Would you like to introduce the Rumjacks shortly to our readers?

I have read that you all have already played in a lot of other bands before. Where you playing the same kind of music like you do now or was it something totaly different?

 * Johnny was playing in a rockabilly band when he and I met and decided to start what would become The Rumjacks.  When I was in Melbourne , I was briefly a member of Mutiny, and I started a folk punk band of my own down there.  Anthony used to be in the punk band Bastard Squad from Melbourne (and jumped up with them when Rumjacks played with them recently).

When was the band found and how have you met the other band members?

* Johnny and I met in Sydney .  As it turned out, we were both living in the same area about an hour out of the city.  We found Frankie at the local pub, he was a local who had been toying with the idea of starting a folk rock band so we roped him in.  One thing you have to understand about Johnny is that he knows pretty much everyone in the Sydney band scene, and he knew Anthony, who saw us at one of our early 'road-test' shows in the major Blue Mountains township of Katoomba .  When we needed a drummer, he stepped right in.  We found our guitarist Gabriel at a tattoo pageant we played in the city.

How did you find the band's name? I guess there is an interesting story?

* Well, there's no real folkore behind the name.  I just came up with it one night in a pub, and it seemed to really work.

Of which bands are you influenced?

* The Pogues, The Clash, The Corries, The Dubliners, Steeleye Span, Flogging Molly, Darkbuster, Weddings, Parties, Anything, Roaring Jack, Mutiny, Dropkick Murphys, Rancid, Tom Waits, Bombshell Rocks, Billy Bragg, The Real McKenzies, Kate Rusby, The Tossers, The Clancy Brothers, The Popes, Mr Irish Bastard, Against Me!, Blood Or Whiskey

You mentioned some, more or less new, European bands, how well do you know the music scene over here?

* I'm not sure how well I know it, but I found loads of European folk rock and folk punk bands through sites like Paddyrock Radio and Shite'n'Onions.  I even bought a Mr Irish Bastard t-shirt off them the same week I first came across them!  

You have released two EPs. How can we get them in Europe ?

 * AT THIS STAGE, you can get them through Pug Music online (www.pugmusic.com)

That’s great. Sometimes it is really difficult to get Australian stuff over here. You stressed “at this stage”... ?

* If anyone wants to distro for us, please let us know ASAP!!

How many shows have you played yet and how many people come to see the shows?

* We play all the time, it is not often that we are not playing a show on a Friday and Saturday night.  I'm no good at estimating crowd numbers, they vary, of course.  We have played shows where people cannot get into the venue.  And of course, we play smaller shows, what I call "family" shows.

Your tour leads you through big parts of Australia , I cannot image that you do all that travelling in a van. So how to you travel?

* We fly around, courtesy of two airlines who are in fierce competition. 

I know a lot of bands and actually every band has some anecdotes about crazy things that have happened during their tours. Is it the same with you?

* Yes and no.  We have broad parameters as to what counts for crazy.  Believe it or not, we are very civilized, (individually and historically, that wasn't always so).  Gabriel and Anthony are Gentleman of Distinction at all times.  I don't drink at all.  Johnny and Frankie drink like farmers, not bandits.  Not sure if any of that makes sense.

It does make sense.  Punk Rock is more than dyeing your hair in multi colors, being drunk all the time and bugging people. That might be fun every now and then or even for a while but wouldn’t it be painful to live that cliché all your life? Most of the (punk)-musicians I know are the most gentle and reliable persons I have ever met.

So do you have a funny story which has nothing to do with being totally drunk?

* Johnny gets his pants off just when sober just as often as when he's pissed.  I don't know how many people find it funny, maybe it is a behavioural disorder, I find it pretty funny, though.  Actually, drunken Johnny McKelvey stories, or rather, those of his drunken alter-ego 'Wild Ronald' McKelvey, are usually very entertaining.

Do you have a favourite place to play and where would you love to play one day?

* Over here, we love playing in Brisbane and we have our favourite venues in Sydney , of course.  We're keen to play Japan , and that's on the cards for next year also.

Sounds really cool. Japanese people seem to love Folk-Punk. I actually don’t really understand why but there must be a huge interest in that kind of music. Do you have any explanation?

* I get the impression that the Japanese are just very open to all sorts of styles, and they seem to really like and understand high-energy music, from rockabilly to punk to psycho-ceilidh.

What are your lyrics about and what inspires or influences you while writing songs?

* Frankie writes bawdy songs that are actually very Australian in terms of their wordplay.  He seems to write about misbehaving, really; wenches and booze and such, although he has this song on the new EP that is very poignant.  It is the flipside of the coin to songs like 'I Belong To Glasgow' and all that sort of thing, it is proletariat song but not in some dumb 'down-but-proud' way.  I find it very dark, it's about a man who is resigned to a passive existence, who both resents and accepts it but has never had any intention of doing anything about it.  I like the fact that it is a variation on a theme.

My own songs are more about imagery than narrative.  I don't plan it that way, but I can't write "and then he/she did this" sort of songs.  Well, I used to, but now I write stuff that combines the headspace of the character with the landscape, or cityscape or whatever.

