Meet local six-piece Özergun, bringing Melbourne honest and colourful funk-rock from their souls.
Having released 2020’s album Chasing Smoke, the band are gearing up to release three new exciting EPs across 2023. These guys will definitely be band to watch, with a raucous live show to boot. “We have a bit of a problem ending songs live. We just keep on going. We don’t know when to stop.”
I sat down with drummer Harrison, lead guitarist Louis, keyboard player Jerome and frontman Sammy to chat jamming, mosquitos and Quentin Tarantino.
What song has to be in your band’s record collection?
The boys were very quick to choose a group favourite. “Blood Sugar Sex Magik by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The newer albums of the Chili Peppers are less jammy, less dirty. You listen to Sir Psycho Sexy and you think why did they put this on the album? The first time I listened to it I thought this is stupid. But then you listen to it again and actually no this is fun!”
Özergun take great inspiration from such a seminal record because they are a jamming band too. “That album is a great example of how a jam band can turn their jams into songs.”
What are your most unlikely inspirations?
Sammy, who’s father’s last name is responsible for the name of the band, gathers inspiration from well outside the musical spectrum. “I used to read a lot of interviews about Quentin Tarantino’s life. He dropped out of acting school and he had a job in a video store where he watched every single movie. He’d analyse them: he was into all genres. He was trying to work out what makes a genre. He managed to find a way to be himself and do filmmaking in his own style despite what the genre is. If you look at all his films they’re all different genres, but they all have that Tarantino stamp. That inspired me as a music fan to be very open to different genres and analyse how different genres work. When it comes to writing, being able to sit in one genre and be aware of how we’re crossing over into other genres. It was an artistic approach that was very inspirational to me.”
What is a unique origin story for one of your songs?
“We’d been playing this song, Mosquito, about how much we hate mosquitos. It came up one night when I was trying to sleep and there was a mosquito in my room,” says Sammy. “It kept waking me up and every time I’d turn the light on I couldn’t find it. Then I’d turn the light off and it would come to wake me up again.”
This song in turn inspired the creation of another song later on. “I was having a bath later and there was a spider hanging above me. It was hanging down off one web, dangling down towards me. Most people would be scared at this moment: I’m quite vulnerable, I’m naked. But I realised that it’s not really fair because mosquitos are our real enemies and spiders are the ones that help clean up the mosquitos. I made a little love song to a spider after that. Lyrically, it harkens back to that old saying we have: ‘we’re not here to fuck spiders’. But in the case of this song, we are here to fuck spiders.”
Lastly, why should people who don’t know you come and see your gig?
“We like to flex our musicianship but only in the most accessible ways, not in a way that excludes non musicians. We’re not here to show off. If you want to experience musicianship that you can be apart of, rather than feel separate from, that is what we are.”
Follow Özergun on Facebook here.
