Regurgitator invade WA with eleventh studio album celebrations

Regurgitator are heading our way this month on national tour celebrating the release of their eleventh studio album, Invader. The Brisbane trio kick off the WA run of the It’s So Invasive tour at The River in Margaret River on Thursday, May 23, before heading to Perth for shows at The Rechabite on Friday, May 24, and Freo.Social on Saturday, May 25, with tickets on sale now. ALEIGHSHA GLEW caught up with bassist Ben Ely to find out how Regurgitator’s enduring spirit of innovation and fun continues to take their music in exciting new directions 30 years on.

Congratulations on the release of your new album, Invader. How long have you been working on the record, and how does it feel to be finally releasing it?

I haven’t really thought about it much, but it’s probably been the most excruciating thing we’ve ever done. Now that it’s out, I feel like a big weight has been lifted off my shoulders. It’s taken close to two years to make. I’m not sure why it was, but I think it all stems from being older, appreciating what we have with the band, and the fact that even though we are a 30-year-old band, we still play and people turn up to our gigs.

We feel like the older we get, the more it blows us away, and the more we feel like we need to lift the bar a bit higher with our band when it comes to putting on a show. We always work really hard to try and make the best show that we can, with regards to every aspect like lights, costumes, how we play the songs, and even what we say.

It’s probably why it took so long because we were sort of putting so much energy into the live show that when it came to recording an album, we worked super hard on it for a long period of time. Now that it’s out, it feels like a big relief.

Definitely. We’ve seen a lot of sides to Regurgitator over your past 10 albums. How is Invader different from what you’ve done before, and were there any specific influences that inspired it?

It seems to be like an amalgamation of everything that we’ve learned in the past. I think the reason we have been around for so long is because we play different styles, which keeps it interesting and enjoyable for us.

We tried to provide lots of different sounds and lots of different songs for our own personal creative enjoyment, but also because that’s always been the nature of the band. That’s probably even partly why we would call ourselves Regurgitator, because it is like this kind of mashup of all the things we love. It is probably like a hyper-version of our previous attempts at other albums.

You have given fans a taste of the new record with a couple of great video clips so far. On This is Not a Pop Song, you worked with Stephen Jones, who we might know from Severed Heads, but he also actually developed analogue video synthesisers! Where did the idea for that collaboration come from, and what was it like working with him on the video?

Yeah, that was pretty cool. I think that was actually our manager, who is a little bit older than us, and he’s a really massive music fan. He’s always going out to gigs and meeting people, and I think he met him.

For Cocaine Runaway and some other tracks, we’re trying to go for a bit of an ’80s edge, and our manager Paul was talking to Steve from Severed Heads, and he mentioned to Paul that he had this ’80s type technology in his basement. He just said we could run the clip through that just to mess it up and make it look sort of ’80s. It took quite a while because, I think, the machine kept breaking and he kept having to repair it.

You followed this up with Cocaine Runaway earlier this month, which was self-written and directed. What was the inspiration for this, and how was it working with Brian from Pseudo Echo?

Because Quan lives in Melbourne and I live in Brisbane, we sort of email each other tracks a lot. We did get together in studios to collaborate together, but with that one, he was in Melbourne. He made the music for that song, sent it to me, and said, “Hey, what do you think about this?”

It sounded great, but he didn’t have any words, and he said he didn’t know what he should sing about. I said to me that ‘it sounds like a real estate agent who is addicted to cocaine and blows up his life because he’s a drug addict’, and then he went away and wrote the lyrics. So it’s kind of like this, almost like a story about this guy who kind of fucks up his life.

We had a gig with Pseudo Echo, a festival in rural Victoria. It’s like a free public event, and we went to the gig, played, and watched Pseudo Echo play. We went up to Brian after the show and had a chat, saying that it was a really great show. He was a really lovely guy to chat with, and we got along really well.

It was like the week after Quan had written the lyrics. Quan said, “I think we should do a video clip for Cocaine Runaway, and we should ask Brian to see if he wants to be in the clip.” We went straight up to him in his dressing room and said, “Hey Brian! We’re making a music video. Would you be in our music video, please?”

He was really great, and even though he did it for fun, he put a lot of energy into it. Even at the end of the clip, when the clip goes to a noir kind of black and white vibe and then it runs through the credits, Brian made the music for the credits. He composed all those synthesisers and keyboards at the end of the video.

It was a really nice collaboration with him. He was a really great guy to work with. I really love it when you work in the arts and you can collaborate with someone, and it’s more about fun than money. You know, it was kind of like, ‘let’s have a fun time with this’.

That’s awesome. You’ll be heading around the country on the It’s So Invasive tour this May and June. What are you looking forward to about getting back on the road, and in particular, playing some of these new songs live?

We are really excited about it. We are really excited to see the familiar faces that always come out to our shows. At gigs, we see the same people, run into them, and catch up with our friends and friends of the band.

We are constantly pinching ourselves that we are this old and we can still tour and play. We feel very lucky. We’re looking forward to playing a lot of songs from the new album. We’re going to play a huge amount of tracks from the past, like some old hits as well, and we’re organising costumes, and we’ve planned a special lighting rig to take with us. We’ve got some nice surprises for the live show. It’ll be super fun.

It’s great to have you coming to WA for three shows on the tour, and you’re bringing Party Dozen and Displeasure along for the ride too. What can we look forward to at these shows, and what made these support acts a great fit for the tour?

We did a couple shows with Party Dozen two years ago, and we really love their band, and they’re really great people. They’ve been travelling in our car because there’s only two of them, and we just get on really well with them. We love the music. It’s quite unique and different. So I’m excited about playing with them.

And we’ve also got a new band member joining just for this tour—this lovely lady from Melbourne who plays synthesiser and guitar. She usually plays in metal bands, but she’s joining us for the tour to play all the additional parts that we can’t play from the record.