Sarah McLeod has been interviewed in all of your classic rockstar spots, but when Beat catches The Superjesus frontwoman on an early Friday arvo, it may be the most rock’n’roll place she’s ever taken an interview.
“I’m out shopping with my mum,” she reports with a laugh. “I’ve just had to duck into the changerooms – all the mums are staring at me.” While being surrounded by babies and new life, McLeod is here to talk about her grown-up kid that’s just hit the big 2-0: Sumo, The Superjesus’ beloved debut LP that hit shelves back in February of 1998.
After breaking out of their native Adelaide and into national attention with 1996’s Eight Step Rail EP, The Superjesus were feeling the pressure in a big way when it came to creating their all-important debut. “When we went into the studio, we were a little apprehensive,” McLeod says. “It was out of our comfort zone – there were a lot more people involved.
“There was a hierarchy involved. If we wanted to pull a guitar sound, we couldn’t just go up to the amps and do it ourselves. We had to speak to the producer, who would speak to the engineer, who would speak to the guitar tech who would then go to the amp. It was a very different operation to what we were used to – I have a lot of memories of extensive discussions that would trickle down through the communication chain.”
Recording took place at Triclops Sound Studios, an Atlanta-based studio which had previously housed bands such as Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins. Sumo was written over the course of roughly 18 months, pieced together between half-formed ideas on the road and endless jam sessions designed specifically for forging new songs.
According to McLeod, the ball began rolling in earnest with the song that would end up being the album’s lead single, ‘Down Again’. “There’s always a lynchpin that brings an album together,” McLeod says. “I knew that ‘Down Again’ was going to be that quite early on in the process.
“I remember writing the vocal part. It was the night before the Big Day Out on the Gold Coast, and I was at a hotel room in Kangaroo Point. I was really excited – you can just tell when something’s going to be really cool.
“It was actually a blessing that it did well, because we were trying to counteract the success of ‘Shut My Eyes’. We wrote that almost as an attempt to dumb down our sound; to do something a bit more straightforward. It was good that the success of that song was more or less replaced by ‘Down Again’.”
In the 20 years since Sumo’s release, The Superjesus have gone platinum, split up, reformed, and circumnavigated the country playing everywhere from the inner-city to Woop-Woop regional festivities. Wherever McLeod and co. may roam, however, she’s always pulled up and regaled with stories from fans about their coming of age, with Sumo as the soundtrack.
“As the tour gets closer, I’ve been digging up a lot more footage and photos from us back then. I’ve been rehearsing songs that we never played live. Hearing all these stories from over the years has really given me a much greater appreciation of this time in our lives.”
Joining McLeod in the 2018 incarnation of the band is fellow founding member Stuart Rudd on bass, long-serving guitarist Jason Slack, and recent acquisition Travis Dragani on drums, who replaced original drummer Paul Berryman after he moved to the States in 2016.
The tour McLeod alludes to is the Sumo anniversary run this October, in which the band are set to play the biggest and most ambitious set of their career. “You’re going to get everything,” she promises. “All of Sumo, all of Eight Step Rail, some B-sides, some covers and all the other greatest hits. We’re going to town on this one.”
