“Oooh, fans or trophies? That’s a hard one,” laughs Sam, the band’s singer and guitarist. “Good for different reasons. The idea of reaching people, having some kind of effect, is great. Hearing stories about people in tough times being helped out by our music, that’s nice. And yeah, having the plaque to put on the wall is pretty cool; the kind of thing you always hope to be able to do as a musician. But it’s definitely secondary to why we do it. You’ll find when you go into some producer’s studio, they’ve got them still in the plastic wrapping propped against a wall, and that’s always on purpose. Or they’ll have awards sitting on the toilet, that kind of thing. Another Grammy? Oh, just put it wherever.”
Keyboardist and backing vocalist Elliott laughs. “I hung mine straight up. No waiting. Zaac [Margin, guitar] used his to hold a window open for ages. He saw it was the perfect size and wedged it in, job done. You really hope no one comes along and steals it now, ’cause it’s just sitting there. Someone would snatch it and he’d be left there crying, ‘Oh no, my breeze’.”
Unsurprisingly, the brothers have some of the most relaxed banter you’re likely to find. Our conversation is peppered with thoughts and anecdotes that start at one side of the table and finish at the other, and while they are quick to poke fun at each other, it’s immediately apparent their musical raison d’etre comes from a very serious place.
“I think no matter what the songs already mean to us, they can end up meaning much more because of the way fans respond to them,” Sam says. “Stories of people saying they walked down the aisle to this song, that they proposed to someone with a certain song, that it helped them through some dark time – those songs get added meaning. Obviously we haven’t had the chance to see that yet with the new record, but it’s kind of exciting because you just never know.”
“The only new song we’ve been able to road test like that is Cut Me Loose,” Elliott agrees. “The way we write, it doesn’t happen together. It all comes together in the studio. We make it happen then and record it there. The first time we’ll play it live is when we’re actually rehearsing it for the album. We don’t really know how any song is going to develop or how an audience is going to respond to something. It’s all guesswork, really. We won’t know until we’re on the road.”
That opportunity isn’t far away now. Having kicked off with an appearance at Splendour, The Rubens will hit the road in support of their new LP Hoops from September until November, and their set is almost guaranteed to evolve with each passing performance. It’s a far cry from the frantic, hit-the-ground-running experiences of their first national tour, when their sound and stagecraft was still developing.
“We’re in a much better live position now, since we have two records to choose from,” Sam says. “And we’ve never done rehearsals like this before. Last time we came straight off the back of that record into our first tours, and we probably weren’t that great then. We were still learning. You’d sometimes see in older gigs we’d have too many slower songs and we’d have to work out how to kick that lull. This time, we want to make things move, and this record is more up-tempo. It gives us more options of how we want each set to flow.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
