There isn’t much of an alternative music scene in Drunk Mums’ hometown of Cairns, at least not that bass player/vocalist Adam Ritchie can recall. “It’s mainly just cover bands, a lot of reggae,” he says. “There’s one punk band called Meat Bikini. I watched them a lot when I was a teenager.”
There was, however, a bit of a goth scene, a strangely common appearance in isolated Australian regions. “I sometimes forget that there was that scene there,” Ritchie laughs. “You can get that with smaller towns. It’s like an emo scene, metalcore and that stuff, bands that are influenced by I Killed the Prom Queen.
Ritchie and his family moved to Cairns from Gawler, in South Australia’s Barossa Valley, when he was eight years old. He spent his teenage years listening to punk and hardcore, which gradually progressed to metal. “I played in quite a few punk bands when I was in Cairns, including some heavier stuff like grindcore. I also played in a bit more of a pop punk band called The Werewolf.”
While Ritchie knew his Drunk Mums bandmates – guitarists/vocalists Jake Doyle and Dean Whitby, drummer Johnny Badlove and tambourine player Isaac Forsyth – when they all still lived in Cairns, it wasn’t until he moved to Melbourne that he joined Drunk Mums’ scrappy punk rock ride.
“I didn’t really listen to garage rock or even rock’n’roll when I was in Cairns,” Ritchie says. “But that changed when I moved to Melbourne. It was really the influence of the other fellas, because they grew up listening to blues and that sort of stuff.”
Doyle and Whitby had been playing music together for a number of years and are responsible for originally forming Drunk Mums. It didn’t take long for the boys from Cairns to attract attention in Melbourne. With their excited stage demeanour and Mummies-esque garage punk licks, Drunk Mums embody the DIY spirit that flows through the veins of garage rock. Famously, Cherry Bar owner James Young saw them on stage at Cherry one night and was so impressed by the performance that he decided to cast aside his resolution to never again manage.
Drunk Mums released their first EP, Eventual Ghost, in 2011, and their eponymous debut long player in 2012. The album cover featured a naked female torso, allegedly that of a stripper by the name of Peaches who’d responded to an advertisement the band placed on Gumtree. The audacious artwork didn’t go unnoticed – Apple initially refused to feature the album cover on iTunes. But, with a bit of judicious digital photographic attention, the company ultimately relented.
“The first record eventually passed, and it’s up there now. I think they just blacked out the nipples,” Ritchie laughs.
On their debut record, Drunk Mums kept it in the family, with recording and mixing handled by Whitby. The first cut of the band’s second album, Gone Troppo, was also recorded by Whitby, before they reconsidered. “We actually recorded this album with Dean the first time, but didn’t really think it fit well enough,” Ritchie says. “So we scrapped it and then re-did it with a really good friend of ours who’d done live sound with Thee Oh Sees and Lighting Bolt. So we sat back and focused on playing.”
Ritchie says Gone Troppo shows Drunk Mums’ evolution from their garage punk past. While it retains the band’s original DIY aesthetic, Gone Troppo displays more of a well-rounded rock’n’roll feel. “I think if anything we’re progressively growing into a full on rock’n’roll band rather than a punk band,” Ritchie says. “You can already tell with our new record there’s a lot more classic rock than the garage punk we’ve played in the past.”
But rather than spurning their past life, Ritchie says Drunk Mums’ evolution is more organic. “It’s kind of a free bird – it’s just gone on by itself. We never consciously say, ‘We’re going to play this kind of music’, whereas in other bands I play in I do say that.”
The title of Gone Troppo is a tribute both to the psycho-climatic intensity of the band members’ hometown (“It sends me mad, so that’s why I moved down here,” Ritchie laughs) and a notable Cairns nightclub by the name of Tropos. “We do go a bit crazy if we’re driving long distances, but the title really comes from paying homage to being from up north and being in that tropical weather.”
Drunk Mums are either blessed or lucky to have three separate songwriters – blessed because it ensures a diversity of songwriting styles, and lucky because it ensures the band has just enough songs to fill a full album. “We just threw everything we had at this record, so it wasn’t a democratic process [to choose the songs] at all. It was a case of, ‘You’ve got a song? OK, let’s record it’.”
As for lyrical subject matter, Ritchie concedes that Drunk Mums aren’t spending a lot of time pondering their internal emotional constitution or the vagaries of human existence. Take for example Nanganator, a song that takes its name from the slang term for a whipped cream charger, the source of cheap narcotic thrills for many decades.
“I think the term nanganator is a far north Queensland term,” says Ritchie. “People would use it up north, but when I got down here no-one would know what we were talking about.”
There is at least a brief note of solemnity on the record: Stinny’s Brain takes its inspiration from the tragic story of South Carolina teenager George Stinney, who was convicted of the murder of two white girls in 1944 on the basis of spurious evidence at best. In 2014, after years of campaigning by Stinney’s sister and other local supporters, the Supreme Court of South Carolina ruled that Stinney’s trial was an abuse of process and the conviction was posthumously set aside.
Miscarriages of justice excepted, Drunk Mums are avowedly out to have a good time. In other interviews, band members have decried the seriousness of modern rock’n’roll, preferring the positivity and idealism of the ‘60s garage rock scene. “I think it was probably one of the other guys who said that, because they listen to some pretty intense music. But I don’t really like listening to shoegaze or that type of music because it’s really depressing to me. I don’t see the point in acting like that. It really seems like people that play that type of music actually aren’t sad, they just portray that on stage.”
Drunk Mums are well into the national tour in support of Gone Troppo, covering Cairns, Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney.
“This tour has been great, it’s been good fun. We played at Sounds of the Suburbs in Cronulla – that was a really good gig. It was set in an alleyway and there were lots of kids just going crazy. We played in Cairns, but everyone’s pretty well left Cairns who were our friends – not totally, but a lot of people have left because they’re over it, just like we were.”
The next step is to get overseas, initially to Spain where the band’s first record was released, and then to United States. But in the meantime there’s plenty of fun to be had at home. “We’re definitely doing it because we want to do it like that. We’re just generally those kinds of people – positive about life, and positive about playing on stage. I think it’s important to be like that.”
BY PATRICK EMERY
