Kiwi bogans win big US fanbase
Kiwi hard rock band Like A Storm is currently blowing up in the States with the help of an unlikely instrument: the didgeridoo, writes Grant Smithies.
You’ve gotta love the New Zealand talent for understatement. Expat Aucklander Kent Brooks is on the line from his adopted home in Toronto. Like A Storm, the hard rock band he formed back here with his brothers Chris and Matt, is currently taking off in the United States. ‘‘We’ve been doing pretty OK, eh?’’ says Brooks. No, you haven’t! You’ve been doing brilliantly. Last year, Like A Storm opened shows for the dove-chomping dark lord himself, Ozzy Osbourne. Their songs have been praised to the skies by Slash from Guns ‘N Roses.
They regularly play alongside all manner of hairy American noiseniks (Creed! Puddle Of Mudd! Godsmack! Sick Puppies! Staind!) at huge rock and metal festivals all over North America, the United Kingdom and Europe.
That’s quite something, right? I mean, it wasn’t so long ago that they were just another bunch of hopeful little bogans trying to hustle gigs around the grubby bars of Auckland.
In the early 2000s, Like A Storm played Auckland’s Kings Arms on a stage so small, they could barely move.
‘‘At one point I turned one way, Matt turned the other, and my bass smacked him in the head,’’ recalls Brooks. ‘‘He had to play the rest of the gig with a black ear.’’
A decade or so later, the stages are more like aircraft hangars. Like A Storm recently played a gigantic hard rock festival in Austria in front of 200,000 people.
‘‘Europe is crazy, man,’’ Brooks says. ‘‘On those huge festival stages, it takes you a good 20 seconds to walk over to the next dude!
‘‘And I don’t think the human brain can comprehend that there’s that many human beings staring back at you. It just becomes this huge mass, like the sea, and you’re trying to feed the ocean, you know?
‘‘You’re trying to get more of a rising wave out of it. What can I tell you? It’s nuts.’’
And things are about to get considerably more mental over the coming months.
Like A Storm’s third studio album Catacombs was released worldwide last week. Lead single The Devil Inside recently became the band’s sixth Top 40 single, making them the highest-charting New Zealand rock act in US radio history.
Brooks seems as amazed as anyone, especially as the brothers self-funded their audio assault on America.
Kent, Chris and Matt Brooks grew up around Torbay and Birkenhead on Auckland’s North Shore, endlessly annoying their more genteel neighbours with records by Tool, Metallica, Green Day, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails.
‘‘We all played in different bands, jamming away after school, and we knew there wasn’t going to be any other path in life for us than music,’’ Brooks says.
‘‘We saved hard and moved to Vancouver in 2005 and used a demo tape we’d made back in Auckland to help get us gigs.’’
Eventually, a random punter at a live show put them in touch with a studio engineer in Los Angeles, who produced their first album. Amazingly, it charted.
‘‘Our phones started blowing up with people offering us record deals. Here’s all these record companies spending millions trying to get their bands into the charts and we’d done it on our own.’’
A whole heap of singles, LPs, videos and live shows later, Like A Storm have become a bit of A Big Deal, something Kent partly puts down to their not-so-secret weapon – the didgeridoo.
‘‘We used to start our shows with it back in Auckland, because we were playing at these ‘five bands for five bucks’ nights and wanted to make sure we stood out, then we started incorporating the didge into our records as well.’’
It’s a mad sort of a sound to find on an adrenaline-addled hard rock record.
Underneath the pounding drums, the sharp shards of guitar, the pummelling bass, way down behind Chris Brooks singing in that semi-comical angry-guy bellow beloved of metal fans, there it is: an ancient wind instrument from indigenous Australia, a sound that has been ringing out in the Northern Territories for upwards of 1500 years.
American audiences ‘‘really love that didge’’, Brooks tells me. High-profile metal magazines Kerrang! and Metal Hammer even requested that the brothers and their American drummer Zach Wood cart the didgeridoo along to photo shoots.
The band worried they might be accused of cultural appropriation when they played their first shows in Australia in March, but got the opposite reaction.
‘‘We had Aboriginal audience members telling us how great it was hearing their instrument being played in new ways on the world stage, and it really fits in well with our sound.
‘‘I don’t think the brain can comprehend that there’s that many human beings staring back at you. It just becomes this huge mass, like the sea, and you’re trying to feed the ocean.’’
Kent Brooks