“So we went up to Alstonville and I met Steve, who I’d never met before in my life, and we started writing and recording music five minutes later. We walked in, grabbed a Coopers Pale Ale, plugged in, and started putting stuff to tape 15 minutes later. Then we just went hard for three days and managed to write and record an album.”
In this era of hi-tech recording equipment and quests for audio perfection, it’s refreshing to hear of such an on-the-fly studio approach. “Scott laid down the rules, initially,” Walker says. “He said, ‘If you think you stink, there’s no second guessing, no deciding what’s good and what’s not good. That’s not for us to decide.’ You’d be given 20 minutes to write the full lyrics to a song. You’d be called in and you’d say, ‘I’m not ready,’ and they’d say, ‘Done mate, you’re ready.’ You’d put down the vocal in one or two takes and say, ‘That’s shit. We’ve got to do that again,’ and they’re like, ‘Nah mate, it’s done. Moving on’.”
The band didn’t just experiment with this approach for the one album. Rather, they employed the completely off-the-cuff method multiple times. “It was such an enjoyable experience, although it was bad for the health, we booked in another slot six months later,” Walker says. “We did it again, and then six months after that again, and then six months after that again, and we recorded four albums.”
The five members of Forever Since Breakfast are scattered all across New South Wales, which makes the practicalities of rehearsing and performing rather challenging. “We’ve got members in Newcastle, Maitland, Sydney and Alstonville,” Walker says, “so everything is very difficult and impractical. People have to drive ten hours to get to rehearsal in one night, so there’s a lot of talking on telephones and working stuff out. But somehow it manages to propel the band forward, having all these challenges.”
Despite the long distance constituency, the band members just can’t help from working together. “I think we’re pretty addicted to it now, pretty obsessed, and I think we’re probably just going to keep going. It’s a bit of a virus that’s got hold of us.”
Forever Since Breakfast have just dropped the new album, Dangerous Levels of That’s Fine. It’s not one of the aforementioned quick-fire albums – in fact they spent a lot longer recording this one, since it was intended for broader release. The band will be in Melbourne in mid-April to play two album launch shows. “It’s going to be great to get down to the music capital of the world and have a crack.”
Walker has a very left of centre way of defining the band’s live presentation. “It’s a vast smorgasbord of muck and melody, and noise and delicateness, that is hopefully very entertaining in a musical sense, for the music lover. Wow, what a pitch.”
BY ROD WHITFIELD
