It took a chance tarot reading to send Pablo Alvarado down the path that would culminate in Mesa Cosa, the self-proclaimed “rock’n’roll ya-ya gang”. Born in Mexico City, Alvarado moved with his family to the western suburbs of Sydney before relocating to Melbourne. Back in Sydney on holiday to attend a music festival, Alvarado happened upon a free tarot reading service. Intrigued, he sought advice.
“The answer was: you need to start a band,” Alvarado says. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I need to do that,’ and the tarot reader said, ‘I believe in you.’ So I decided that was what I was going to do.”
Alvarado returned to Melbourne, and proceeded to advertise for members to join his just-conceived rock’n’roll band. “I put up posters with bubble writing in book stores because I didn’t want to put them in music stores because I didn’t want musicians to join the band,” he says.
A drummer and bass player soon came into the fold; a former Sydney friend of Alvarado’s, who’d previously discussed starting a band called Mesa Cosa, picked up a tambourine and declared himself ready for the adventure. “And then another friend of mine who was just staying here for a week, he joined the band, and before you know it we had a little gang of people.”
Over the years some members have left, some have returned and some have stayed on: Mesa Cosa is, Alvarado says, a dynamic collective that shares a common attitude. “We just wanted to have a band that was wild and had fun. At the time there was a lot of bands that were into the Velvet Underground and their pedals, a bit too cool for school. I wanted a band that was loose and loud. We’re so lost in ourselves onstage that people can lose their selves offstage because we’re taking away all our inhibitions. We just wanted to be a band that helps you get lost and be in the moment and not think about yourself and whether you’re cool. It was kind of a meditation philosophy.”
According to local legend, the first Mesa Cosa show was an event in itself, with a couple of members of the band coming to blows. Alvarado can’t remember such an incident, but does concede Mesa Cosa’s excited attitude has boiled over into the occasional intra-band stoush.
“There have been a few fights,” he laughs. “There was definitely a fight on the last night our first drummer played with us. We’d been up two nights, my friend had taken DMT and the tambourine player and I had stayed up two nights drinking goon. We were really out of it and we were playing this show, just rolling around in the cables screaming, and we thought we were awesome. But our other guitarist had had enough, and packed up his guitar and quit the band on stage, and we yelled at him and ran after him.”
Notwithstanding Mesa Cosa’s desire to be loose on stage, their live shows are reflective of the band members’ united sense of purpose. This is a consequence, Alvarado says, of the platonic relationships within the band, and a common attitude towards musical performance.
“Our guitarist Chris [Penney] joined the band just because we said he had to be in our band,” Alvarado says. “He’s one of us, and he feels about life and music just like we do. He didn’t even know how to play guitar, so he learnt how.”
Exploring the concept of a musical gang further, Alvarado says Mesa Cosa is on a wild adventure. “We all feel the same way, that we’re trying to portray something, to deliver something that we all agree on. We play rock’n’roll. Not rock – rock’n’roll. It’s loose but tight. We feel like we’re on a quest, like a Scooby-Doo adventure. The biggest thing our band can do is to go on a Scooby-Doo adventure, solve mysteries and entertain crowds.”
For the past few years Alvarado has supplemented his time in Mesa Cosa with a touring company called Bone Soup. Originally a vehicle to bring out Japanese band Zoobombs, Bone Soup has become a prolific touring venture, promoting tours by The Courtneys, Acid Baby Jesus, Guantanamo Baywatch, White Fang and host of others.
“They’re all bands that share our ideology of friendship and inclusiveness, and entertainment – music that brings people together. It’s eclectic and not defined by one particular theme. We all share a love for friendship and party and adventures.”
Mesa Cosa have already put down over a dozen tracks from which their next album will be compiled. In the meantime, however, they’re still living in the moment, and hellbent on dragging their audience into the same hypnotic rock’n’roll state.
“We want people to be excited and included, inhibition-free, ego-free. We really want to take our fans to a place of ecstasy. A lot of our songs have this really intense thing, but then at the end they have this big reprise where there are these big major chords and this moment of release. I feel like we always want to take our audiences on a journey where it’s wild, loose energy, and then dark, like a trance. I’ve had people say they’ve had a religious experience watching us.”
BY PATRICK EMERY
