The band – who’ve been together only 18 months – also named their debut EP perfectly: across its seven tracks there are plenty of drunken life lessons covered, with a hefty dose of Celtic-punk partying thrown in for good measure. Taking their cues from bands like The Pogues, Dropkick Murphys, Flogging Molly and Social Distortion, The Ramshackle Army fuse that very obvious Celtic-punk lineage with a certain Australian colonial-folk essence, crossing the classic heart-on-sleeve street-punk ethos with a happy-go-lucky drinking soundtrack for life, love and loss.
It goes without saying that it’s an effective way to start a party. If you’re not dancing when they’re playing Time Immemorial or Fire Is Burning, you’re a po-faced heartless Andrew Bolt-esque bastard with no love of life.
For such a new band to be so well formed- ideologically and musically – already, however, is indicative of their collective passion for the band’s music and songwriting principles. “Without sounding like a cockhead old man,” Gaz begins, “I’ve found that one of the massive thing about coming into this band is that we all have the one direction, we all have a common goal. So we’ve come from bands in our younger days where everyone is happy to sit around in a rehearsal room… but when actually it comes down to the hard work behind it, it’s like pulling teeth. But being in this band it’s like ‘right, let’s get this commitment onto the table’,” he nods.
“So we’ve come in and we’ve all had our specific roles in the band and we’ve been able to say that our talents are in different areas,” he grins. “The common goal was very important; we’re in a good place at the moment with sounds. We’ve got far enough where we have a sound that is kinda ours, we’ve still got that leftover of different influences. So on the EP every song is different but not so different that it’s disjointed.” Kat agrees, saying, “That was good actually because we all had different ideas and musical backgrounds.”
“There’s a lot of new personalities,” Gaz nods of how the band figured out how to write and sound like The Ramshackle Army, rather than sounding like the sum of their influences, so effectively on Life Lessons And Drunk Sessions. “There’s a whole bunch of times where you have to find your role – particularly with so many instruments in the same space and coming in writing new songs. We’re honest with each other, there’s not a massive amount of ego, and figuring out everyone’s balance has been good: we’re all headed in the same direction, and if you’ve got a problem they’ve just got to tell you,” he shrugs.
“Also, most of the relationships were actually formed in that we were bandmates first,” explains Kat, “and you develop that band relationship first, then we’ve also become friends out of it which is good. It makes communicating easier.”
With a generation of bands like A Death In The Family, The Drones, The Go Set, The Currency, The Gunrunners, The Snowdroppers and countless others all mining Australia’s rich vein of co-opted traditional colonial folk music – and utilising the unique attitudes inherent in it – to craft very distinctive types of Australian rock ‘n’ roll; with their added elements of banjo, mandolin and fiddle, The Ramshackle Army add a definite Celtic-folk touch to their slabs of punk. “Folk is very much the people’s music,” argues Kat, “it’s often in simple keys, with simple melodies; the same as, I guess, pop music – and punk music as well – in that it harks on those really simple elements. It may sound complicated, but you could just as easily have inhaled eight pints beforehand and you can still get through it,” she nods. “And, in fact, I do,” offers Gaz with a laugh.
Lyrically, the band’s take on Celtic-punk also offers avenues through which to offer those specific life lessons the band allude to with their EP title. “That whole positive re-enforcement thing has always struck a cord with me,” explains Gaz. “I’ve got a Dylan Thomas poem tattooed on my arm, so it’s always been a ‘stand up for what you believe in’ idea that’s resonated more than anything.” Espeically, it would seem, on the band’s opening salvo, Uprising Young Citizen. “The fight song element of it struck a cord with me. The amount of times when a song has come up and you go ‘you know what? This is a flat-out party song – I don’t want it to be anything else’. I don’t want people to read into it too much and look at the lyrics on the CD and go ‘what the fuck is he on about?’ ” he laughs.
For the band themselves, it seems life lessons are still being figured out. As to what they might see the life lessons in their music being, Kat mulls the idea over before answering, “I reckon don’t get hung up on shit… like – no – this is me having a couple of wines…” she adds, as Gaz laughs, “That’s going into the interview.” “No,” Kat laughs, “the lesson was when I realised that I was no longer the market that triple j and a lot of advertising companies are pitching at – no one’s targeting me… I’m free of all that. What is actually important is what you actually that get a kick out of. The whole pressure of these little scene-y things, like ‘you should like this, you should do this, you should hang here’: it’s bullshit.”
“Without being too niche,” Gaz offers, “and being too specific about it, I guess what you mean is perspective, age and getting older, even the perspective on the important and the not-so important things… and the shit that used to annoy me when I was 23, I just don’t have time for anymore.” Kat nods, adding, “And you go from actually stewing over that shit to going, ‘you know, I’m not actually going to waste an ounce of energy on that’. So you write lyrics instead,” she looks at Gaz. “You have an outlet,” he agrees. “You channel frustration, give it a voice.”
Those lessons will be launched with an epic session at The Tote this weekend, announcing The Ramshackle Army’s arrival with a barrage of Celtic-punk partying. “The launch? Yes, it’s very exciting,” Kat offers. “Fucking hell,” Gaz, laughs, “seriously, there’s going to be an absolute massive sigh of relief, because the last couple of months have been flat out 100%,full on working, trying to get gigs, playing gigs constantly, for the money to pay for this thing. There’s a lot of pride there too, that we’ve done it all ourselves. Getting all of the EP done up to this point… it’s been a lot of work: playing gigs to afford recording and everything, we sent it to the ‘States to get mastered, we organised a tattoo artist friend of ours in Sydney to do the artwork, got it pressed down here, all the merch designs have all been done in-house… so getting all that to a point where we get to launch the EP at The Tote is pretty amazing. Even if we can’t launch it on ‘homeground’ at The Arty, we’re lucky to be able to do it at The Tote.”
