Considering Clowns are entirely self-managed, this is a fairly remarkable feat. However, the band couldn’t have risen to where they are without paying attention to that which surrounds them. “Pretty much everything that we’ve done now is shit that we’ve learnt from other people,” says frontman Stevie Williams. “I remember the advice that I got from Tibor Gede, who played in a band called Jika. I was like, ‘I’ve just started this new band Clowns, how do we build this up?’ He was like, ‘It doesn’t matter where they are, just play a shitload of shows, watch every support band, meet every person in the pub, talk to them, learn from them and that’s how you’ll do it. There’s no trick.’ And that’s what we did.”
Of course, these instructions wouldn’t have generated interesting results if Clowns weren’t armed with bucket loads of firepower. Nowhere is this more evident than on the band’s second album, Bad Blood, which lands next week. It’s actually only 16 months since Clowns released their debut LP, I’m Not Right,and in the ensuing period they’ve toured Australia many times over – including major support slots with Bodyjar, Frenzal Rhomb and Poison Idea – and made trips to China and New Zealand. On top of this, triple j’s Short.Fast.Loud named I’m Not Right the fifth best album of 2013.
Still, the band weren’t going to sit around contemplating their good fortune. “Basically at the start of 2014 we got the idea in our heads,” says guitarist Joe Hansen. “We picked when we were doing the album and wrote towards that.”
“In years of being a fucking music nerd, I’ve noticed that a lot of bands tend to drop a bit of momentum if they wait too long on their second album,” says Williams. “The bands who churn out an album that’s maybe 70 per cent their best stuff and 30 per cent a bit of filler, it’s still better than a band that waits two, three, four years to release a killer album. They just lose that momentum.”
Moving straight from one album to the next, there’s a risk of mining similar creative territory. The guys from Clowns are still fairly young, but it’s not as though the band was in its infancy when I’m Not Right came out. In fact, prior to making the record, Clowns spent a few years gigging like mad and developing the band’s identity. As a result, once that record was done, they were primed to turn a new leaf.
“We all got older, developed as a band, we like all kinds of music, so there’s so many different influences coming in,” Hansen says. “Maybe [Bad Blood’s] a bit heavier, a bit faster, but it wasn’t really a conscious decision to do that. It was us writing what we’re into and what feels natural.”
Indeed, Bad Blood featurestracks such as Infected and It Stops With You,which reveal a more vicious hardcore edge than anything Clowns have given us previously. Then there’s the album’s 11-minute finale; an exceptionally ambitious and dynamically schizophrenic number called Human Terror.
“A lot of our old stuff has a bit of a rock’n’roll influence and is a bit bouncy,” says Williams. “On this album, we lost the fiddly-ness of rock’n’roll and we focused on the power of one chord. Like, [mimes intense strumming], instead of [hums cheesy guitar riff].
“We did definitely want to try new things,” he continues. “We didn’t want to release the same album again. We did make a conscious effort to steer away a little bit from the last one and try things that we didn’t do on the previous album. I hate it when a band releases the same album time and time again.”
“Unless it’s The Ramones,” says Hansen with a pointed finger. “If we were as good as them I wouldn’t care, but we’re not.”
I’m Not Right was produced by known eccentric and Melbourne studio guru, Lindsay Gravina (Rowland S Howard, The Living End, Cosmic Psychos). Gravina’s input furnished the recordings with a muscular vibrancy. Bad Blood is a similarly ballsy affair, but Gravina wasn’t in the producer’s chair this time around. Rather, the album was recorded at Hothouse Audio in St Kilda, with assistance from Jez Giddings and Craig Harnath.
“We’d been thinking about going to the Hothouse a number of times,” says Williams, “but we never could afford it. Then this time we were like, ‘Fuck it. We’ve come this far, we’ve already done an album, we’ve already toured Australia a number of times, we’ve got to step it up somehow’.”
“[Harnath and Giddings] made the record sound great,” Hansen enthuses. “They got all our ideas. Anything we wanted to make happen, they could make it happen.”
“They were our perfect combo,” agrees Williams. “They knew what we were going for and they helped us get it there.”
Although Clowns run the band independently, much like its predecessor, Bad Blood will be released via Poison City Records. In recent years, the Melbourne label has attracted mountains of attention by virtue of its uniquely impressive artist roster (that includes the likes of The Smith Street Band, Luca Brasi and Deep Heat). PoisonCity’s specialty can loosely be deemed ‘punk rock,’ but the label doesn’t try to control its artists’ behaviour, as Clowns can testify.
“I think people respect PoisonCity in the regard that it is well curated,” Hansen says. “A lot of the bands are very different, like The Bennies, pop-punk/ska stuff; then us, we’re completely different to that; then bands like Harmony who are completely different again. I think it’s become a label to trust for different kinds of music, but it’s all good quality.”
“Just because something’s punk doesn’t mean it has to be four chords, screaming,” adds Williams. “It’s got to be people doing whatever the fuck they want to be doing without caring if other people are going to like it or not.”
Indeed, Clowns’ incumbent ascent wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for their can-do attitude and fearless application to making music the only way they know how. And, as they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it: “Since we released the last album, shit just keeps getting fucking weirder,” Williams says. “People are coming to the shows and buying the record and hearing the songs on the radio. It’s a bit of a surreal experience. But we’re still taking the steps that we want to take. The only reason we’d get a manager is because we’re too busy touring and writing, or whatever, and we have a guy who’s walking with us every step of the way and we’re making decisions together.”
With Bad Blood in the can, and the band on the cusp of a major headline tour,it looks as though Clowns are multi-taking just fine at present. “Part of it’s not just being a musician, but being an adventurer,” says Hansen. “We don’t know if it’s going to be great or shit or anything, but even if something we do sucks, we still learn from the experience. That makes a healthy band, I think. Nobody can succeed all the time. Where’s the challenge?”
“[If you succeed all the time] it wouldn’t be succeeding, it’d just be like normal,” says Williams.
Hansen offers an example: “As soon as bands get off the smack they start making shit music.”
“We’ve got to get on the smack,” says Williams. “Maybe that’ll be the inspirado for the next album. We’ll all start taking smack and it’ll be the greatest Clowns album ever. And then one of us will die.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
