“The Fumes have been going for – shit – over ten years now,” explains founder Steve Merry. “I was playing with a drummer, Joel Battersby, for all that time, and we toured through the States and Japan. A couple of times in Japan and a bunch in New York. We did two albums, one with Lindsay Gravina at Birdland Studios, and the second one we did with a fella from Detroit called Jim Diamond from a band called The Dirtbombs. And we were pretty much flat out that whole time. And it was on one of those trips to the United States, to work on the Stateside release of the first album, that pressures started to arise. Different viewpoints and philosophies started to become amplified and Joel decided to split. At the same time, Merry was going through some personal upheavals of his own, so he took the opportunity to just stop, after ten years, to regroup.
Eventually, after a period of reevaluation, Merry hooked up with new drummer Jacob Mann and started working on some tunes: a time he describes as “a good year and a half fucking around, rehearsing.” And he hasn’t been in a particular rush to release new material just for the sake of getting it out there. When it’s right, it’s right. “I’ve been working on shit that I’d been writing for a long time that never really fit with Joel, so it was a good opportunity to work on that stuff. We spent a bit of last year on a few tours, just working up our live gigging hours with Jake.”
It’s always a big thing for a band to switch drummers, but especially when they’re a two-piece. At least in a larger band there are more individual elements that make up the band sound, and therefore more of them that are still intact if somebody leaves. “It’s completely different! It’s like a long-term relationship. I mean, if anything, there’s a side of me that was really suited to Joel but there was a lot more that I couldn’t do with him that I can do with Jake. It’s cool. We’re feeling pretty good.”
Simultaneously with working The Fumes back up as a live entity, Merry and Jake have been in the studio working on album number three. “Our engineer is Ryan Hazell, who has been our live engineer for the last five or six years. He’s also the Drones’ main engineer, and he’s got his own studio down on the central coast of NSW,” Merry says. “I figured another head on the project would be good, and he plays a bit too, so we’ve been working with him. And I’ve been finally turning on these ideas and songs that I’ve been fucking with for years, and finally bringing them to life. We’re doing everything ourselves too. Apart from ourselves there’s no influence from any marketing angle, which is great. As much as we’ve tried to keep that to zero before, there was always management and a whole bunch of other people trying to steer you in some certain direction.”
BY PETER HODGSON
