KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD
People Vultures! Android vomit! Turkish guitars! “Subverting the norm”! From the vast imagination of mainman Stu Mackenzie comes the freak-rock phenomenon of the 21st century.
EARLY ONE EVENING IN 2010, THE NASCENT KING GIZZARD & The Lizard Wizard to took the stage at The Cornish Arms, a pub on Melbourne’s Sydney Road, before a roomful of punters eating dinner. This loose conglomeration of musicians moonlighting from other, more serious bands were led by singer/guitarist Stu Mackenzie, who’d conceived the group as “a dumb Grateful Dead, with songs so simple you could learn them on-stage”. Musical freedom was their mission, though Mackenzie concedes this often meant “six guitarists playing at once, three of whom were extraordinarily out of tune. We could clear rooms within 60 seconds.
“Because everyone was usually drunk or loose or whatever,” he adds, “this era is a blur.” But everyone remembers The Cornish Arms. “We played this horrendous Theremin-led jam, and Stu snapped all but one of his strings halfway through, but kept playing anyway,” says gregarious drummer Michael ‘Cavs’ Cavanagh. “It was awful. At the end, this bloke pushed his plate aside, walked over and said, dead serious, ‘Guys, that was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. You will never, play stadiums.’”
WHILE THIS STINGING REBUKE STILL HOLDS TRUE – KING GIZZARD & The Lizard Wizard have yet to grace a stadium stage – the septet have since become a global cult phenomenon. Over a dizzying 17 albums in a decade, they’ve spanned garage-psych Nuggetr y, jazz-fusion odysseys and thrash-metal concept albums, while Mackenzie’s fantasy-themed lyrics – spinning yarns of Tolkien-esque monstrosities, apocalyptic visions and a “confused cyborg” named Han-Tyumi – piece together a twisted, interlocking mythos
“THEY CALLED ME ‘PSYCHEDELIC’,
SO WE MADE A SPAGHETTI WESTERN ALBUM, TO PROVE THAT WE COULD BE ANYTHING,” Stu Mackenzie
dubbed the “Gizzverse” by a dedicated following. “I don’t think I’m any more creative than the average person,” says Mackenzie, in the Melbourne house he shares with his wife and cats. “I don’t think I have an absurd amount of ideas – I just follow through with most of them.” Proving the point are latest album KG, and a sequel to follow in 2021. Further exploring the middle-eastern psychedelia of 2017’s Flying Microtonal Banana, these new LPs find King Gizzard’s playful invention still thriving under Covid’s heavy manners. But Mackenzie misses the camaraderie of the pre-lockdown days. “The social aspect has always been very important to me,” he says.
Two serendipitous events drew a 16-year-old Mackenzie down this current fantastical path. First was making friends with “the arty, muso kids at school in Geelong who didn’t like footie so much”, leading him to badger his dad for a guitar. Next, a serious Aussie Rules football injury. “I tore my anterior cruciate ligament, and my knee was basically jelly,” he winces. “I spent eight weeks in traction, just learning guitar. I became obsessed with it.”
On recovery, Mackenzie ditched sport to play music with guitarist Cook Craig, bassist Lucas Skinner and harmonica-playing pro-skateboarder Ambrose Kenny-Smith, future Gizzards all. They later moved to Melbourne to study, where Mackenzie befriended drummers Cavs and Eric Moore, and Joey Walker, a guitarist with a lucrative sideline as an electronica DJ/producer, TrumpDisco. “We all lived in two shared houses across the road from each other,” Mackenzie says. “I remember a lot of late nights, a lot of live music, and not much else.”
With a fluid line-up that often swamped stages, the band’s early public outings were “absolute chaos”, according to Skinner. Within a year, however, they gathered unlikely momentum, and the membership solidified into what Mackenzie calls “the seven who never left”. “We were all playing in so many other bands,” says Cavanagh. “But Gizzard were the only one people turned out to see.”
A couple of self-released EPs and 2012 debut album 12 Bar Bruise followed, released on their own label, Flightless. But when local media championed their garage-y take on psychedelia, a fear of pigeonholing provoked the first in a chain of creative volte-faces. For second album Eyes Like The Sky, Ambrose’s father, British-born actor/muso Broderick Smith, narrated a dark wild west fantasy over a Morriconeesque soundtrack. “It was my ‘stick it to the man’ moment, or maybe just an act of self-determination,” grins Mackenzie. “They called me ‘psychedelic’, so we made a spaghetti western album, to prove that, actually, we could be anything we wanted.”
