A jacket partially conceals what appears to be a t-shirt emblazoned with Nirvana’s trademark blotto smiley face. However, its serif font reads “Lee Hartney Sex Drive” – an in-jokey tribute band named that takes its name from The Smith Street Band’s guitarist. The inclination is to jump right in and talk about what became known as ampgate, the biggest local news story of the week, but we start off with the genesis of Don’t Fuck With Our Dreams, a tidy EP package of five cohesive tracks.
“We were always going to record something,” Wagner states. “We try to put out something every year. We didn’t really have time to do a full-length due to tours. We decided to do an EP, which was cool because we were able to do something about what was happening at the time. When you do an album, it’s a collection of songs from a year, year and a half. When you do an EP, you can do five songs that were recently written, so you can capture what was going on. You don’t get to do that often.”
The EP’s title and thematic elements result from an unpleasant altercation experienced while on the road touring the album Sunshine & Technology, involving Poison City label brethren The Bennies. “The whole ‘don’t fuck with our dreams’ thing came from when we played at a storage shed in Byron. This guy who wasn’t involved with the band or anything rocked up because he heard there was a band on, thinking we were Parkway Drive or something. He was quite drunk and aggressive, and ended up in an altercation with Jules from The Bennies, who got quite injured. I can’t really talk about much more because of legal stuff. During the altercation, Jules yelled at the guy ‘Don’t fuck with our dreams’. Which was, in hindsight, a poignant thing to say. It summed up what we were going through. We took it hard and struggled with it for a while, and it was quite harrowing knowing that something like that could happen at one of our shows. The reasons I wrote the song was to try and get something positive out of the experience. It strengthened our resolve to not let something like that happen again. It made us hungrier, when at first we were cancelling shows because of it. We turned a positive from that horrible fucking night,” Wagner reasons.
One of the most striking aspects of Don’t Fuck With Our Dreams is its uncanny flow from track to track, a characteristic you can envision resulting from refining a larger pool of track into a concise whole. As Wagner explains, that wasn’t the case. “It was a fluke, they were the five best songs we had at the time, and they were five songs that were thematically similar. We knew what songs would bleed into each other during recording, so we had that in our mind the whole time. I was trying to capture what we were doing, the massive highs of touring Sunshine & Technology and playing these shows that were way bigger than anything we’ve ever time before. But with more people coming to the shows, there are more dickheads. It’s these massive highs, thinking that it’s everything you’ve ever wanted, then these personal lows where you’re affected by people being hurt. I guess it was important trying to capture everything that goes into touring, rather than just the whole ‘on the road, gettin’ drunk’ aspect of it all.”
Even before the outpouring of support resulting from ampgate, The Smith Street Band have amassed a groundswell of adoration both at home and overseas. They’re successful, but not in the conventional fame and fortune regard. “I feel like it’s been a steady up since we’ve released the album. We don’t really think about it like that. We don’t have any major label ambitions, we’re not trying to get famous. We don’t put pictures of ourselves on the album covers and all that shit. We just want to play the best shows we can, and play them all the time. You’ve got to get used to spending that crazy, confined time with people where it’s high emotions and no sleep. That’s the process within itself that you have to get used to. As for the band itself, it’s gone beyond what I thought was possible. My dream of dreams when I first got started was to headline The Corner. Now we’re doing it, and I get tingles just from saying it. I still think people have got the wrong Smith Street Band and they’ve meant to book someone else. I couldn’t be more surprised, happy and flattered with how the band has gone. We’ve fucked up heaps of stuff, but we’ve thought about everything we’ve done and done it on our own times.”
Stylistically, The Smith Street Band lends itself heavily to punk, with elements of folk at times reigning supreme. “I think we’re a hip hop band,” Wagner dead pans as I ask which genre he feels more aligned with. “Honestly, that’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t listen to punk music, I just listen to hip hop. When I write, it comes out as a rap in my head. Look at me, I’m not going to be a rapper. I don’t think we’re a punk band, maybe we’re in a similar vein with our ideals. There’s some folk in there. Everyone in the band listens to different stuff. We try to get everything there.”
Inevitably, talk turns to ampgate. After The Smith Street Band’s performance at Old Bar the Saturday prior, Wagner’s Fender Hot Rod Deluxe amp was brazenly taken from the venue. The internet was abuzz the following Monday with amateur detectives trying to discern CCTV imagery, identifying two suspects – one of which was soon labelled “fedora guy” due to his questionable taste in head wear (though some debate the hat was in fact of the pork pie variety). Thanks in part to the assistance of fedora guy, the tale had a happy resolution. “Everyone is saying ‘Oh, I bet you’re sick of talking about ampgate.’ But I say, ‘no it was the best thing ever’,” Wagner exudes. “It was so funny, I love it still, I’m still reading back over all the comments. It was the best day on the internet. It was the best publicity stunt I’ve ever organised. People are actually asking if it was a publicity stunt, but as if I could be bothered organising that. I’ve got way too much stuff to organise to let alone orchestrate this shit. I do feel like ‘fedora guy’ got a bit of a bad wrap. He has a shit hat, let’s face it, but it wasn’t really him who stole it. He was involved, and he did the wrong thing, but in the end he was the one who returned it. A bit of the flack could have gone to the bloke who walked out with it. My dream conclusion would have been to meet the guy who stole it. I’m not angry at him – he fucked up, and he would have been really embarrassed, and it would have been a very stressful day for him. I would have loved to have resolved it by meeting him and getting a photo with him, blurring his face and not giving out his name, but just me and him holding the amp giving a thumbs up. But it didn’t end up that way, but that’s alright.”
BY LACHLAN KANONIUK
