For many Australian bands, playing SXSW is a dream. For DZ Deathrays, playing SXSW and being kicked off stage for being too loud is a reality. “I don’t think I have ever been kicked off stage for playing too loud before. We had just finished our song, so at least they let us finish, then they turned everything off and said, ‘Sorry guys we can’t let you keep playing or they will call the police on us.’ We kind of just laughed at each other and walked off. It was supposed to be an acoustic stage but we don’t really play acoustic so we just played normally. It sucks; we were actually starting to get a good crowd.”
After a blur of touring and the recent release of their album, Bloodstreams, Tone Deaf finally caught up with drummer Simon Ridley during their short lived break between tours.
Recording their album at producer Neil Coombes’ Mt Nebo studio, Bloodstreams may be just the thing to catapult DZ Deathrays from NME hype to world domination, one house party at a time. While the sudden SXSW aided success may appear to have come from nowhere, the writing process for Bloodstreams was somewhat longer in the making. “We have got some songs on there that are really old, ‘L.A Lightning’ is probably the oldest one on there. I think we wrote it just after the first EP but it just didn’t feel right to put it on the second one.”
“About four or five of them though were really recent and we only wrote about two months before we got to record them. We had the studio time booked in and then we realised we only had 12 songs, usually you have got to write 20 and cull the bad ones,” laughs Ridley. “We can only really spend two or three hours in a jam room before we get bored.”
The rollicking and relentless sound of Bloodstreams has attracted almost constant comparisons to Toronto two-piece, Death From Above 1979, and Ridley is happy to take the compliment. “When our old band broke up… it was just Shane and I and we were both listening to ‘You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine’ and thought, ‘Fuck it, why don’t we just make a two piece?’ So we decided to make the band for house parties and made a list of what we wanted to sound like… and DFA were definitely top of the list. We started playing all these shows and we were getting ‘Oh you guys sound like The Black Keys or The White Stripes or any other two piece band out there that is popular’, [but] when DFA came back and did their reunion tour everyone was like ‘Ohhh, so that’s what you guys sound like.’ It is better being grouped with a band you like rather than a band you don’t like,” he surmises.
This April will see the band tour Bloodstreams nationally with friends and sometime fellow bands mates, Velociraptor. “We put Velociraptor on as our support band because we don’t really get to play in that band anymore. This is the only time we could and it is so much fun playing in that band.”
“We started that band with Jeremy and it was just a three piece at first then we started playing more shows out of town. We didn’t want Velociraptor to finish up and it sucked that Jeremy had to sit around and wait for us so we got a few friends,” explains the drummer. “It started off just being two extra guys to fill in for Shane and I, then when we got back they still wanted to play so we said ‘alright’; we just realised it was more fun to have more people in that band. Within the space of a year we added ten more members. When we got to twelve we thought, okay, this is a little crazy.”
Just when the DZ Deathrays’ touring schedule could not look any crazier, they recently announced a thirty-something date of Europe and America. “When we start our American tour we will be coming straight off our European tour. We literally have a day to get from Germany to Alabama. I don’t know how that is going to work.”
While the DZ dudes have proven their ability to destroy a bottle of Jaeger in three minutes (don’t believe me? Check out their video for “The Mess Up”) , they do have a method to keeping their touring madness interesting: “You just have to have people around you that are really fun to be with, that have that energy. The European tour is also twenty-something shows in three weeks, which is just off our Australian tour so we are pretty much playing every night for the next three months. We just have different friends looking after us in different states, so by the time we finish our European tour our friends over there will be haggard and like, ‘Leave me alone, I don’t want to see you guys for ages.’”
So after all of the hype, the shows and the Jaeger; was this what they had in mind when they decided to jam a few years ago? Well, maybe not. “I have no idea, we didn’t even think it would last this long. When you start a band with a name like DZ Deathrays the thing is just destined to fail.”
DZ Deathrays’ tour kicks off tonight at Elsewhere on the Gold Coast.
