“I never really stop writing,” he says. “And we’re always playing shows, so I always want to have new material. It feels natural. If anything the break in between Modern Capitalism and the previous album [We Will All Die At The Hands Of C.G.I] felt very unnatural to me. It feels a lot more natural to just finish recording an album and tour and then come home and start again. That’s just how I like to do stuff and I think the band does as well.”
Despite their recent productivity, the band haven’t always been so united in their aims. The two-year interval between The Bon Scotts’ second and third albums was the result of a tactical marketing plan, much to Sutton’s chagrin.
“We had someone from the band take over the management side of things and he became very strategic about how we needed to do everything – how we needed to make sure the hype was right and the timelines were right, all these different rules. After a year of all these rules we kind of hadn’t done anything and I hated it. We had a big talk and he ended up leaving the band because of it.
“I don’t do The Bon Scotts for the business side of it. I do it because it’s fun and it’s everything I want to do. I can’t give a shit – no matter how many times people tell me I have to give a shit – whether timelines are right or whether we release at the wrong time. I just want to make music and I have fun. We’ve been around long enough to know we’re never going to be the next buzz band. We have good shows and we love playing, so let’s just do that because it’s fun.”
On that note, in typical Bon Scotts style, Good Times is a lively folk number with an immediately infectious vocal hook. However, despite the title, it’s not a celebration of non-stop hedonism. The lyrics refer to “bad decisions” and feeling “fucked up”, and it was inspired by some fairly sobering real-life events.
“In primary school, in first grade, our teacher said, ‘There’s this kid coming to our school who’s very small and he’s been bullied at his last school’,” Sutton says. “He was introduced to me and I was told that I had to look after him for a little while. He was my best friend all the way through to year 10 when he left school to do an apprenticeship. We kept very close afterwards, but he got into drugs a lot more than all of my other friends and his life spiralled out of control a little bit. Then I actually found out from my dad that he was stabbed in a conflict. It was heartbreaking because he was a really good friend, but it was also just so scary that my life was on that same trajectory and just the small decisions probably stopped me from going down that same path.
“But the song isn’t sad,” he adds. “The song doesn’t remember him like he was a fuck up or anything like that. It remembers him in the way that I remember him, which is this guy who was kind of dumb at life, but very good at having fun and made my life very enjoyable and probably shaped a lot of my opinions and attitudes on life.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
