Latest / HEAVY Music Interviews / Still Up To Their Necks In It With AYA LARKIN From SKUNKHOUR

Transcript

Still Up To Their Necks In It With AYA LARKIN From SKUNKHOUR · HEAVY Music Interviews

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I'm a Larkin. I'm a singer from Skunk Hour. We're
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: an Ozzie band and we're celebrating commemorating thirty years since
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: the release of our most iconic song up to our
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Next in It. We are touring the East Coast of
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Australia through October and November.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: Fantastic mate, Thanks for joining us this satterday pleasure. As
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: you say, Skunk Our head off in October before you're
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: thirtieth anniversary tour of the song up to our next
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: in It.
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: So firstly, happy birthday. Youre looking pretty good for a
• 0:39
  Speaker 3: thirty year old.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: I wish myn told me the other day I looked
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: good for an eighty year old.
• 0:46
  Speaker 3: I was like, okay, oh god, no, I think I
• 0:48
  Speaker 3: like mine a little bit better.
• 0:50
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yes, is way better. I'll take you on us now.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: It's pretty cool to doing an anniversary tour for a single.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: Mate like you hear a peeps of bands during a
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: tour to celebrated album, but I've never heard.
• 1:01
  Speaker 3: Of a single celebrated tour before. So well done.
• 1:05
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's that song of ours.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: Is it stands out in our repertoire or you know
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: the work that we the song songs we created. So yeah,
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: we're just we're just shining a bit of a light
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: on that one. It's always been our you know, the
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: one that people talk about the most.
• 1:27
  Speaker 4: So it's getting some love.
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: Well, so we'll talk about that song then.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: Obviously, like the fans loved it, the critics loved it,
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: the world loved it. But when you wrote it at
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: the time, did you have any idea that it had
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: that something special.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: It's a good question. It came together pretty quickly, and
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: we we we did. We enjoyed it a lot, like
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: as it was forming, because the guitarists or it came
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: into the rehearsal studio one day and said, I dreamt
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: this part and I think that was the intro.
• 2:03
  Speaker 4: Section.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: And then he immediately kind of in the morning, I
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: think he got the rest of the you know, a
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: couple of the other rifts, because it's like a whole
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: series of riffs.
• 2:11
  Speaker 4: That kind of just work, you know, rolling over each
• 2:13
  Speaker 4: other anyway.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: And then my brother Dell had had had this idea
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: in his back pocket, He's the MC. Yeah, this idea
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: in his back pocket of a spoken word thing that
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: didn't rhyme, you know, no, no, rhymes anyway, and so
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: he said I've got this thing and that those parts
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: came together, they kind of raft onto each other seamlessly,
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: and yeah, it felt good, but it didn't.
• 2:37
  Speaker 4: It didn't.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: We didn't know that it would be our biggest song
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: when we were putting it together. And then I came
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: up with my vocal In the next week or so,
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: I was boring my girlfriend.
• 2:46
  Speaker 4: Actually we're a cheap Battalion restaurant.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: One night, I'm like, oh shit, I've just got this
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: idea for a Melody'll go like this, and she's like, yeah, whatever, I.
• 2:56
  Speaker 4: Want to hit the menu.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: I came back to the boys and yeah, that worked,
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: and yeah, the rest is history.
• 3:06
  Speaker 4: Thirty years of it is.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: The album that came from Feed had more of a heavier,
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: darker sound to it, so after our next indent, it
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: was a blending of an upbeat, blending.
• 3:17
  Speaker 3: Of hip hop, acid jazz, old rock and funk.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: But at the time, did you consider it a risk
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: putting it on the album because it was so different.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: No, we wanted to do something in that second album.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: Classic band syndrome, where you want to do your second album,
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: you want to be a bit more darker or heavy
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: or whatever, but it was we just had we had
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: a lot of great songs in that which were a
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: bit more powerful or kind of densely prog funky, you know,
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: but this one stood out because it had it's got
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: that kind of pristine kind of feel to it, and
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: also it's got this kind of it's very centered, it's
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: very you know, it's unhurried. It just does its thing,
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: even though it's got big riffs in the in the
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: in certain sections, we we thought it was definitely had
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: to be there, and it formed a centerpiece, like the
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: eye of the storm.
• 4:25
  Speaker 4: It was the.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: Calm bit around all the kind of more funky or
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: intensely rocky stuff and.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: The songs called up to our next in it. But
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: over the years, have you ever figured out what it is?
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: What are you up to?
• 4:38
  Speaker 4: You next?
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: Me?
• 4:39
  Speaker 4: Yeah, another good question.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: No one's ever asked that before, and I've pondered that
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: a couple of times. It's just it's just about the
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: hecticness of urban living.
• 4:52
  Speaker 4: It's about you know, going to your job. It's about
• 4:59
  Speaker 4: you know, just.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: The hustle and bustle, the grime, the filth there, and
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: then you know and seeing you know, people who kind
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: of slip off this conveyor belt and kind of can
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: get crushed by the wheels. You need to see people struggling,
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: you know, with problems greater than your own, and it's
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: it's like a bit of a reflection on urban life.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: And once you're you know, once you drop into life,
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: you know you don't have much choice. You just keep
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: charging your head. You know you can take drastic action,
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: hope you don't, but it's just about it's about rolling
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: with the challenges of an urban existence.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: And now looking back now it's probably a bit of
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: a blower for your mate. But how exactly did that
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: one song change your lives and careers?
• 5:53
  Speaker 4: Yeah? It it really did.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: Like it kind of the first album we had well
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: got us a bit of cut through and I was
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: like self funded India album that later got licensed by
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: Sony when we signed. After that album, it was more
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: you know, naive and really just about our love of
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: funk music and old funk music especially.
• 6:21
  Speaker 4: But this this one.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Kind of gave us some what would you call it,
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: just a bit of kind of a credence in you know,
