A hallmark of The BellRays’ sound is lead singer Lisa Kekaula’s rich voice – think Tina Turner with the soul of Sharon Jones.
“As far as Australian bands go: to me there isn’t a rock band around that can’t have some connection to AC/DC just because they are a cornerstone to ‘heavy’. If you wanna be heavy with a guitar, you have to have listened, which means you are therefore influenced,” establishes Kekaula on the importance Australia’s most well-known rock export.
The BellRays’ ability to marry the heaviness of rock with the uplifting emotion of soul is very unique – their only equal in the genre would be Detroit’s The Dirtbombs. Kekaula openly talks about the origins of her band’s sound. “It was an organic process that has taken a while to just evolve naturally. We never started a band thinking it would sound like The BellRays’ eventually sound. We didn’t stumble onto it either. We just practiced and wrote and got players and lost players and eventually we just turned into what we are. We grew up into The Bellrays that people know. That is one of the things that I am most proud of. We don’t have to act like we are anything but what we are because we are all natural. No posers here.”
Any rock fan familiar with any one of The Bellrays’ fourteen albums will know that the band project a sense of entitlement and bravado through their music that would make Iggy Pop shake in his boots. For example, their song Stupid Fucking People from their most recent album, 2010’s Black Lightning, reconfirms the band’s tenure as one of the hardest rocking bands in the world – just listen to Kekaula discuss The Bellrays’ headline slot at CherryFest.
“It feels like we fucking deserve it. We rock hard and it is a comfort to know someone like James (Young – owner of Cherry Bar) knew we should be playing CherryFest as soon as he heard us at the gig we played at the Corner Hotel last time we were there,” contends Kekaula.
“We are no joke the real deal. Nowadays there is so much pump to get publicity. Everyone wants to be seen and heard so everyone has someone pitching them that says ‘this band is amazing’, we are so over-sensitized as human beings now that you have to be touted as the second coming and spend a lot of money saying that to be heard because people have little desire to learn or try anything new. I think a lot of that is on the music industry’s past track record. Lots of shit has been said to be great just to get people to buy it and people have lost the ability to understand that they need good music to feed the soul,” she concludes on why The BellRays are so deserving of the headline slot at CherryFest.
James Young was inspired to ask them to headline CherryFest after their performance earlier this year at the Corner Hotel, with him inviting the band back to Cherry Bar for some hard drinking post-gig. “After the gig at the Corner Hotel which ended late – especially if you add a morning flight the next day – we thought ‘oh we will drop by and have a few drinks’ –wrong. We were there and had tonnes of drinks because of wretched Wally Kempton [Even, The Meanies]. We had a fucking great time and then we played!” A embarrassed nervousness enters Kekaula voices as she moves on to describe the band’s impromptu performance at Cherry Bar.
“We try not to play encores unless people really make some noise. That night we still had three songs we hadn’t played, so we decided that would be a good choice of songs to play. We were very drunk about the whole thing but still rockin’. After the third encore I said goodnight and low and behold I looked around and everybody in the place was three sheets to the wind and not listening to me say goodnight, they were just screaming like banshees,” retells Kekaula. So what does a band do after three encores with a full crowd still in front of them? She now tells us exactly what happened, “Bob [Vennum, guitar] said to me ‘hey we are on AC/DC Lane; let’s do Highway to Hell.’ I said ‘no’ because I like to say no and especially when I’ve been drinking the word feels more at home. Somehow after about the fifth time saying no, I realised if I played that song I really wouldn’t have to be standing there anymore. Once we launched into the song it was truly all a blur that I had to relive through all the tweets, posts and re-tweets!” Concludes a very, in retrospect, happy frontwoman.
Finally, Kekaula discloses what’s happening for The BellRays on the recording front, “We’re writing and recording songs now for the next record and hopefully that’ll get out next year. The lips thing took up a lot of time and energy so we’re kind of catching up. We recorded some stuff and then when we went back to it we decided it needed some work and new ideas came into the picture. So hopefully we’ll have a new one out soon.”
BY DAN WATT
