Regatta De Bloxom

Craig Bloxom, bass player/singer/songwriter from vSPY vSPY, returns to WA with his new reggae-fuelled trio, RSPYS. BOB GORDON caught up with Craig Bloxom to find out what we can look forward to when the band hits Amplifier Bar on Friday, May 30, The River, Margaret River, on Saturday, May 31, and Indian Ocean Hotel on Sunday, June 1.

Craig Bloxom didn’t touch a guitar for two decades after the band split in 2003; he instead worked as a chef in the US and Mexico before returning to live in New South Wales.

By the time of COVID, however, he had a musical itch to scratch, wanting to explore the reggae and ska styles that had originally influenced his old band and to learn finger-style bass in the process. With drummer Chrissy Lowe, he began playing reggae covers of classic Australian bands, but when then-new guitarist Tekoi Tarawa joined the outfit, he brought with him the idea of applying that reggae focus to Bloxom’s old songs.

Reggae Spys, more formally known as RSPYS, was born.

“It’s that wonderful thing in bands, when you get in a room with a couple of people you don’t know, and you say, ‘Okay, let’s play this. It’s in the key of G,’ and then you all start to play, and everyone begins to smile,” Bloxom says.

“Tekoi Tarawa, a Māori from the Kaimai ranges of New Zealand, went home, and we said, ‘Come back tomorrow, and let’s have another go.’ Tekoi came back the next day, and he said, ‘Look, yesterday was fun, but I went home, and I was on YouTube, and I was listening to all of the vSpy vSpy songs that you’ve got. Why are we doing Angels, Midnight Oil and Church songs when vSPy vSpy have got 20-30 great songs that we could turn into a kind of reggae’?”

“We all looked at each other and went, ‘Tekoi, I think you’ve got a good idea there.’ So that was the beginning of the Reggae Spys and the formation of the group that would begin to make this mongrel sound.”

The ‘mongrel sound’ sees the trio imbue reggae realisations of Spys hits and classics such as Don’t Tear It Down, Credit Cards, Use Your Head, Harry’s Reasons, Hardtimes, Sallie-Anne, Clarity of Mind and more. Bloxom, however, is very clear on what the band is and what it isn’t.

“It’s really not reggae,” he states. “What we’re bringing to WA is not a reggae band. It’s a rock and reggae thing, a little like The Police, but it’s metamorphasised into what we call ‘Australian mongrel reggae.’ We’ve taken all the songs of vSpy vSpy and put them through this lens of mongrel reggae.

“It’s a lot of fun. It’s got plenty of power, too. The ska fields and the reggae fields have always been there in the old vSpy vSpy stuff. Michael Weiley (guitar, passed away in 2018), Cliff Griggs (drums) and I—we all loved XTC, Bob Marley, Toots & The Maytalls, all of these reggae/ska bands, let alone the Two-Tone movement back in the late ‘70s. I’ll never forget the first time that I heard Message To You, Rudy by The Specials. That was ska music, and it was a big influence on vSpy vSpy on lots of our early songs.”

RSPYS released an album of these reimagined songs (plus one new track, RUOK) last year called Unity Gain. To Bloxom’s delight and surprise, it reached the ARIA Top 10 album chart.

“I thought there was no point being a band and not re-recording all of these songs,” he explains. “So I dipped into my superannuation and took out $20,000, and we recorded this album and released it on CD. Of course, me being kind of old school, I didn’t realise that nobody buys CDs anymore, but everyone listens to Spotify, which is trying to kill the industry, in a way.

“But we sold enough CDs and Spotify streams to go Top 10. We went to number seven on the Australian ARIA album chart. So we’re a Top 10 band, everybody! It was really a wonderful thing, and it made us realise that maybe we’re on the right track.”

What still plays out in RSPYS’ songs is the strength of the band’s social conscience. Credit Cards pitted consumerism against poverty, Don’t Tear It Down pondered homelessness, Harry’s Reasons examined drug culture, and the title of their third album, 1988’s Xenophobia (Why?) was aimed at the racist tensions coming to the surface as Australia celebrated its bicentennial.

“Look, we’ve always been a band with a social conscience,” Bloxxom says. “The first song that I wrote for Spys was called Do What You Say. ‘You seem to talk about things so much. Why don’t you do what you say?’ That was directly written for politicians who we know will say one thing and do the next.

“We’ve always had a really strong social conscience, and when we were taken over by Midnight Oil’s manager (Gary Morris), he really encouraged us to write about social things. I think he gave us the idea for ‘half a world with credit cards, the other half are left to starve’ and ‘ID cards now and credit cards, plastic takes the paper’s place.’ We all know that the whole world personally runs on credit cards now, and they’re trying to get rid of cash in society. I think we just had a finger on the pulse at the right time.

“I know Spys have always been a band that’s not for everyone, but I think when people would come and see us play, they could get an idea for the passion. We weren’t good at writing love songs; we were just passionate about writing songs that meant something.”