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: kind of just showed that it was a bit of
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: a and it was really different. Now that first album
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: was very derivative of a bygone era. We loved it
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: and it was natural for us. But you can point
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: to it and go, oh, you know, it sounds like
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: all these old funk records. We even wanted it to
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: sound small and drum sounds that were tiny and like
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: slowing the family stone all that stuff. But this one,
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: it's our own thing, and like that's some some other
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: some other pretty big, bigger.
• 6:59
  Speaker 4: Than us artists.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: Australian artists have come to us down through the years
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: and talked about how much they love that song because
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: it's so different to other things. So yeah, it became
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: it became something that kind of knocked down the doors
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: for us.
• 7:18
  Speaker 4: And glad for that.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: And we spoke about the sound before and the mixing
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: of genres, which, like we say, had a bit asked Javes,
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: hip hop, old rock and funk in these In the
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: modern age, that sort of stuff's done all the time,
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: but back then there wasn't too many bands experimenting like
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: that musically, Like how did you get that that perfect
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: concoction together? Like was it experimentation or was it straightaway?
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know that we've perfected it, but it
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: was something that we you know, we all came in
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: with The unifying aspect for us was a love of
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: funk because it was based there's a band that was
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: driven by a great bass player, Dean Sutherland, who's just
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: you know, a beast on on on the bass guitar,
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: and the guitarist Warwick, who's a very plays guitar unlike
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: virtually any other guitarists in the country really because he's
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: got all that, you know, the funk fingers, but he's
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: also got.
• 8:13
  Speaker 4: A darkness to him as well.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: And we all pull in, you know, like a drummer
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: grown up playing in punk bands. And it was after
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: that first album, which was really just about funk and
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: that old funk sound, we wanted to show those other
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: influences and it was It wasn't a very commercial move,
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: and it also took us out of a scene that
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: we knew was kind of would come and go. There was,
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: you know, a funk scene that was burgeoning in Sydney
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: and the but we wanted to kind.
• 8:51
  Speaker 4: Of shift into these other other aspects of our thing.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: And so yeah, like I said, it wasn't the most
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: commercial folking idea, but what it was and we even
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: took it further on the next two albums too, even
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: when we lost our mc dell, my brother for the Who.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: He left after the second album for various reasons. But
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: the third album is even more bent and and yeah,
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: we were The good thing about that is, you know,
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: we've never gotten sick of playing the songs too, because
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: it's not like we're just playing stuff that is part
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: of a movement or part of a you know, part
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: of a time capsule.
• 9:34
  Speaker 4: And yeah, well, you know, there were hip hop bands around.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: When we were there, the rock bands there, even bands
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: have just played kind of funky music.
• 9:42
  Speaker 4: But we wanted to swirl in through all of it.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: And we we you know, the music still stacks up
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: today because it's it's done without it's not calculated.
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: Now we're back to the chore Mate like it starts
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: on the Central Coast of October twenty four, goes through Newcastle,
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: Barron Bay, Gold Coast, Brisbane. Franks and Melbourne were finishing
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: in Adelaide on November the fifteen. So what the lights
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: have you got in store for us on the rain Mate?
• 10:10
  Speaker 4: We have.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: Great stuff coming out of that album that was all
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: around up to an accident. So we're going to make
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: sure that we hit virtually every track on that album.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: We've also got some new music that was released in
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: the last few years that stacks up well, and we'll,
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: you know, kind of it's earned its place on our
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: live repertoire and its own merits.
• 10:35
  Speaker 4: We're not just force feeding people new music because it's new.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: So we've got a couple of new ones there, and
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: then we'll you know, we get some special guests here
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: and there when we run roll into certain towns, and
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: we also, you know, like to have a couple of surprises,
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: just with a couple of tracks where we you know,
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: improve some stuff as well.
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: I'm not going to push you for those surprises, mate,
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: because everybody needs a bit of mystery and they life.
• 11:00
  Speaker 4: You do won't be a surprise if I tell you.
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: And you mentioned the new music you're going to be playing,
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: Like over the past couple of years, you put out
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: the EP parts of the Sun and a single Rain
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: on Me, So you're obviously don't want to even though
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: you're celebrating this particular song, you don't want to rest
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: on your past. Laurels like you guys are still intent
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: on making new music and moving forward.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: We still got a creative discourse gone on between us.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: We still show you know, we still talk about you know,
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: someone might have a riff or an idea, or a
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: feel or a tempo.
• 11:36
  Speaker 4: You know.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: I in the middle of the night last night, I
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: couldn't sleep. I had something in my head. I got
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: the guitar out, I recorded a you know on my
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: on my phone and thinking that could work for the
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: band as well, it could be for my soloship.
• 11:50
  Speaker 4: So yeah, we're still.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: Creative beings and it's just finding the time to carve out.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: You know, we've all got day gigs now, you know
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: a lot of us have kids, and just finding the
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: time to carve out writing time and recording time, mixing time,
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: and then you know, mounting it all up. Yeah, but
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: the win new music that comes out again in the future,
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: don't know when.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: Fantasome matell thanks very much for your time. It's been
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: a pleasure speaking we did. The tour does kick off
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: October twenty fourth and the Central Coast. I'm going to
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: come along to the brist and show Brothers, so I'll
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: be
• 12:27
  Speaker 4: Let's get you on the door.