“While the changes in lineup that we ended up having this year made it difficult, we’ve realised now that we can just wing it,” he says. “Things aren’t as impossible as they might seem, I wish we’d had the courage to jump up and split and go overseas four or five years ago.”
Money for Rope is back in Australia after what McKenzie describes as a rollercoaster of a year touring Europe and India. “We basically spent almost all of 2014 overseas, we were really back only for a month,” McKenzie says. In May, the band were scheduled to travel to the UK and subsequently to Europe. The open-ended nature of the tour – the band was going to purchase one-way tickets and see where the winds of touring and performance blew them – unsettled a couple of members of the band: “Even as we got close to leaving I wasn’t sure who was going to be at the airport,” McKenzie says. “Even when some of the guys said they’d be coming, they said they might leave at any time.”
Within a short period of landing in Europe, the band’s bassist and one of the group’s two drummers had decided to decamp back to Melbourne, leaving Money for Rope with three remaining members. Despite such personnel challenges, the band trudged on, determined to make the best of the opportunities ahead of them. Initially, manager Wally Kempton filled in on bass with typical rock’n’roll preparation and professionalism. “One of the best shows I reckon we played was in Prague, when Wally had to learn his bass parts in the car on the way to the show, and Eric [Scerba], the remaining drummer, had to learn to play both drum parts,” McKenzie says.
Along the way, Money for Rope picked up a fill-in drummer from Glasgow (“We always wanted to have two drummers – when we’d turn up at a festival with only one drummer the promoter was often disappointed,”), but couldn’t afford to fly him around Europe for the entire tour, so the band subsisted on the payment from shows and augmented by whatever freebies they could acquire along the way: “There’d be the occasional festival show when we’d ask at the end of the set if we could sleep on someone’s floor,” McKenzie says.
When Money for Rope teamed up with Courtney Barnett for a series of dates in Europe, the band was able to take advantage of left-over European promoter largesse. “We lived a bit off Courtney’s rider, and because most of them are vego, we were able to scoop some of the meat off their plates,” McKenzie laughs.
The touring experience, however, was overwhelmingly positive, with the benefit of hindsight at least. “It’s always such a rollercoaster touring,” McKenzie muses. “The highs are fantastic, but although I’m not a particularly negative person, I suppose the things that get stuck in your head are the times when you’re not sure just how you’re going to get through it all. But we built a tight-knit family out of the whole experience.”
After returning to Australia (“We decided it was better to have no money in Australia, than to have no money in Berlin, which was our original plan,”), Money for Rope regrouped briefly before heading back overseas, this time to India. “India was a phenomenal experience,” McKenzie says. “The crowds were really passionate, especially at the festivals we played, and even though they didn’t really have any knowledge of the bands that were playing.” McKenzie also participated in a songwriting workshop with a few other Melbourne artists, including Peking Duck and Appleonia. “That was a really different experience, especially because songwriting can be such a personal thing for some of the songwriters,” McKenzie says. “But it was a phenomenal group of people to be working with, it was an amazing experience.”
Since returning to Australia, the band, with the addition of a new bassist and drummer, are now back to their full, five-member complement, and have directed their attention to writing and recording the songs for their second full-length album, notionally due for early 2015. “Production-wise, this has been much more of a group effort than the last record,” McKenzie says. “We had the choice of doing it either in Berlin with minimal gear, or in Australia using the gear we’ve accumulated over the years, so we chose the latter. And this time around, it’s more about letting the recordings flow into a record, rather than going into the studio and recording the songs specifically for an album.”
Having spent most of 2014 living out of a suitcase and lugging gear between venues and airports, McKenzie’s trying to take maximum advantage of the Australian summer: “We probably could have finished this record by now, but we’ve been doing a lot of fishing and relaxing. It’s a lifestyle choice, but hopefully it’ll be reflected on the record,” he laughs.
BY PATRICK EMERY
