“If you’re having fun, people have fun with you,” he says. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We try to play shows that we think are going to be fun, with bands we like – shows we think we would want to go to. And I can’t see us [writing about] any subjects too hard-hitting or anything. One of the guys tracked a demo the other day that was about three-and-a-half minutes and we accused him of writing an epic.”
Leggatt and guitarist Aswin Lakshman met in high school and have since played in several bands together. Wanting to make music that better reflected the tunes they listened to, they formed Going Swimming a few years ago with bassist Callan Trewenack and drummer Ben Barclay. The quartet have spent three years writing and gigging in the lead up to their debut album. Here at last, Deadtime Stories is a 12-track collection of raucous garage, surf and punk tracks, with a healthy dose of piss taking.
“The four of us have all been in a lot more serious bands – longer songs, a bit more wanky,” says Leggatt. “We thought it was time to put all our new songs into an album and thought it wouldn’t take us very long, being a very no-fuss, lo-fi recording. We thought it would come together quicker than it did, but we got there in the end and we’re stoked to put it out and move on to play the newer stuff. Progressing as a band has felt pretty natural; we’re still enjoying it and having fun.”
Not quite garage and not quite punk, the band might’ve invented a genre of their own: monster-punk. It’s a fitting description for not only the Goosebumps-inspired album cover and title, but the ramshackle way they attack their music.
“When you think of the word punk, I don’t think we fit that bill,” Leggatt says. “And we’ve played with a bunch of garage punk bands, and sometimes we don’t fit that bill either. So we’re kind of our own little niche, and I think part of that is my vocals; I yell and do weird stuff. I like to try to riff on a working title and see if I can keep the working title as the final title. It’s not like I have a big scrapbook of heartfelt lyrics I want to put into song. That’s the fun part of it, just writing little ditties.”
A quick glance over Deadtime Stories’ tracklist reveals a selection of creative and funny song titles; an indication of Leggatt’s sense of humour.
“Yoko, Oh No! was a tough one as it’s an instrumental,” he says. “That song has changed titles a million times. At some stage it was called something like ‘YOLO’, but we decided we can’t have that. Cosmonauts and Crosses was a riff on the original title, which was something about being a cosmonaut. The lyrics are a bit messed up and all over the place. We almost wrote it as we recorded and I couldn’t get the lyrics right. We got really drunk one night and I just spat out the verses.”
A national tour is locked in for October and November, and there’s sure to be plenty of onstage frivolity. “We’re pretty loose on stage. We try not to be loose musically, but sometimes that works its way in. Our songs are short and sharp, we smash them out and pack as many songs as we can into a half-hour set. We want to leave them wanting more, so hopefully they’ll come to another show.”
BY PAUL MCBRIDE
