“If you’re going to go to the effort of singing words there’s got to be some point to them. They can’t just be, ‘la, la, la, I love you I think you’re a sexy babe and now I’m heartbroken because I think you won’t have me.’ I don’t really see the point of that. There’s got to be something about the words, not necessarily a story but at least an idea that’s a bit interesting.”
McNelis explains that his lyrical content is derived from a mixture of literature, life events and fanciful indulgence. “On our most recent album, Billy Hunt is a little story that I got from that book The Fatal Shore, which is a great book about Australian history. Often it’s about things that happen to me, Come Dance At My Funeral is about a friend of mine dying. Sometimes they’re just completely made up; little ideas that come to us when we’re drunk.” admits McNelis.
Flap! have just completed a run of shows around Australia supporting The Cat Empire and McNelis is particularly pleased they were able introduce their music to an all ages crowd. “One of the things that’s been really great is we got the chance to do a couple of underage shows. The kids have been awesome. They’ve been extraordinarily enthusiastic.”
An array of venerable influences congeal in Flap!’s music and it’s fair to presume that hearing the band for the first time would’ve been a learning experience for some of the younger audience members. McNelis doesn’t rush to back up this opinion but he does affirm the younger crowd has keenly embraced Flap!. “I think these days – kids are pretty smart, they have the internet – everyone’s listening to everything now. I think it’s more of a feeling of everyone having a good time.”
Flap!’s live show encourages everyone to let loose, thus it’s pretty integral for the band members to have an outrageous onstage party. “We have so much fun it’s probably psychologically unhealthy,” laughs McNelis. However it’s not mindless fun and McNelis reveals that a lot of effort goes into formulating Flap!’s unique take on gypsy-swing.
“The songs are carefully constructed. It generally takes us at least a couple of days to put one together, then a little bit of gigging it to see how it works before settling on an arrangement.”
McNelis suggests that their regular genre-meshing is basically the product of the various band members’ musical agility. “Everyone in the band’s got a pretty broad musical background so we’ve got a lot of musical resources; different ideas that we can draw on. There are lots and lots of influences in the music, which is basically just solutions to musical problems. Because we’ve got so many great people in the band we’ve so many excellent solutions.”
The songs are fine-tuned to a certain degree but Flap! still leave room to manoeuvre when performing live. “We get something that works and then inevitably we get bored of doing it like that, so different things come out in the process of gigging the songs, ” says McNelis.
Flap! will appear at the Stonnington Jazz Festival this month on a double-bill with fellow Melburnian jazz mavericks The Hoodangers (bassplayer Mark Elton is actually in both bands). McNelis describes the massive impact The Hoodangers had on the members of Flap! in their formative years.
“They’re a band that started in ‘93 and they were, for me, really a part of the halcyon days of Fitzroy. When I was growing up looking around for where the energy was in Melbourne there was the indie-rock scene and the jazz scene and the modern jazz scene, but The Hoodangers, they were so good! They played traditional jazz like it was punk music and they sang in Australian accents, so we’ve stolen lots of our style off them.”
The tag ‘traditional jazz played like punk music’ aptly describes Flap!’s music. A Great Day For The Race was recently named the Best Australian Traditional Jazz Album at the Australian Jazz Bell Awards, but McNelis agrees Flap! don’t precisely represent traditional jazz. “I had a great rave about this with a bloke called Steven Grant, who is C.W. Stoneking’s music director. He wasn’t being rude about it, but he reckons what we do isn’t jazz and I tend to agree. I think one of the defining things about jazz is that the forms of the music are improvised. I don’t really think we’re jazz. We’re more like a rock band that sounds like jazz.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
