If you were tuned into Melbourne’s rock’n’roll underground in the late 1980s, you might remember a little band called The Narelles. Then again, you might not. Formed in 1988, the band led by Alan Brough and Casey Bennetto never got the big break they were looking for. Still, The Narelles stayed together for 16 years, coming up against drug addiction, press attention (or lack thereof) and financial turmoil along the way.
“It was off and on until 2004 when we officially called it a day,” says Brough. “And now we’re back together ten years later. [Casey and I] certainly weren’t getting on the way we had got on and I think that, in a way, the only thing that saved us was taking a total break.”
When The Narelles kicked off, they weren’t exactly virtuosic musos, but they more than made up for this in sheer enthusiasm. Meanwhile, the band had a very exact stylistic agenda from the get-go, which veered away from the era’s prevalent trends.
“We very much went out own way,” Brough says. “There was a lot of people surfing that late-‘80s/ early-‘90s Madchester scene – the baggy jeans, the club beats with guitars and bass over them. The Stones Roses, Inspiral Carpets, that sort of thing. But we were a lot rawer, which may’ve been because I couldn’t play my instruments very well. But post-punk and overdriven, distorted rock’n’roll hides a lack of technical proficiency.”
In the lead up to The Narelles run of comeback shows, the group’s 1989 lead single (We’re) The Narelles has been re-released. The song packages together punching, pub-rock verses with choruses that nod towards early ‘80s British Indie pop. Another immediately noteworthy feature of (We’re) The Narelles is the track’s humourous lyrics, commencing with the line “Well I’m 21 and I demand the right to be a social leper on a Saturday night.”
“That was always a thing we concentrated on,” Brough says. “One of the things that we wanted to do to lift us above the miasma of bands that were around was to engage people not just musically but with comedy. There’s a good tradition of that – Spizzenergi, Half Man Half Biscuit, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. The Narelles always focused on trying to enrich the musical experience by making it funny. So we are as close to somebody like Los Trios Ringbarkus as we are to the Twerps.”
This characteristic explains why the band’s chosen to coordinate their return with this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Brough – who plainly denies the project is in any way farcical – outlines the nature of the forthcoming gig series. “Most of it will be our songs, some old, some new,” he says. “It’s going to be loud, it’s going to be fast. We’ll remind people of some of the highlights of our careers. But the majority of the time will be us playing our guitars, playing our basses. It’s very much a rock’n’roll gig.”
So even if The Narelles never crossed your radar in the past, it doesn’t mean you can’t join them to celebrate this triumphant reunion. “One of the reasons that bands get back together is that you put aside all the bad things that happened and remember that the thing that started you going was how much fun it was to be onstage with each other playing music,” Brough says. “It was a bit like getting back together with someone you split up with. You know, you go out a couple of times, you see whether things are still there and you realise that life/ music is better with this person around.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
