"The song is my take on psychedelia, though psychedelia if it were slightly more honest."
Last year, Melbourne musician Spike Fuck had a creative outbreak. After a three-year hiatus from the music scene, there was suddenly a lot to say – about death, mortality, life, sanity, joy, sadness, judgement, forgiveness, heaven, hell, purgatory and so on. The compulsion to say it all felt intensely urgent too.
In the flash of lightning, the artist behind 2016’s mythical EP, Smackwave, had 10 demo songs to have his way with in the studio, alongside his new band (which also answers to Spike Fuck).
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But despite his burst of energy, long stretches of time passed with nothing new uploaded on Spotify. Then, the band freed the six-and-a-half minute epic Other Right Hand of the Lord at 11.59pm on December 24, 2024. Spike says the song is a snapshot that windows fans into what he’s been up to in his absence.
“That’s who I am doing it for ultimately. It’s a conversation between me and them. My goal isn’t to attract the attention of a record label or to appease the industry. If that stuff comes my way and there are people who can genuinely help us to achieve our goals? Great. But if not, that’s also fine. We’ve got everything we need right now,” he says.
“I understood that planning a release on Christmas Eve was knee-capping myself in a sense, but I like to think the choice to do so was in support of this more noble or quixotic purpose of making music for the pure love of it, and to get it to the people who actually wanna hear it, no matter when it comes out.”
The soulful Other Right Hand of the Lord, which sits somewhere on the spectrum of gospel-inspired polyphonic folk-rock, hits heights that are natively at odds with what Spike describes as his own inclinations towards nihilism, pessimism, cynicism and detachment.
“I’m not a positive person naturally – it’s actually a daily effort for me to be,” says Spike. “However, I think this lot of songs, and that one in particular, has this thread that’s like, ‘I am alive. I’m still alive, and what a great thing that is.’ It’s not some paltry oh-look-how-wonderful-life-is-now kind of thing. It’s more along the lines of, ‘I’m alive, and in a sense, I choose to be every day, so now I better work at making it bearable and perhaps even enjoyable.’ And in doing so, it has.
Not even to give an answer about death or life or meaning – I have none, and I’m not in the business of trying to find one anymore. But there’s something about making music and creating that allows you to peer above the pettiness of it all… All I’m ever trying to [do is] convey my inner, wholly subjective experience that seems near impossible to do in day-to-day life outside of art and music.
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“But to put all of that feeling and experience into music and have it resonate with someone else, and they understand it at a deep level and they feel it, that is probably the most rewarding part of it, and also something that I’ll never fully comprehend.”
The band recorded the almost-seven-minute song inside a place called Dennis, a shed-turned-studio attached to the West Footscray share house of band bassist and producer Elvis Walsh, replete with gear procured from the deceased estate of a late “Dennis”.
After winning over live audiences with all of a microphone, an industrially stabbing backing track and a karaoke-show vibe, Spike is thriving with a band – as Other Right Hand of the Lord shows. Although, as Spike says, he wasn’t originally paying the song’s potential a whole lot of mind. Walsh, on the other hand, was envisioning something inspired.
“He had this whole vision for it to have this big, bright, Big Star production,” says Spike. “I chose to trust his process and I’m so glad I did, because now I couldn’t imagine the song any differently, and it’s probably the song I’m most proud of.”
To describe Other Right Hand of the Lord as psychedelic, as Spike has, has at times confounded people, he says. “The song is my take on psychedelia, though psychedelia if it were slightly more honest – and not about the colours I saw on my last acid trip, or some platitudes about being one with everything,” says Spike.
“What I’m really interested in — here and more broadly — is the psychedelic experience produced by, say, coming off methadone and psych meds — the terrifying lows and the general sense of chemical terror it can produce.
“The pain is so intense that it goes beyond the physical and even mental. It’s truly existential and even beyond drugs now. Life is so inexplicably strange. What I’m really interested in is the outer reaches of human experience.
“And the aspects that aren’t perhaps immediately life-affirming the way that a profound acid trip is; the aspects that don’t make sense, or are so incredibly painful and disorienting at the time that they defy explanation, but in the long run, can lead you to appreciate life so much more fully, as if your life depends on it — which it does.”
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Spike Fuck’s tour stretches 10 dates across mainland Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. “I’m clean and sober now and I like to keep a regular-ish routine where I can,” he says. “On tour, I’ll basically just keep the routine I have at home… but yeah, I’ll figure that out as I go. It’ll be a journey of discovery, I guess.”
Spike Fuck, the band, has been recording two to three days per week around civilian life and keeping a serious schedule.
“The process has certainly been gruelling at times, but everyone involved, including myself, has risen to the occasion. Each win, each song we complete, each person I meet and get to know, each opportunity presented [and] each contribution of the band members makes the song something far greater than it otherwise would have been. It’s all just been such a pleasant surprise,” says Spike.
“Music is inherently personal and emotional and requires you to give something of yourself that you might not want to give, so it’s important to trust and have a good relationship with your bandmates for it to work. Because it’s about the music but equally, it’s about the connection with other people.”
Get tickets to see Spike Fuck at the Corner Hotel on March 28 here.
