Among many other things, Melbourne rock quartet FONT are a testament to stickability.
Like many musicians in the pandemic’s ‘Most Locked Down City in the World’, their pursuits were blocked and momentum halted, but with a kick in their step and no small amount of determination to see through on the band’s early potential, they have emerged through the quiet years with their debut album, the ever so aptly titled Coburg-19.
Some seven years ago Trevor Bryan Cotton had moved to Melbourne from Perth where he had been involved with acclaimed bands including The Jaycos, The Community Chest, Emperors, and Radarmaker. On the lookout for new musical friends and adventures he’d joined John Doe & the Shallow Graves (“like Dave Graney fronting The Bad Seeds… a loungier version of dark, deathly Melbourne-sounding music”) and a tradie-themed punk rock band that he also recorded called Tumble Turn.
However, with songs of his own up his sleeve, Cotton wanted a more realised rock/pop experience. It all fell into place when he bumped into guitarist Angie Jones at the Retreat Hotel in 2019.
“Angie and I had met a few months’ beforehand and crossed paths a few times through mutual friends and going to record store performances,” he recalls. “I had some songs of my own that I wanted to bring into a band, but I didn’t even know Angie was a muso. So to begin with we were just talking shop and I ended up finding out she’s a guitarist in her own right. So we decided to form a band.”
“Trevor asked me if I knew anybody, and then all of a sudden it was like, ‘yes I do!’. I knew Luke (Millar) the original drummer and then Mick (Muc, bass – Chimper Kimblay/ThundaBox). Then Luke moved on and we got my Mr. Mark Adams (Likedeelers/Cold Irons Bound), who’s also another friend. It’s a very social sort of band.”
Jones had some songs she’d kept aside since her days playing in Sydney in the ‘90s in bands such as Sulk and Supernova. Combined with Cotton’s song ideas and contributions from Muc and Adams, the band developed a strong suite of songs.
“Everyone in the band has contributed to songs,” says Jones. “Trevor and I’ve written about half each. There’s the idea and then Mark has another one in the mix and Mick just plays his bass over everything, it’s great. He does really, really nice basslines.”
“He counterpoints,” notes Cotton.
Things were moving along nicely, with a few promising shows around Melbourne and a commitment made towards a recorded release. It was 2020, however, and COVID had plans to destroy all plans. Melbourne faced lockdown after extended lockdown and the members of FONT found themselves isolated. They couldn’t get within 5km of each other, let alone within a rehearsal space.
“That was just a big bummer that whole period because I think we were getting some momentum before all the lockdowns with the gigs we were playing,” Muc says. “It really just hit pause on that.”
View this post on Instagram
There were glimpses of respite, but they were fleeting and added to the frustration.
“There were moments in which lockdowns were released and we were able to go out so we could do little bits here and there,” says Cotton. “But really it was like Mick said: there was a pause button on the whole project.”
“We’d just sort of ramp it up and then shut down,” Jones adds.
The sun had to shine eventually, and in 2022 FONT were able to gather to knuckle down on further song arrangements and get onto the business of recording. The ideas were flowing…
“I still had some riffs hanging around that weren’t converted into songs and I knew Angie had quite a few as well,” Cotton says. “So as soon as we knew that lockdown was done for good, which was late ‘21, then we realised we could really dive in and we actually got into it with gusto.”
Cotton got the band into his favourite rehearsal space in Preston with his recording equipment in tow and settled into capturing the gemlike qualities inherent in the songs.
“It was very fluid,” Muc recalls. “You hear stories about people having arguments and stuff, but there was no friction. With the whole process it just felt like, ‘I’m dealing with professionals’. We’re really lucky to have someone in-house that gave us that really professional treatment and is also a friend and band member. It’s pretty special.”
For Jones, who’d stopped playing in bands in the early 2000s, the writing and recording experience was more than creatively fulfilling.
“With the songs that I brought in I had been sitting on them for a long time,” she notes. “I thought no one would ever want to have ever turned them into a song, but then these wonderful guys put their input in.
“With a lot of stuff I’ve written I don’t write lyrics. So I would present Trevor with the idea, a theme, and a riff and then he was creating lyrics to go with my songs that I had worked on with everyone putting that little extra touch in.
“You can just see everyone blending together, but it’s sort of different than a lot of the stuff I think that’s around. It’s sort of broad and we’re quite happy to try most genres, I guess. Well, within reason (laughs).”
The results are like the seasons in a Melbourne day. Given the era they were written in, there’s a feeling of home and suburbia and there’s a lot of diversity in that there suburb.
From “Pretty Lately”’s alt-country-sonic-bittersweetness (amidst 29 chord changes) and the Turnstyle-meets-Weezer-meets-Pavement riff fuzzery of “Lineup”, to the power-pop trash – via Neil Young – of “Take Me By the Hand” and the epic-psych of new single “Pass the Curse On”, there’s indeed a little something for all the neighbours.
“’Pass the Curse On’ is one of Trevor’s that we all created an entire song from,” explains Jones. “It’s probably one of the first jointly written songs from scratch by the band. I wrote the main riff and lead atmospheric sound effects on lead guitar for it. It’s our loudest track on the album and I think everyone submitted something unique into this song.”
“In essence, the lyric is about generational trauma,” Cotton adds. “Evolution is a result of all the refinements to our DNA, but there’s a simultaneous devolution at odds with this. This is addressed occasionally in the arts, but it’s under-represented in social discourse. As depressing as it may be, we’re gonna need to talk more about our shittiness as human beings if we hope to get past it all.”
The album was provisionally titled Full Fontal (“We love our puns around here,” says Muc. “We love flogging a dead horse”) but Jones came up with Coburg-19 – a perfect encapsulation of time, place and moods, which is reflected in Cotton’s lyrics across the album.
“I was inspired by Angie’s title to think about what it means at this time and for this band in this city, because we really had to restart and with a new drummer in Mark as well,” he explains.
“You wrote the songs, you lived those songs from birth as well,” Adams responds. “So I count myself very lucky. It’s been fast and tense for me but I get that the other guys don’t feel that way. It’s been perhaps a long slog with this awful set of delays in the middle of it, and someone key leaving, whereas I just come in at the end of the crest and just go, ‘Wow, that’s fun. We’ve got a record!’”
Indeed they do. What comes from listening to Coburg-19 is a sense of unity across the songs and within the band. Yes, they have a record, verily a document of shared creativity and persistence. They are releasing a single and video from it every six weeks until October.
“There was a sense of rebirth about the process and of starting from the grassroots,” Cotton reflects. “It was a community thing and it’s really important for us because we all live near each other. We all live somewhere along the 19 tram line on Sydney Road. So it was just something to grab a hold of, thematically. It really just fell into our laps.”
Follow FONT on Spotify and Instagram.
