“What’s so funny is that my first band worked relentlessly to get to the point that we did,” he says. “With Beach Slang, we were there almost as soon as we released our first EP. That first run of shows had kids singing along immediately. We were just staring at one another, wondering how this all happened. I’ve had people ask what the key was to the immediate success of the band – I’m thinking, ‘Man, if I knew, you think I’d have spent all those years kicking around?’ There’s no science to these things. It’s purely just rock‘n’roll magic.”
Back in July, Beach Slang came, saw and conquered Australia on a whirlwind visit as a part of Splendour In The Grass, alongside acts like The Avalanches, touring partners Spring King and one of Alex’s all time favourite bands, The Cure. Although it’s been barely a year since the release of the band’s debut The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us, the world is already staring down the barrel of a follow-up.
It’s entitled A Loud Bash Of Teenage Feelings, and it sees Alex and his band getting their head around everything that has happened in the 12 months following Things‘ release. Much of the record was written while on tour, something that Alex had never considered previously.
“I didn’t know that I had the skill set to write on the road,” he says. “It felt like a really cool challenge, especially considering we were up against the sophomore slump, as so many put it. It was a little daring and – to be completely honest – probably a little dumb. I think it brought out something special in this record that wouldn’t exist if I was writing the same way that I wrote the last record – at home, alone in my bedroom. I was in a different city every day, meeting new people every day. I was getting new energy all the time. I may be romanticising it a bit, but it felt very Jack Kerouac. It became second nature to write this way.”
Alex got his start as a teen in pop punk band Weston. The band achieved cult status, but never once received the accolades of their peers. Upon their quiet implosion, Alex drifted away from music entirely before trying out some song ideas with a couple of friends. The rest, as they say, is history – now 42, Alex is finally seeing the fruits of his labour after over 20 years of work. It’s gotten to the point where fans across the world are now sending Alex photos of their Beach Slang tattoos, with lyrics of his marked on the arms, legs and chests of his truest devotees.
“My first reaction was to think, ‘Why would anyone get a tattoo of my lyrics?’’’ he says. “I mean, you get Jawbreaker lyric tattoos. You get Smiths lyric tattoos. That’s the kind of level I was thinking at. It was so hard to see myself on the other side of that. It’s so hard to describe. Words mean everything to me. I wanted to be a writer long before I ever wanted to be a musician. To see someone commit what I’ve written to their body, it’s the biggest knockout punch in the absolute best way. I can’t thank those people enough, I really can’t. Something I’ve done has connected in some way that it’s permanently a part of you.”
Alex speaks about the band almost as though it’s a separate entity from himself, perhaps because it represents that oh-so-rare second chance, and rarer still, one that ended up paying off in dividends. Although Feelings is primarily focussed on the stories of the kids coming to Beach Slang shows rather than Alex himself, it also touches on the ways Alex sees himself in them and what they’re going through. It’s particularly pertinent considering Beach Slang is still a group in its relative infancy, and even a band of grown men are not exempt from maturing in the public eye. “Rock’n’roll is a crazy, confusing thing,” says Alex.
“When you’re a band starting out with something going for you, you’re figuring out the whole thing as it goes. You’re going to make mistakes, and you’re going to slip up – but you’re also going to have these moments of triumph. Everything is going to happen, and that’s what we’re in. We had no expectations when this band started. Now that it’s getting somewhere, it gets a little clumsy. You’re going to have moments where it falls apart. The test is when bands push through that. You have to ask yourself if what you’re doing means enough to fight back – to fight the good fight, as it were. I’ve tried doing other stuff, this is the only thing I’m any good at. I just want to play songs with my friends and hope that our friends turn up at shows.”
Earlier in 2016, it was uncertain if Beach Slang would even make it to Splendour, let alone to their next album: a show in Salt Lake City ended with thrown guitars, temper tantrums and an onstage proclamation that the audience had just witnessed the final Beach Slang show. Within a day, Alex addressed the rumours head-on and assured fans that the band would continue. Several months removed from the fact, he sees the band’s foundation as solid – he’s adamant about not fucking this whole thing up.
“I feel like I should talk more about how calm things are in the band right now,” he says. “It was a lesson learned for me that I didn’t think our onstage wobble mattered, and we all woke up the next day to all of this press and all of these messages. I didn’t think we were on that level at all. My manager said to me, ‘You have no idea how big your band is getting, do you?’ and my honest reply was ‘Absolutely not.’
“We probably just thought we were The Kinks, and that we could get away with having a fight onstage. We’re trying to proceed in a way that isn’t so alarmist. We’re thinking things through a little more.” Alex looks around the room, still in a haze of jetlag and no-sleep delirium, yet with a sense of clarity as he imparts his final words. “There’s no desire for us to stop.” He smiles and adds: “There’s no reason to.”
BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG
