“I ran out of battery on my phone, and so I had to go into the hairdresser and charge my phone and talk to the hairdresser, it was really weird. I was doing an interview, and they were like, ‘Sure you can use our phone charger, you complete weirdo’,” McKenzie laughs. Rock star life.
Deep Sea Arcade have just returned from a massive tour of the UK and Europe, playing a bunch of festivals and headline shows to promote their debut LP, Outlands, which was released in March this year. Often when Australian bands journey overseas for the first time they get crowd-shock – audiences can be exponentially different from one country to the next. McKenzie explains that they’ve begun to suss out how to play the game.
“Every time you play somewhere new, you have to get the crowd to warm to you. It’s like flirting with a girl, or flirting with a guy, you kind of don’t want to come on too strong straight away. There’s definitely a dialogue that you have with audiences, and some audiences will warm quicker to you and some might not warm to you straight away, but they might by the third show. It’s like dating,” he alleges, chuckling.
Despite only releasing Outlands earlier this year, McKenzie says the band are already up to their knees in songs for the next record, which they will record after their upcoming Australian tour. McKenzie and bandmate, Nick Weaver, have written most of the band’s material until now, but McKenzie says that the group’s approach to this record has been much more collaborative.
“It can be a little bit like going into a kitchen with five boys. Have you ever been into a kitchen with five boys?” McKenzie laughs, receiving a negative answer. “Well if you’re cooking with five guys, nothing gets cooked. Everyone’s fighting over how to do it, if you get what I mean. That’s a pretty good analogy for writing a song with five dudes. But often it really helps to have a pretty structured idea of how a song should be if you want to actually be collaborative. So we get the groundwork of the song – melodies, bass line, an idea of what the beat’s going to be – and then we can fill it out from there, because there’s a scaffold to build upon.”
Deep Sea Arcade are heading out on their final national tour for a while before heading into the studio – with the new record slated for early next year – and McKenzie says it’s good to be back on home soil. So, what can we look forward to? “We’re going to showcase some new songs, we’re showcasing [new guitarist] Jimmy, and we’re just gonna thrash it out, play really well, and blow everyone’s socks off.”
BY CHLOE PAPAS
