Legendary Australian rock group Hoodoo Gurus are heading back west to celebrate their 40th Anniversary and to show off their brand new LP, Chariot of the Gods. With special support from The Dandy Warhols and locals Rinehearts, the Gurus are set to rock the Belvoir Amphitheatre on Friday, September 23. To find out what it feels like before a gig as a Guru and what inspired the new record MICHAEL HOLLICK spoke to frontman Dave Faulkner.
40 Years eh?
41 now!
Oh of course, COVID has caused a few delays! So you must be really ready to go now?
Yes, we’re feeling really good. We just did a couple of shows up in Cairns to get ourselves back into the groove again after having four months off and it was all very fun. We can’t wait until it (the national tour) kicks off tomorrow.
Being deep into your career, do you still get nervous before a show?
Absolutely, though it is hard to know what to describe (the before gig feeling) as. Nervousness is not really the right word. I guess I would say that you get a very kind of distracted air before you go on stage, like the thousand-yard stare. There is a part of your brain that is preoccupied with what is about to happen and whether its adrenaline going through, or you are just trying to visualise what and how things will happen
How would you describe the emotions you feel on stage then?
The thing about going on stage and having people watch you play and hopefully enjoy it and think you’re fabulous and all those sorts of things are all on the surface and they are great, but the thing that it all really comes down to, and what you are really doing is, you want to go out there to feel the music and to be an instrument yourself.
You have to switch off your normal sense and become that instrument and do what you’ve trained yourself to do after all these years and you know, experience makes you do that. You release all the other stuff away, temporarily. It’s a real freedom. We want to come back to that moment, and in a sense, to express our nature. That’s who we are and what we want to be…to not have any barriers or restraints from the rest of the world on ourselves.
Prior to the release of Chariots of God, the band had their longest gap between releases. What’s been happening?
One major thing that happened was the process of our long-time drummer, Mark Kingsmill, retiring and the welcoming of new drummer Nik Rieth (The Celibate Rifles, Tumbleweed and The New Christs). Mark joined the band for the second album, so when (he decided to retire), we had to really look at ourselves and say, do we want to continue with our end? We had a moment where we went really too sure if we were right without him. We took a good look at ourselves and we made the decision that we didn’t want to let that define us and we wanted to see where else we could go.
Was Nik the band’s first pick?
We did try a bunch of other drummers, but we all thought that Nik was just right. Working on the new songs with Nik really bore that out. Those songs have a different energy about them. It was still very Hoodoo Gurus in one sense, but for us, it was quite a different experience. As a songwriter for example, it bought out a different character in my writing.
I believe the recording of the new album was quite a bespoke process?
We planned to make this record as a series of singles. This was a different way to work, we hadn’t done that approach since our very first album. The only thing that interfered with it was COVID, where we weren’t able to see each other for periods of months due to the lockdowns.
So we get the drums set up and all the amps out and do a couple of songs and then packed it all away, before doing that all again. That means it’s never exactly the same each time. Different space, different studio, different songs have their own kind of energy from the particular moment that they were done.
Unanswered Prayers was the first single off the new record, Chariots of God. How did that one come about?
That came right at the end of 2019, we were just doing the single Unanswered Prayers. I wrote the riff for the song on the way home from rehearsal and then the next day we started playing the groove and there was just a dynamic there, something that was interesting to me and worth exploring.
The following morning I woke up and wrote all the lyrics and the song was almost complete the next time we played it. It was clear to me there was something going on with the song and I wanted to release it as soon as possible, so it became our first single in December of 2019.
How was the record different from what you had written before?
It’s hard to explain. How do I know what type of songs would have happened with Mark instead? It’s just how things have developed. Nik has a certain energy, more swing in his play, which adds a slightly sexier vibe to it. Nik is very much part of our psyche now.
