For Miljoen, a relaxing day spent in the great outdoors has proven long overdue. He’s had to endure weeks of crappy Melbourne weather, with wind and rain forcing him indoors. “It’s been horrible,” he says. “Conducive to songwriting and staying indoors though, which Melbourne’s meant to be good for.”
Miljoen has certainly been excelling at the former exercise – and not only just over the course of Melbourne’s inclement October. For a year and a half now he’s been working away, driving his band forward and churning out songs. He’s a relentlessly productive musician, full of an endless creativity that one can imagine his years as a member of legendary ‘90s group Violetine imbued in him. Indeed, there’s a new She’s The Driver record sitting and waiting to go, though the band plan to sit on it a little while longer.
“For the last five months, I’ve just been doing a record,” Miljoen says. “We’re putting it out [in 2017]. Just being a littler band, if we were going to put it out now, we’d [get] caught in that Christmas rush. It’s no benefit. You disappear from now until Christmas. So we’re just going to leave it and wait until next year.”
Such news should have fans of the group markedly excited, particularly given Miljoen speaks of a new direction that the band started heading in. “We’ve been a two-piece for quite a few years. And then we got a bass player about 18 months ago, a young guy [Joe Golotta] who was working with me. Then we did two albums in the space of the last 18 months, so that’s been really great.”
Golotta’s appearance allowed Miljoen to focus more on playing the guitar and fulfilling his frontman duties: something he hadn’t always been able to entirely do, given he spent some time acting as both the bassist and guitarist of She’s The Driver. “I was trying to do bass and guitar at the same time,” he says. “I don’t like admitting it, but I stole the idea from an American band called Local H. They were sort of post-Nirvana, a really good grungey two-piece, and I ended up touring with them with a band I was in years ago.
“They just had this really good sound. The frontman had removed four screws from the front pickup of his guitar. So, the front pickup only picked up the top two strings, but the back pickup picked up all six. So he ran four strings through one amp and six strings through the other. It sounded basically like accompanying himself. I mucked around with that, and it worked, and it was good for a while.” Miljoen says. “But there’s a bit more freedom playing one instrument, I’ve found out.”
If all that tech talk is making your head spin, don’t worry. In practical terms, Miljoen settling for one instrument will expand rather than negatively alter She’s The Driver’s distinctive brand of blues-punk unease. The group aren’t giving up on one sound: they’re wholeheartedly embracing another, adopting, adapting and surviving.
The addition of the group’s third player is already paying off: the band’s new single, Novelty, has a bloated, anarchic feel all of its own, and long-term fans will be pleased to hear this new step for She’s The Driver feels like an evolution rather than a sell-out. “When Joe first came along we had half the last album we did, Kill That Sound, already done,” Miljoen says. “He played on half of that then we put that out. He was more or less finishing off things I’d started. But this new record that’s coming out, it’s had his input from the beginning. It’s a bit more of a band thing.”
By Joseph Earp