Which songs / which bands are you listening to at the moment?

* One of my favourite albums is Grant Lee Buffalo's 'Mighty Joe Moon', I always have that around.  If there's ever a record with songs that blur the inner and outer landscapes, it's that one.

Two more questions short before we end the interview:

What was your very first album?

* The first album I can remember seeing being bought was The Dubliners, 'Dubliners Now'.  That was when Jim McCann was in the band.  I was about three, and went to see them with my father at Sydney Town Hall .  I can still remember the mystique of the whole thing.

What’s the ring tone of your mobile?

* I don't have a mobile, I refuse to siphon money into those fucking mobile phone companies.  I send smoke signals with cigarettes.

Would you like to leave a message to our readers?

* Just that we hope you like our music.  And we definitely hope to come over and make new friends.

I keep my fingers crossed that you will have the chance to come over very soon and I have no doubt that you will make many new friends all over Europe .

Many thanks for the interview!

Cheers, Ute!

Does this story sound familiar? A band is formed in Sydney, inspired by the Pogues, by traditional Irish and Scottish music, and by lots of noisy electric stuff as well. The singer was born in ....Glasgow..... Their frantic, drunken gigs are legendary, building up a diverse following of Newtown punks, Blue Mountains folkies, expat Scots and Irish and assorted lefty weirdos. The music is fast, loud and accordion-driven, with ruggedly tuneful vocals over the top. That’s where the similarities between Roaring Jack and the Rumjacks end. A quick listen to Hung, Drawn and Portered, and the Rumjacks assert themselves as a totally different beast.

BOMBSHELLZINE.COM

THE HOTSEAT

2009 EDITION

THE BASICS

Name : Will Swan
Band : The Rumjacks
Job In Band : Accordion, Tin Whistle, ‘Second Vocalist’, Lyricist of some sort
Website Address : www.myspace.com/therumjacks

HOME

Hometown : Sydney, NSW, Australia

Hometown is best known for The Harbour & the cityscapes it provides

Best thing about the music scene in your hometown : The flair
Most influential band to yourself that’s come out of your home town : Influence is relative

Best up and coming band from your home town would be : Probably some band with lots of hair starch/wax/gum or something.

THE BAND

What’s the story behind the band name?

We did a William Burroughs cut-up method to get the name.  Frankie struggled with this.  The other band members got distracted by beer taps.  So I just kept on cutting-up, and came up with ‘Rumjacks’.  Not really sure what it means but we like to think it has a playing card character quality about it.  It sounds like a working troubadour.

When did the band begin and how did it come about?

Johnny was in a rockabilly band, but needed more than Chris Isaac covers and brutal-looking wanna-be pin-up chicks to soothe his wild soul.  I found myself back in Sydney after playing in Melbourne folk punk bands.  From this point, we gathered ragged pirates from wherever we found them.  In all honesty, the band found the members.  This is true.

How would you describe your sound to the average Joe on the street?’

Punk rock with a howling host of desperate horse-thieves providing the chorus and with a very loud accordion in there somewhere.

What’s your current release? Tell us a little about it…

We have an EP entitled ‘Hung, Drawn & Portered’.  It features four of our own songs and one traditional cover.  We cover drunken funerals, addiction and recovery, migration, Beatniks and Van Diemen’s Land in our own songs on that EP.

What image do you think / hope your music conveys?

This would be relative.  But something righteous and irreverent by turns.  Something tropical, something historical.  Something open to interpretation, to be honest.

In five years time the band will be…

Coming up with innovative ideas for merch to sell at shows.

OFF THE STAGE :

What was your first introduction to music that made you think seriously about playing it?

I picked up a tin whistle because I’d encountered The Pogues, who had re-introduced me to the folk music I’d been surrounded by as I wee boy. My family was right into Steeleye Span, The Dubliners, pipe music, Australian bush music, The Chieftains, etc.  My old man is a gun tin whistle player, so I got a couple of tips, but generally I just played along to Pogues and Dubliners records and anything else with tin whistle in it. 

What was your first band name and what style did you play?

My brother, who is a gun banjo and mandolin player, and me had a band which was largely underage called ‘The Harridans’, we played in bars and wherever we could.  We were playing so-called ‘Paddypunk’ before anyone, it was loose and mad, totally unselfconscious.  We’d play Dylan covers, Tom Waits covers, hillbilly songs, a few originals.  It was all about drinking homebrew on stage and blood on the strings.  I was at uni but I still consider it a sort of childhood.

Tell us three albums you couldn’t live without in your collection

The Pogues: Red Roses For Me

Tom Waits: Rain Dogs

Steve Earle: Transcendental Blues

Best piece of musical advice you’ve been given

I never listen too closely to sound mixers because they all say something totally different to one another and they generally have trouble focusing.

Two groups/artists you’d love to take out on the road

1)     A good band with a great girl singer up the front, so we could poach her for a duet with Frankie. 

