has no bad songs.”

The band was stoked when Saltzman agreed to produce their first offering, as they are very big fans of The Black Keys. “He’s already real rich, so he obviously wasn’t doing it for the money,” Sid said. “That makes us pretty happy.” Fitzy agreed, ” He was a good bloke and was open to doing different things.” “He was really cool. Good to work with,” Ted added.

With little experience going into the studio, it didn’t take long for the boys to find their comfort zone. “We were in there for 12 hours a day, just about every day,” Ted said. “So once we got in there and started it was fine. There was lots of sitting around drinking beer, eating burritos and watching TV. We watched lots of Steve Irwin.”

While the band is best known for their energetic and raw live show, they tried to keep things a little simpler on the record. “It is a live sound, but it is different to our live show,” Sid explains. “There is less of the slide guitar stuff. The live show has more percussion and different fun stuff, so it’s a bit different to that. I mean it has quiet songs and that. It’s just a bit different.”

The Vasco Era is a hard band to pigeonhole and they themselves have created a new genre for themselves – “blues/metal”. “It’s real loud and screamy, so it is kind of metal,” Sid says convincingly. Even if that does sound like a weird genre to mish-mash, the band still perform The White Stripes better than the Detroit duo.

Sid said the reason it has taken them so long to bring out an album is because they didn’t have enough material or the financial backing to make one. “We just didn’t have the songs,” he said. “We’re on a record company now. We couldn’t afford to pay for our own album.” The album will have 10 tracks and will be released through Universal, who picked up the band after their two independent EPs Let It Burn (2004) and Miles (2005, Era Records), which featured the single Kingswood.

The trio has a dynamic relationship with each other that is fun to watch. The brothers have been friends with Fitzy since high school and he is now considered a brother as well. He even gets in on the sibling rivalry when he can. “I just try and put an opinion forward,” Fitzy said. “They just think we’re the front men, we get to have all the say. It’s bullshit. I’ve had enough. Seriously.”
“He is the one that we argue with the most, Michael,” Ted replies. “You know you’ve got no lights on you tonight.”
“That’s probably true. Here at the glorious Falls Festival, a wonderful music festival and I’ve got no lights on me, great,” the forgotten drummer sighed.

The play fight is over as they play out their set onstage. In the middle they all drop down and The Beach Boys classic Kokomo bursts out of the speakers. Members of the crowd take over the stage with Hawaiian shirts and lays, while the band’s guitar technician hands out cocktails and leads them in the hula. They are all one big happy family and they’ll have some very happy fans when the album hits stores.