“Fuck, I love redheads,” says David Le’aupepe, the enormous, leather-jacket clad frontman of Gang of Youths. He clasps my small, burgundy skull with his bear hands, presses firmly, and grins with the smile of a man who’s accomplished something.
Which he most certainly has: Gang of Youth’s debut album The Positions has been years in the making, painfully spurred by David’s tumultuous and painful relationship with his cancer-stricken ex-wife. An indie rock opus, it has a raw quality, intricately tied to anthemic ability. It’s a truly magnificent record, and worthy of anyone’s time.
On the dawn of The Positions‘ release, I sat down with Dave to discuss making his Joshua Tree, honesty within music, and his love for metal.
Tone Deaf: The honesty of the album…it’s like a Bruce Springsteen record…
(Dave leans over and gives a huge hug, large smile in tow.)
TD: How brave do you have to be to be able to bare yourself the way you do in your songs?
DL: Courage is a commodity that is all too short and far between. What are you going to lose?
TD: Well, you can lose faith, lose friends…
DL: Fuck it. There’s no higher calling than being honest, and being true, and having integrity, being abrasive in your approach to the truth. The stark reality of what I went through…I don’t want to hide that. At the same time, I didn’t want the band to be a fucking thing. Who wants their whole life story to be displayed on a screen for everyone to throw apples at? At the same time, I had to make a decision: am I going to do the thing that I really like doing for the rest of my life, and do it honestly, or just get a desk job, and function under those parameters.
TD: There’s that epiphany of ‘I can do this’, or ‘I can do this’. Was there any kind of moment within the band that was a watershed moment?
DL: The girl I wrote the songs for was such a genesis for what we did. I think we just wanted to be together, us four. It became a story of them propping me up. There wasn’t any stark epiphany, there wasn’t a brave descent into chaos, it was already fairly chaotic. We had no choice but to keep doing it.
TD: When you were going through this heartbreak, was your first instinct to write about it?
DL: My first instinct was to run the fuck away. I guess when you’re with a person in that romantic capacity, you just avoid it. When it got to that terminal stage, something just snapped, and your lifeblood becomes important. I wanted to tell this person how much I loved her, and how much I wanted to make shit happen.
TD: How would you describe how the band reacted during this time?
DL: I was an asshole to them for two years. I was obsessed with making this thing, and they stuck by it. They listened to me piss and moan, my three week-long benders. They emotionally and physically, literally picked me up, by the armpits.
They’re probably the best people I’ve ever met. Feeling like I had a backbone in that regard, I wasn’t completely alone. It was evident in the way they stuck around.
I was such a fucking animal for two years, and I was horrible to work with…I was unpredictable. I was so profoundly egomaniacal, and had a twisted sense of self, or I used to anyway, and it was hard to balance that. Especially getting all this attention that I didn’t want in the first place, anyway.
It was a weird period of realizing your weird little Frankenstein’s creation had become bigger than you intended. All this immeasurably stupid garbage comes along and all you want to do is sit in a garage, drink beer and play music with your friends, and go home to your missus.
TD: On the subject of dealing with fame, how was working with a major label [Sony]?
DL: Awesome! They don’t give a shit, they just want us to be happy. I think there’s a misconception about major labels that they still function like major labels. They can’t! It’s awesome! It’s people that love music. I know indie labels that don’t give as much leeway with their bands as Sony do.
I think we’re one of the more esoteric bands on their roster, and they wanted to do everything the right way. I’m a trashy indie kid as well – I grew up in a working class family in the inner West. The thought of being signed to a major record label, being a metalhead, I was like, “Fuck that, I want to sign to Deathwish!”
“[We] want to do something that’s important to people.”TD: Being a metalhead, was it strange coming from an evangelical background?
DL: We all met in [church] as kids. I was the bad kid in youth group. That’s how we learnt to play music together.
TD: Do you give credit where credit is due – to church?
DL: Fuck yeah! Playing in church was the thing that got me into playing music generally. That’s a lie; it’s where I learnt music.
I wouldn’t have discovered Slayer if I had felt accepted by my wider Christian community. If they didn’t think I was this poor brown kid, I would’ve been into Switchfoot. I was like fuck you; I’m going to listen to Slayer, and Mayhem, The Ramones and Sonic Youth. It was my way of finding acceptance where I wasn’t finding spiritual atmosphere. I’m glad they rejected me.
TD: How would you like for there to be Gang of Youths tragics?
DL: With this album being so honest, I opened up, and I want people to find solace. Music fans can find it alienating. FKA twigs is cool, but I can’t emotionally connect with it. I have trouble connecting with stuff I don’t have an emotional foundation basis. Maybe I want people to connect with us emotionally.
Like Slayer, there’s a visceral, guttural, primal…when you hear ‘Ride the Lightning’…the blood boiling. Maybe that’s why we didn’t make self-aware shoegaze music, or quirky guitar pop, or witty, astute observations like Stephen Malkmus. We wanted to make a Joshua Tree [U2].
TD: Not a lot of people are comfortable admitting that!
DL: Fuck yeah! I want to connect!
Dr. Dre said, “Forget about the ghetto, and rap for the charts”. Part of me wants that Joshua Tree moment in my life – not to be as big as [that], but have people connect in the same way. It’s big, ambitious music, and they weren’t afraid to be lambasted by neophyte art-student journalists.
TD: Gang of Youths have always worn their ambitions on their sleeves, with SXSW and the Sony deal. Why do you think so many Australian bands are afraid of success?
DL: They don’t want to be lambasted, they don’t want to be insulted. That’s okay, we just don’t give a fuck! I don’t want to not do what I want to do because some asshole is going to tell me I’m a dickhead for it. I’m not a careerist – I could work anywhere – but in terms of the sonic quality, the thematic concerns of our album, we always wanted to do something incredible.
When you’re a lonely, friendless, poor kid, and you grow up in a shitty neighbourhood, and your only concern is music and baseball, you develop a need or desire to do something, to make your life mean something.
Everyone wants to matter, and the four of us want to do something that’s important to people.
Gang of Youths’ new LP The Positions is out now on Sony Music.