2)     Any band that who can talk about interesting stuff.  Most bands are made up of either suburban bogans or inner-city lightweights.  True free-thinkers are hard to find.  I'm joking, of course.  I lived in Marrickville, Sydney and Brunswick, Melbourne, for a hundred years each, so I'm only joking about the inner-city lightweights. 

Favourite song of your group?

‘I’ll Tell Me Ma’, because the room just blasts off in all these different directions.

The thing you most look forward to just before a tour is

The next hot meal.  In one band I was in, I was reduced to eating an apple for my one meal in Hobart, although we’d been promised hot meals.  So I try and keep it hot wherever possible.

The thing you least look forward to before a tour is

That cold sock feeling you get when playing cold places where you don’t have time to change your socks after sweating them through.

When you’re not doing band related stuff, what are you usually found doing?

Reading books by or about Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, reading tattoo magazines, kicking a hacky sack around with my girl and my ragamuffin dog, prowling around trinket markets and Chinatown food courts, buying incense and charms.

ON THE STAGE / ROAD

What gear do you use?

I play a 60-bass Paloma piano accordion.  This is an inexpensive accordion, what I like to call a ‘combat accordion’, made in China under Italian license.  I use a K & K Sound Systems accordion mic system preamp (belt-pack).  I play a Dixon tin whistle that I ordered from Yorkshire.

Favourite place (city/town/country) you’ve toured… and why?

Brisbane, specifically the shows we’ve played for Punkfest at The Jubilee Hotel in Fortitude Valley.  They tear it up, it’s tribal and they’re just all really friendly, hard-dancing people.  They don’t do it by halves in Brisbane.

The best show you’ve ever played was… and why?

The most recent Punkfest show up there.  It went vertical, we were just bouncing up and down from the centrifugal force of the room, and Frankie went all ‘Rage Against The Machine’, which was fun.  It felt sort of ‘pagan’.

Who hogs the stereo in the van the most?

I have always considered myself entitled to DJ duties on road trips generally, because I don’t drive.  But we talk so much that we don’t actually play much music.  I mean, we’re not a breezy, reflective kind of deal when we’re together, we really just blather on.

After a week in the van/bus on tour which band member will have the messiest section, and what would we most likely find stashed there?

We haven’t done that long together in one haul yet, but sooner or later we will.  Johnny McKelvey is easily the messiest member in the road trip department, on account of his whole McDonalds thing.  And dig this; he’s a vegetarian who digs Maccas.  So he orders meatless McBurgers every time we go anywhere, and there’s all the detritus from that stuff.

Who in your group has the worst “bad habit” on tour, and what is it?

Frankie seems to skip meals, and Johnny sometimes forgets to shave.  Personally, I will have none of that rock’n’roll nonsense!!

Most embarrassing moment on tour?

Getting in the vehicles to drive to wherever we were staying after not getting paid by a certain Canberra venue.  “Oh, didn’t we tell you?  You had to sort the door yourselves”. That makes you feel like a dancing clown who just danced for free.  But we sold a lot of CDs that night, so bollocks to them.

Give us a good quick ‘on the road’ story, funny, embarrassing, memorable, whatever…

We pulled into a certain hamburger chain restaurant out in the country and a real hay bale of a local yokel was eating his cheeseburger while sitting on the toilet with the door open.  Just gazing vacantly. 

Your manager calls and says the venue you are about to play really wants to keep you happy, what’s the first thing you chuck on the rider?

I’d get those original Red Bull drinks that come in the gold tins, the real Thai ones, the stuff that tastes like medicine.  Not that ripped-off sugary crap that nightclub losers mix up with vodka.  I don’t drink alcohol any more, so that’d be my request.  The others would probably ask for Jamesons Irish Whiskey. Anthony would specify red cordial, he is fuelled by fire engines.

RIGHT NOW

What’s getting the most spins in your stereo right now?

Right this second?  The Aggrolites’ new record.  It’s got me yearning for summer.

Tell us a band or artist everyone should check out and why…

The Snowdroppers.  You know why?  Because they’re like us, in two ways:

1)     They LIVE their thing.  They’re not like these wankers who get all dressed up when (and only when) they’ve got to play; you know the types?  Dandy effete rockabillys can be especially bad in this regard.  Anyway, in the case of The Snowdroppers, their ‘thing’ is vintage cocaine blues, they’ve got this whole Bonny & Clyde thing going on, they look like bootleggers who’ve just held up a barbershop in some Louisiana township, they look like they carry straight edge razors and only sleep with women who wear suspenders every day.  In fact, they do only sleep with women who wear suspenders all the time.

2)     They take the same approach to the influence of musical roots on their own music as we do.  In our case, it’s traditional ‘Celtic’ and folk music, in their case it’s blues.

If you could change one thing about the music industry today, what would it be?

Better PAs in the venues.  If only the venue owners really knew how much punters and bands talk about a venue pretty much ONLY in terms of its sound.  Everything else comes a distant second.  They should put all their energy into the sound.  Build it and they will come.

Thanks so much. 

Much appreciated,

Will

The Rumjacks - 'Hung, Drawn and Portered'

Written by After Thursday, 20 August 2009 06:42

Rumjacks