Kelly, a carpenter by day, and Jolene have been living double lives, he as the frontman of local horror-rockers Horace Bones, and she as the four-piece’s faithful tour bus. In fact, it’s in this workday van that an amazing transformation occurs, as the singer and his bandmates take on their rock alter-egos. “It’s a bit wild, to be honest. We’ve all got jobs in our normal lives so when we’re on tour we’re fucking animals. Driving in the car, we release it.”
The hard-working band have taken in much of Australia, but Kelly best remembers driving through Gundagai. “A lot of people told us, ‘You’ve got to stop off at the Dog on the Tuckerbox.’ We were thinking like the Big Pineapple sort of thing and I remember getting there super hungover, stopping off and it’s the smallest fucking statue you’ve ever seen. I remember standing there with our bass player and being super deflated, thinking about life.”
Kelly pauses for a moment. “It was kind of fucking with people, you know? Which Australians are good at.” The band themselves are no exception. “We’ve played a lot of shit gigs where the people there don’t give a shit or don’t like the music,” he says. “We don’t really dwell on their not liking us, we probably go out of our way to make them hate us even more.”
The band are partway through a boat-load of dates on their latest east coast tour for new single The Rats, a song which sees the quartet at their most dynamic, clawing along and bursting at the seams like they’re nesting behind sweat-stained wallpaper. It’s their best song to date, and proof that Horace Bones are the real deal.
“It felt special from the get go,” Kelly says. “When a song comes together really quickly and you don’t put any effort into it really, you know it’s a good one.”
The tour is probably the most important of the group’s short existence. “As usual we’ve been doing less rehearsing of the set and more just jamming songs. We usually write when we’re not supposed to, so we’ve been pretty prolific lately.”
The band are blessed with a singular mindset, whether that be procrastinating in the rehearsal room or blasting an audience with songs so tightly wound they could put an eye out. It all stems from years residing in the same share house. “You’re watching the same shit TV and you’re listening to the same music. We’d go down to Old Bar and the Tote as much as we could to see the same bands together.”
It was during this period that the housemates found their name, which, as though devised by some marketing department, manages to perfectly encapsulate their sound. “Nothing like that happened,” Kelly says.
Horace Bones is the Charles Manson-esque cult leader at the centre of the 1970 schlock horror film I Drink Your Blood, in which a town full of people are infected with rabies. “The movie was fucking bonkers and we were kind of bonkers, so Horace Bones was logical.”
In an industry that adores applying ever-more-specific labels to things, it’s no surprise that the quartet have become ‘that horror film band.’ It’s something that irks Kelly a little.
“The horror label came about as a secondary thing. We don’t write our music with a horror theme in mind. We’re not trying to be Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
It’s true, the band are more frayed jeans and facial hair than stockings and eyeliner. And even if Kelly were in a horror film, he can’t imagine himself as a self-assured protagonist.
“I’d be an innocent bystander screaming. One of those close-ups to the face screaming in horror, that’s pretty much what I do on stage. They’re important though, you’ve got to have a guy screaming or nobody knows what’s scary. That’s what I do: I set context.”
