Perth punk rock legends Scalphunter are giving their new video, There Will Be Change, a suitably raucous launch at The Rosemount Hotel this Friday, June 13, with support from The Nococaines, Them Sharks, The Bob Gordons and Blackwitch. TRAVIS JOHNSON caught up with guitarist Alex Cotton.
It’s not that Scalphunter didn’t deserve to win The Big Splash last year – they most certainly did. But it’s a truism that bands as hard and heavy as these boys rarely win any popular or critical acclaim outside of their genre ghetto, and so the four denim-clad desperadoes taking out the top slot – and it’s attendant $10,000 cash prize – came as something of a surprise, albeit a very welcome one.
“Obviously we got an awesome amount of exposure from winning it and all that stuff,” reflects guitarist Alex Cotton. “And I guess it was, winning the money aside, a reinforcement of us doing what we were doing and it was the best kind of feedback you can get, I guess – that what we were doing, other people enjoyed! So that just pushed us to go harder and stronger and keep doing what we’re doing.”
Their latest offering is a new music video for the song There Will Be Change, taken from their third self-titled EP and directed by Steve Browne. According to Cotton, the track seemed like an obvious choice for a music clip. “There was debate over whether we pushed a shorter, harder song or something that we thought would appeal to a slightly larger audience. All of them, in a sense, are just punk rock sing-along tunes as far as we’re concerned, but the message behind the song and what we wanted to do with it fit really well with the idea when we first started talking about doing a clip and it all came together pretty easy, so we thought, ‘Oh well, let’s run with that.’”
Thematically, Cotton tells us the song “…is about the frustration with corporations and religions and government at the moment stopping people from expressing themselves and stopping people from being who they are through art and all that kind of stuff. It’s about those religions and governments and corporations refusing to listen to people and everyone, all the millions of people who aren’t in favour of consumerism and capitalism and all that sort of stuff.”
The band knew they wanted to collaborate with Browne fairly early on in the developmental process. “We’d seen some work he’d done with photos and we knew him through being in the punk rock scene and all that stuff. We knew that he was capable and he’d done stuff like this before, so we sat down and had a meeting with him and discussed the song and what we wanted to do with it and the theme behind the clip and us wanted to show the message behind the song with something gory but tongue in cheek at the same time. He kinda loved the idea and came up with a heap of suggestions and it went from there. It was awesome!”
