In fact, Shepparton isn’t relevant at all to Shepparton Airplane, other than as part of a memorable geographical rock’n’roll pun. “A bandmate of mine from another band was bored one night and was coming up with all these mash up names of famous bands and really shitty Victorian towns, and Shepparton Airplane stood out as one of the better ones,” Chow says. “When we were doing the usual thing of coming up with a band name, I just called him up and asked him if we could use it, and he was happy for us to. Names often say a lot about bands, but with this name you don’t know what to expect from the band.”
This much is true. Shepparton Airplane deliberately channels the English post-punk sound of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, augmented with rollicking rock’n’roll sensibility. “It initially started out with me wanting to do something art rocky. I’d been listening to bands like Wire, Gang of Four and The Fall, and I wanted to do something like that,” Chow says. “But when we got together and started writing, they just became more rocking party songs, but still with that off kilter feel going on.”
The genesis of Shepparton Airplane had come when Chow, a veteran of multiple bands over the past 20 years, approached fellow guitarist and long time friend Ezra Dowling with the idea of forming a band. “We’d known each other for 20 years but we’d never actually done anything, so we decided to get something going,” Chow says. “About a month after that we needed a drummer and bass player, so we got Steve [Striker] and Stew [Raynor], who’re both good mates of mine and I’ve played in bands with them. It’s a pretty boring story, but that’s how it all started.”
The story of Shepparton Airplane’s coming together may be devoid of salacious detail and intrigue, but it does reflect a laissez-faire, mature attitude that flows through Shepparton Airplane. Though all of the band members have played regularly over the years, there’s no sense of career trajectory, record sales and world domination. “We’re just a bunch of mates who wanted to play together, rather than being a serious band and trying to get the right people together for the job,” Chow says.
It wasn’t too long after forming that Shepparton Airplane had enough songs for a de facto recording session in a rehearsal room above a bar in West Melbourne. Chow, a recording engineer by day, supplied the recording gear and committed the band’s repertoire to record. Upon hearing the finished product, Shepparton Airplane realised it had an album ready in the can. “We set up to record the songs so we could see what they sounded like, and they came out so well that we decided to put it out as an album,” Chow says. “It sounded exactly the way we sounded live. People tend to like that, rather than something polished and slick sounding.”
This week sees the beginning of Shepparton Airplane’s four-week residency at the newly re-opened top floor of the Gasometer Hotel. “The timing has worked out really well because we’re taking a break for a couple of months from October because The Peep Tempel’s new record is coming out, and they have a big tour planned,” Chow says. “It’ll give us a chance to test out some new material we’ve been working on.”
BY PATRICK EMERY
