“Well last time was an emotional roller coaster, so I don’t know what to expect to be honest.” Sean Caskey, the lead singer of Last Dinosaurs sounds as if he is on a therapist’s couch as he explains his band’s last trip to Splendour In The Grass. “We were playing after Cloud Control and just before the end of their set the tent was packed. We were so excited, it was Sam’s birthday (their bassist) and it was going to be our biggest show to date. So we walk on, and there were like 15 people left, everyone had gone, I was gutted.”
It’s good to see that Caskey can laugh about it now and after a year of touring their infectious pop/rock debut In A Million Years, the band is now preparing for a (hopefully) more welcome reception at Splendour in the Grass, following their appearance at the Adelaide Splendour spin-off festival, creatively titled: Spin-Off.
“We’ve always had great experiences in Adelaide… and we’re playing with some great bands from Splendour so hopefully we’ll be partying with some of them,” says Caskey.
Coming straight off the back off a hefty European tour, the never-ending debate about Australian festivals versus European festivals reignites, but in the unlikeliest of fashions, because as Caskey happily confesses, “we are fiends for free shit.”
So what European festival gives out the best freebies? “Lovebox festival in the U.K. We couldn’t believe it – there was a tent that had free cocktails, perfume, designer bags, seriously so much free shit, we were shameless, the whole band just loaded up and it was amazing.”
It’s natural to want to know stories from the road, the hijinks of a bunch of Brizzy boys wreaking havoc on the continent but Sean remains tight-lipped, instead preferring to do what everyone loves to do, rip on the French. “I think we got the typical French stereotype at our Paris show, the venue was awesome and the crowd was really mean. We had girls in the front row rolling their eyes at us!”
“People were cheering and clapping at the end of songs but then you had others who looked visibly unhappy, it was hard to tell how we went…” When suggested that it’s better than a recent faux Guns’n’Roses show in Manchester when Axl Rose walked onstage an hour and a half late only to be bottled during the first song for his tardiness, the frontman agrees, “yeah I would take the Parisian stereotype over the Manchester stereotype any day of the week.”
Sticking on the topic on Mancs and their two biggest loves behind football: lager and music, it’s obvious from the pop-rocking zeal of their album that these boys have been bred on Britpop and at the very mention of early millennium British bands such as Arctic Monkeys and Bloc Party sparks an excitable interruption from Caskey, “Yes, yes, in my perspective the UK market is key for us, we want to get to the US sometime this year but we are not a very American band so I think we feel at home playing next to British bands on festival bills, our sound is definitely more British in influence.”
In A Million Years was mixed by Eliot James of Two Door Cinema Club and Kaiser Chiefs fame and the lead single ‘Zoom’ even opens with a looped sample a’la Bombay Bicycle Club’s ‘Shuffle’.
Perfectionists by trade, Sean is happy to admit that his writing process is slow and that lots of songs get left on the cutting room floor, “my writing is always happening but whenever it’s not perfect, it’s not pursued.” This philosophy can be heard in the intricacy of the band’s first EP and album; they pride themselves on quality musicianship and rally against what they see to be an apathy towards musical expertise in today’s music scene. “I think there are a lot of bands that think it’s cool to not know how to play their instrument, it’s more about their look or just a bunch of effects pedals but everyone in Last Dinosaurs is continually trying to be the best musician they can be,” Caskey states proudly.
New material is not far away for the band but the singer stresses that he’s not going to be rushing any releases out lest the band fall into the dreaded second album curse that particularly enjoys haunting Australian music. “We are keen to get the next album out within the next two years but I have no idea how that will sound right now.”
“Yesterday I effortlessly wrote a country song called ‘Upside Down.’ I’ve never written a country song before, I don’t listen to country music but it just came out of me…” pausing mid-sentence, laughing perhaps at the thought of growing some Willie Nelson hair, Caskey adds “maybe we’ll go all out country for the second album, that’s one way of staying unpredictable.”
