On the surface, the Cosmic Psychos don’t look like an influential band, but when you remind yourself that they’re arguably the most influential band to come out of Australia, the image of three blokes standing around a tractor seems about right.
As frontman Ross Knight put it in the band’s own documentary: “Here’s three ugly-looking blokes, touring the world, playing at all these wonderful cities, dining at all these wonderful restaurants, meeting all these famous people, and in the back of your head you’re thinking, ‘Well, I’m a fucking farmer.'”
Indeed, Knight’s more than aware of the kind of influence the Psychos have on alternative music, particularly overseas, but it’s not something he’s ever really given much thought. There’s too much work to do on the farm, too many young fans to enjoy a beer with.
“I’m always told we are, but it’s hard to know, because a lot of these bands we’ve influenced we’ve all shared a million beers with them,” says Ross. “So we don’t know if it’s the music or if it’s just that we’re good drinking buddies, good company when we’re on the sauce.”
As for that doco, entitled Blokes You Can Trust, Ross agrees it’s helped kickstart a revival for the Australian punk legends.”There’s no doubt about it. For some reason, he must’ve taken some horrible mind-bending thing and bothered to do a doco on the Psychos,” Ross tells Tone Deaf.
‘He’ is Matt Weston, whom you may know as the bass player for Melbourne outfit High Tension, with whom the Psychos have toured. Weston directed Blokes You Can Trust, in addition to several of the Psychos’s videos, and now serves as their manager.
“We were just bumbling along, doing our own thing,” says Ross. “It definitely made things up and about for us. A lot of people thought we’d just disappeared into the sunset, but we were actually hanging around and watching the sun rise.”
“The difference would be that now we have Matt on board and a bunch of other people doing stuff for us and organising things,” Ross says of the Psychos’s pre- and post-doco phases. “It’s huge, because if left to our own devices we’ll always put it off for tomorrow, being the great Australian males that we are.”
The album that immediately followed the documentary, 2015’s Cum the Raw Prawn, was pure Psychos and attracted considerably more attention than 2011’s Glorius Barsteds or 2007’s Dung Australia.
“That whole album was recorded in a flash so it was an anti-Psychos record about a Psychos record, you might say,” Ross says of Cum the Raw Prawn. “There’d been a few whispers for us to maybe not swear so much and we’d be even more popular.”
“That was a red rag for a bull,” says Ross, “so we decided to add as many expletives to it as we possibly could.” Whilst the band’s previous albums influenced the ’90s Seattle grunge scene, the new album brought the Psychos face to face with a new generation of bands emerging on home soil.
“If it wasn’t for the Pyschos, I’d never get out,” says Ross. “And getting to play with high quality bands like High Tension and Dune Rats… I mean, you look at High Tension and Dune Rats, they bring back memories. Especially Dune Rats, who remind me of being a naughty little boy.”
“It sort of ignited a feeling in my guts that I used to feel when I was in a young band,” says Ross of watching Australia’s new vanguard of young bands perform. “It’s great to see there’s people out there still getting excited about music.”
“The older you get, the more you take it for granted, but it being a hobby of mine I never get caught up in it. But it really lifts my spirits to see people getting into it.” In particular, Ross is glad to see Australian bands embracing their Australian-ness.
“I think it’s great to see that, because it’s so easy to sing in another accent if you want to,” he says. “I just think it’s a realisation of I guess the internet machine. It’s made international music so close you can access anything and everything.”
“And I think there’s a lot of people out there with pride in what they do and how they sound. It’s great to see Aussie bands sounding like Aussie bands.” You can easily trace a line from bands like The Smith Street Band, Dune Rats, Violent Soho, and their distinctly Aussie vernacular to the Psychos.
Of course, the Psychos had a different road to these bands. “I don’t want to sound too old, but back in my day — there’s a classic line for you — we haunted record shops for fan zines and new albums, you’d buy records and CDs on covers alone even if you hand’t heard them and go, ‘Oh, that sounds alright,'” Ross recounts.
“You’d pick up a fan zine and there were connections between these record shops. It was sort of the first network.” Nowadays, bands are often courting a different network, that being triple j, which Ross isn’t too fussed about, though he appreciates the opportunities it gives young bands and listeners.
“I don’t listen to triple j. I don’t hate triple j. I think it’s a great medium for younger people to listen to music,” he says. “I always had the feeling, and I may be wrong, it’s only my opinion, that triple j was being run by too many older people and wasn’t really representative of the youth culture listening to it.”
“That has been my opinion. And what I listen to now, when I’m in my ute with an AM radio, I listen to sports station SEN 24/7 and if I’m in the bulldozer, I’ll listen to a couple of CDs or I can really only pick up the ABC.”
A touchstone for young Aussie bands who just want to play Aussie music and an exotic oddity for the progenitors of American grunge like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but to Ross the Cosmic Psychos are no different to the fans who come out and see them. As he admits, anyone of them could easily take there place on stage, and vice versa.
“It’s a good way to make people feel,” he says. “We don’t feel any different and we’d be just as happy out there leaning against the bar and anybody down there would be just as happy on stage drinking a beer. It’s a very neutral and probably relaxed feeling, I think.”
See the Cosmic Psychos and many more, including Dorsal Fins and Rat & Co, when they play to a sold-out crowd at Kennedy’s Creek Music Festival 21st October – 23rd October. More info via the Kennedy’s Creek Music Festival website.
The band also have a bunch of headline shows on the horizon, check below for details.
COSMIC PYSCHOS NATIONAL TOUR DATES
Wednesday, 12th October 2016
170 Russell, Melbourne
w/L7
Friday, 21st October – Sunday, 23rd October 2016 – SOLD OUT
Kennedy’s Creek Music Festival, Kennedy’s Creek VIC
Sunday, 23rd October 2016
Karova Lounge, Ballarat
