“Wow. I apologise for that interview. It must have been horrendous,” McDougall laughs. “That was before I’d ever interviewed anyone and we didn’t realise how hard it actually was.”
The real reason for this interview, of course, is Soundwave, which Frenzal will be laying waste to in just a few short months. “We’ve got a whole album ready to go, but we can’t record it until our drummer [Gordy Forman] gets his broken arm better. The nerve damage has almost healed, and these shows will probably be the last we do with our fill-in drummer Kye Smith.
“Kye’s this drum savant who knows every drum part of every song ever. So it’s going to be a masterclass of how our songs are actually meant to be played. For the audience, and for us.”
There’s something else McDougall is looking forward to about Soundwave, “You just get to go and watch a bunch of awesome bands,” he says. “You get your set over and done with and then you go and watch bands. Or, if you don’t like that band, go into their little dressing shed and nick their beer while they’re onstage. We did that to NOFX.”
McDougall has been shredding on stage with Frenzal since the mid-‘90s. However, he’s recently branched out to work with other artists, which has led to an expansion of his technical setup.
“I’ve been playing some shows with Briggs, the hip hop artist from Shepparton, and I’ve just pulled my Roland guitar synth out of storage,” he says. “I’ve started learning how to use footpedals. I’ve never had to use them. I’ve been using the Line 6 M13 stompbox modeller. But in Frenzal I just use a Marshall JMP and a tuner. I bought the JMP quite a few years ago. About that time I was using 5150s, which are rad but too heavy to carry. Then I started using Mesa [Boogie] again because our bass player is our sultan of sound – the guy who sits there twiddling the knobs on the amp. Then last year – maybe it was the NOFX tour – I thought fuck it, I want to use Marshalls again. So I pulled out my JMP, which I’d never used on stage. It hadn’t been [modified] at all and it was the loudest fucking thing in the room. It was amazing. It was like, ‘There’s Malcolm Young.’ That’s that sound. It’s a proper amp being overdriven because it’s being blasted in the power amp, not by a Boss Metal Zone pedal. And I’m really excited to do these shows in NSW and Melbourne because I can drive to the shows and bring my amp.”
As for his axe of choice, McDougall is a long time Gibson SG guy. “It’s a pretty boring – I say off-the-shelf but really off-the-online-store – model. A 2007 one. I got another really cheap one from somebody in Brisbane on Gumtree that has really nice P90s in it, so that’s my spare guitar.
“But my favourite guitar is this beautiful Cole Clark Culprit that I used in triple j a lot. It feels like a Telecaster, but it sounds rad, and really angry when you overdrive it.”
BY PETER HODGSON
