Ely is Regurgitator’s bass player and co-vocalist, who founded the band along with the other co-vocalist and guitarist Quan Yeomans in the early ’90s during Brisbane’s ‘Manchester days’, when it was a hotbed of creativity and excitement with the main proponents Screamfeeder and Powderfinger. Eight albums in and still pushing stylistic boundaries, the obvious question for Regurgitator is ‘how do Ely and Yeomans keep motivated?’
“Well, I guess I kinda like that we feel as though we are kinda doing whatever we want and we like the creative process. One of the reasons that we have been around as long as we have is that we do have that freedom to do whatever we want to and not have to conform to what a band is ‘supposed’ to be. I just feel like ‘why should you just stick to one style or genre?’” he explains. “When we went in to doing this record, we decided we would jump around a lot stylistically and make the tracks identifiable as those different genres,” admits an excited and honest Ely.
The album’s title track, Dirty Pop Fantasy, is a dark and driving electro song. With the 19 song album split evenly into Ely written songs and Yeomans written tracks, it will come as no surprise to fans of the band that this song belongs to team Yeomans. “That song came in at the eleventh hour! Up until then we were going to do a double album and it was going to be called Album Album, and then we started thinking about it and decided to do one really strong album.
“Quan was singing Dirty Pop Fantasy in the apartment in Hong Kong one day and I said ‘that’s a really good track’ and he answered ‘oh, that’s a really old track that I have on the hard-drive’ so he pulled out the hard-drive and I had a listen to it. We decided that it was actually a really good song and we should use that on the album, and then we were trying to think of an album title so we decided to use that song,” says Ely. While the song smacks of modern electro’s punchiness and syncopation, its roots lie in the ’80s with one particular maestro of that era. “Quan has an obsession with Prince, so as you would know from Song Formerly Known As he tries to emulate Prince a lot. Dirty Pop Fantasy was another example of that.”
Sticking with the mode that half the album was written by Yeomans and the other Ely, it seems only logical to discuss an Ely’s contribution: The song Bongzilla is a riot, from its whimsical name to its proto-psych soundtrack and lyrics “I hear the colours , I see the sound”, the song screams ‘DOPE’.
“Sometimes when you get stoned you feel like you are just floating. That song just kinda reminds me that feeling. The Rastafarians say ‘if you smoke weed it removes all of the conditioning that has been placed on you throughout your life from school and your parents, so I guess the idea with that song is that you’re this lone figure moving through the world without any conditioning or without any connection to structures,” states Ely before adding, “but I don’t really do it [get stoned] much anymore.”
As established by this article, Dirty Pop Fantasies is an album of many moods and many phases and while it will be a huge challenge to reproduce it live, Ely and Yeomans are going to give it a go on their upcoming tour by seeking to play at least half of the album live – that’s nine and a half songs.
“We’re touring Australia in late September and October and then hoping to take in most of Asia in December. We have a band called Wampire from America supporting us. As far as the tour set goes, we’ll play quite a few off the new album – I really love Sine Wave and Can’t Stop but I think Bongzilla will be a lot of fun live as well!”
BY DENVER MAXX