IT’S MAY 2014, AND IF KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD Wizard aren’t playing their weekly 3am residency at Brooklyn bar Baby’s All Right or jamming at the ski lodge they’ve rented on Hunter Mountain in upstate New York, they’re at the Daptone House Of Soul, a legendary all-analogue studio in Bushwick. Halfway round the world, nearly completely unknown, a new era for the band is sketchily underway.
Back in Melbourne, Mackenzie had been living off “the dole, instant noodles and free beer at gigs”, essentially homeless, crashing on mates’ couches with only a guitar to his name and nothing to plug it into. However, the growing buzz surrounding the effervescent psych-rock of third album Float Along – Fill Your Lungs inspired Mackenzie to take a high-risk leap into the unknown: the band’s first tour of America. “We played to no one, we lost heaps of money,” laughs Mackenzie. “But gradually, at every show, we could see there were slightly more people. And really, the whole thing was just about being seven Australian idiot kids who didn’t know what they were doing but had somehow made it to New York.”
Yet it was in the States that King Gizzard’s identity clarified, and Mackenzie’s status attained something guru-like.
“Stu is like the embodiment of an ego-less person,” says Joey Walker. “He gave me faith in my songwriting. I’d never met someone with that ability to just let go. We’d struggled to define what Gizzard actually was. We’d genre-hopped a lot, and that caused a lot of confusion. But New York was this great moment where we realised, ‘Oh, this is what we do – we just do heaps of different crap!’”
Newly enlightened, the group returned to Daptone in 2015 for an ambitious eighth album, Nonagon Infinity, conceived as a never
ending “sonic Möbius strip” – a multi-dimensional jigsaw of interlinking riffs and repeating motifs that drove Mackenzie to distraction but won the group Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal Album at 2016’s ARIA Awards (the Australian version of the Grammys). “Doing things the hard way takes you to places you’d never reach otherwise,” he reasons. “It’s always worth it.”
Returning to Melbourne with international plaudits ringing in their ears, the band set up a new Flightless/Gizzard HQ in a warehouse-cumstudio-space at 253 Lygon Street. Five further Gizzard full-lengths followed in 2017 alone, their range epitomised by Sketches Of Brunswick
East’s jazz-rock excursions and Flying Microtonal
Banana – on which Mackenzie played a speciallymade hybrid of electric six-string and traditional ba˘glama so he could play “the notes between the notes”. “I never wanted us to sound like one band or genre,” remembers Mackenzie. “I wanted us to sound like a record collection.”
Another 2017 release, Murder Of The Universe
– which told of Han-Tyumi engulfing the galaxy in android vomit – saw Mackenzie’s love of sci-fi take centre-stage, kicking fan immersion in the “Gizzverse” to another level. “I’m a sci-fi dork at heart,” he admits. “Nowadays, I can sit through a movie about relationships or whatever, but years ago I connected better to fantasy. I find scifi a useful writing tool – it’s fun to world-build. Like, I can’t write another love song – they’ve all been written. But creating my own interconnected world… That’s just so much fun.”
Like the best sci-fi, Mackenzie’s is not pure escapism. Witness the prescient virus-themed Superbug from 2019’s thrash-metal dystopia
Infest The Rats’ Nest. “It’s about fear,” he says, his laidback demeanour darkening. “Not fear of the bogeyman, but existential, human-extinction fear. It’s the scariest thing, to me.”
KING GIZZARD APPROACH 2021 looking forwards and backwards. With and its sister album finished, they’ve built a new HQ to replace the recently vacated 253 Lygon Street. Mackenzie admits mixed feelings over leaving their old “clubhouse”: “A lot of our records were made there, heaps of parties, hanging out every day with my best mates, making music… It’s really been great. But here’s to the next five years, I suppose.”
Change is in the air. Earlier in the year, drummer Eric Moore announced his amicable exit, to focus his energies on Flightless. “It’s weird, to think that next time we go on tour he won’t be there,” says Mackenzie. “We’re not actively looking for another drummer. It would be like adding another family member. At this stage we soldier on as a six-piece.”
Yet the ranks of their adherents continue to swell. “To the die-hard fans on our Reddit page, we’re like a boy-band,” grins Joey Walker. “They all have their favourite members.” As for the future, Ambrose Kenny-Smith says the group are “just excited to get around each other and jam again”, while Walker predicts “more of the same shit, subverting the norm as we usually do, and coming up with more dumb-arse concepts.”
And Mackenzie? “Everyone else has their own side-projects, but King Gizzard is the only thing I do, and I’m happy with that. Though I’m about to become a dad for the first time, so maybe things will be different. I got into this for the music, to travel the world, to live this lucid life – but mostly for the friendship. We’re a big family, and I don’t see that ever changing.”