When your correspondent was 15, I had two things in my life: footy and masturbation. I remember running a warm-up lap for Mt Eliza Redlegs at the Wooralla Drive ground quietly singing a pretty cool song at the time called Self-Abuser that featured the lyrics “Hey hey hey hey self abuser, beating off used to make me feel like loser.” It was by a band called The Fauves and the song offered a whimsical insight into a paradox of manhood. Now as a 31 year old I ask myself, ‘why does this moment resonate with me?’ Is it because I could relate to it and it was delivered in an Australian accent over Seattle style grunge?
On the eve of The Fauves 25th Anniversary gig at The Corner Hotel this Saturday, singer and guitarist Andrew “Coxy” Cox took some time to discuss why his band resonated so stringly with ’90’s Australia.
“Our music really reflected our lives and what we were going through and people in similar situations really related with our songs.” He now relates directly to my personal anecdote, “You talk about going to training down at Wooralla Drive. Me and Doctor both played footy for Mt Eliza and now Doctor’s son plays for Mt Eliza. I suppose our music really reflected who we were. We all grew up in the outer-suburbs and our music has always spoken of that, we’ve never tried sing about city-centric themes like buying drugs off the streets New York, we’d be more likely to sing about playing cricket in your backyard,” he laughs warmly.
The Fauves formed at Mt Eliza High School in 1988 as Coxy, Philip “Doctor” Leonard (guitar/vocals) and Adam “Doug” Newey (drums). In 1993 the band signed to the now defunct major label Polydor and put out two albums that performed poorly sales wise, Drive Through Charisma (1993) and The Young Need Discipline (1994). However, in 1996 The Fauves released Future Spa that featured the aforementioned song Self-Abuser as well as Dogs Are The Best People. The album was a hit with both singles racking up plenty of airtime on triple j and seeing the band going from playing The Punter’s Club to selling-out the Corner.
Coxy, now in an incredibly self-critical manner, talks about The Fauves rise to notoriety, ““We got signed to Polydor in 1993 and put out two very, very unsuccessful albums on Polydor and that’s probably a luxury that bands don’t get these days. I mean we released two albums that only sold about 1000 copies each and most bands probably would’ve been dumped at that point. So Future Spa came out in ’96 and had three singles that got a fair bit of play on triple j. So ’96 to ’98 was when we pulled our biggest crowds and the peak of our renown.”
The song Dogs Are The Best People is arguably The Fauves most well-known song and it’s playful chorus was sung far and wide across festivals and bedrooms from 1996 to 1998. The chorus’s lyrics are, “Now there’s a church, there is a steeple/ Dogs are the best people.” Personally, I interpreted these lyrics as stating that girlfriends will want to get married one day but dogs are happy just being dogs. Cox is quick to dismiss my intellectualisation by explaining, ““We were always quite surprised how it connected with people. I always really saw it as statement on the nature of people – mistrust and betrayal and I guess dogs don’t do that so the underlying sentiment was ‘if dogs are the best people what are people?’ But no one ever picked up on that they were always like ‘you must like dogs’ and it took on this life of being about dogs whereas I always intended it to have a much darker sentiment.”
Finally Cox delights over the support band for The Corner show, The Doctors Orders that are in fact a The Fauves cover band featuring young(ish) Melbourne musicians Jarred Kennedy, Jarred Long, Sam Spurgeon and Jon-Lee Farrell. “The Doctors Orders just really appealed to us on perverse level that there was this band who a) covered Fauves songs and b) only played Phil’s songs. It just seemed bizarre we just had to get them. Beyond that, Phil he is terrible at remembering his own songs so that means a lot of songs we don’t do anymore because he can’t remember how to play them. We’re also interested in what songs they might dig up that we don’t do anymore.”
BY DAN WATT
