“Oh no, I remember it clear as day,” he says. “I was at uni and hadn’t really played in a band since high school and had started to miss it. But I saw this very short ad in Beat. It just said, ‘Band looking for guitarist, must love ‘60s rock’n’roll. Call Kris or Wally’. The name Wally struck me as probably being someone over 60 – this image of an old stoner sinking a few cans on the weekend. I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what I need in my life.’ I didn’t have any rockstar dreams, fuck that. I just wanted to get high and drunk on the weekend and play some music. But I met up with these guys who turned out to be my age, and ever since then they’ve dragged me into this terrible business of going on tour and recording records. Putting in effort? Bugger that.”
Despite Heath’s best intentions, he and has bandmates have put great swathes of effort into The Basics over the years. The mystery of this dedication, though, isn’t where they find the reserves to keep rolling. It’s how, after countless back-to-back gigs, they’ve managed not to strangle each other. Do they simply bite their tongues during the difficult times, or is there some dusty secret the trio has uncovered?
“I think because there’s only three of us it affords a bit of pissfartery,” says Heath. “We can change it up live and it’s pretty easy to follow if someone decides to take a song in a certain direction live. That keeps it fresh. There have been some moments when we overbooked a tour back in the early days, going around the entire country and getting pretty jack of each other. In those instances you just have to grin and bear it, or get hideously drunk and fall over on stage, have a fight afterwards. Get a punch on happening, that tends to clear the deck. And then the next gig you’re best mates again. You’re back to trying not to cry tears of joy because you’re playing with your brothers in the cosmos, and you’re really high off that hash cookie, and everything is glorious.”
Bleary-eyed appreciation notwithstanding, in 2010 the Melbourne trio initiated a long-deserved break. While Schroeder pursued a solo project and De Backer re-energised his Gotye alias, Heath established the instrumental ensemble Blood Red Bird. In part, this was because Heath simply found himself with enough time to pursue another gig, but also because after years of pop-rock shenanigans, he was primed for a new creative challenge.
“I was really interested in Mediterranean styles of music,” he says. “Having lived in Brunswick for ten years I was sort of in the right spot for that. After being in a pop vocal group for so long I was so sick of people singing, but it was mainly just for fun. It grew into this collective of odd musicians, but everyone gets busy. You lament the fact that when you’re in your 20s, at university or on the dole, you kind of sit around doing nothing, days and days dawdling around the streets of Brunswick making friends with nonnas and Greek car mechanics. Then you hit your 30s and you know all of these musicians, these amazing creative people, but everyone is too busy. That’s the tragic irony.”
The Basics’ latest release, The Age of Entitlement, appeared back in August. It’s far more politically charged than the group’s earlier work, but no less accessible and entertaining.
“Kris had said to Wally and I if we’d like to go and record at Abbey Road, and we said, ‘Sure, but we don’t have any songs.’ Kris said he’d write some, and a lot of what he came back with was very political. I think Wally and I had this moment where we looked at each other and went, ‘Joisus.’ We hadn’t performed songs like that before, really. We both agreed with him politically, so we thought, ‘OK, great.’ Sometimes it’s important to stand up and say what you think. So we went for it, and I think because it’s still pop music and fairly easy to digest musically, it’s a good conversation starter in terms of its political lyrics.
“At this point, I don’t know if there’ll be another record. How much do we keep flogging this horse? I think it’s nice to maybe have done something which has a little bit more substance lyrically about our country. I think that’s a good thing.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
