One can imagine the mundanity of paperwork might also be playing a part in Lane’s growing sense of excitement about the massive show You Am I has lined up, an appearance at A Day On The Green that will see the band perform alongside such luminaries as Something For Kate and The Meanies.
Nonetheless, Lane admits that these days he relishes any chance to hang out with his bandmates –Tim Rogers, Andy Kent, Rusty Hopkinson and Mark Tunaley. “We’re excited whenever any tour rolls around,” he says. “The thing about our band is, maybe going back 17 or 18 years, we were a bit busier. We’re still relatively busy, as far as touring goes. But we only get the opportunity to do a tour like this once or twice a year, so we look forward to the opportunity when it rolls around.”
Though Lane might feel only relatively busy these days, he and his band still spend substantially more time on the road than many of their contemporaries. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that the group jetted around the country on a headline tour, spruiking 2015’s Porridge & Hotsauce. “I do miss being on the road when I’m at home,” Lane says.
“After all these years we’re all good friends. We miss each other’s company. We all have a similar sense of humour, so we’re always cracking jokes and having a laugh. But we’re all busy with other projects. We’re juggling them when we’re not touring. It’s always best when we’re together.”
For Lane nothing beats climbing into a cramped van with friends he’s known for decades. “When you’re touring in a rock’n’roll band, a lot of it’s based around the absurd and the ridiculous anyway,” he says. “The ability to laugh about silly things keeps us from going insane. If you’ve got a pretty intense run of shows, you push through it, and then fall in a heap when it’s all said and done. It’s funny how the body works, you can get through on a wink of sleep a night, and possibly too much to drink.”
Rather than such physical and mental deprivation draining Lane, as one would reasonably expect, he argues that such restrictions positively improve his performance, and it’s clear that he and his band do whatever they can to make their live sets fresh – even if that means running themselves ragged.
“On tour, you operate on not much sleep,” he says. “But I always find the best shows we play are the ones where we all feel shithouse, because we’re less inhibited and less aware of what’s going on around us. We put our heads down and concentrate on playing. For some bizarre reason, those shows always tend to be the most enjoyable.”
That said, Lane evidently only feels comfortably pushing himself to the limits because he knows that his bandmates always have his back. Rogers has a habit of introducing Lane onstage as “my son,” and the group has a shared sense of the familial that makes them more than just your run-of-the-mill rock band. “I think we all look out for each other,” Lane says.
“We’re always communicating onstage, and we’re always looking out if someone else is feeling flat. We’re always communicating, and we rely on keeping things together for each other. We play structured rock’n’roll and pop songs, but we like to keep a fair amount of it spontaneous as well. That really is where the magic happens. The songs are structured up to a point but we like to keep it free.”
The You Am I way doesn’t involve doing a thing to death, or polishing up songs till they’re nothing but sheen, and the joy of a song like Heavy Heart is the joy you get when you see something very beautifully fall apart. “That’s the thing about the recording process: I like going to a recording with a vague idea of what we’re doing, but it’s always the little mistakes in the recording that makes the songs,” Lane says.
“It’s a rarity in this day and age to hear little errors and mistakes like you do on songs in the classic era of rock. Those are the things that excite me.”
By Joseph Earp
