AGED LIKE A FINE RED

OVER A DECADE LATER, ESKIMO JOE’S 2006 OPUS BLACKFINGERNAILS, REDWINE REMAINS A CORNERSTONE OF AUSTRALIAN POP-CULTURE. NOW, THE FREMANTLE TRIO ARE GIVING IT THE DELUXE REISSUE IT’S DESERVED FOR YEARS.

Few tunes could make an Australian millennial’s ears prick up quite the way “Black Fingernails, Red Wine” will. Released in 2006 by alt-rock luminaries Eskimo Joe, the anthem has long survived as a memory of simpler times – a crushingly catchy, musically perfect pearl of the mid-Aughts, and arguably the Fremantle trio’s most quintessential cut.

As part of their longstanding 21st birthday celebrations (they’ve since turned 22, but who’s counting when they look so young anyway?), the band have reissued the single’s eponymous LP with a hulking 28 bonus tracks – eight of which previously unreleased – on a double-disc red vinyl.

Obviously, we had to weasel our way into the party. Thankfully willing to bear our overenthusiastic lust for nostalgia, guitarist Stuart MacLeod took us for a stroll down memory lane.

Four times Platinum, three ARIA wins and six more nominations, more airtime on Triple M than hours on the clock… To say this album was successful would be the understatement of the year. Did you think it would all blow up as massively as it did back in ’05?

I don’t think we ever saw it coming at all. I never even considered being in a band as a career option in first place [ laughs]. It all just kind of magically happened. Y’know, we started writing some songs together, we got Joel [Quartermain, drums, guitars, keyboards and backing vocals] onboard, we entered a band competition, we won, we hit the road, our song got on the radio… It all happened very organically – there was no master plan to world domination. So this record was no different. We went into the studio going, “Let’s have some fun and write some tunes,” and then out of nowhere, it was at the top of the charts!

So how did all you settle into that whirlwind of success?

You gain a lot of the confidence you need to believe in yourself when you have success. That’s probably the best outcome we got from it. A lot of people get caught up in their success and it goes to their heads, but I think living in our hometown definitely helped with that – we had all our old childhood friends telling us to stop being dickheads if we ever became dickheads. They’re not the sort of people that you can wank on about music to either, because they’ll just be like, “Okay, that’s boring.” They definitely kept our feet on the ground, which was a great thing.

Even now, BlackFingernails is still such an important record to the Australian music landscape. What do you think it is about this record that’s kept it relevant 14 years on?

I love that you think it’s relevant – that’s reassuring [ laughs]. I think we just captured a mood, or a feeling, or… I don’t know, really. There was a dark quality to the record that kind of caught people’s attentions. But at the end of the day, I think it was just that the songs were good songs, y’know? We’ve always tried to write songs that you can strip right back to an acoustic guitar and still have them stand up, so they’ve got nowhere to hide. And I guess that’s what it all comes down to, really – they’re songs that you can play in front of someone, and they’ll just instantly connect.

Do you remember what guitars you were slinging in the studio back then?

We haven’t actually changed our guitars much over the years. We were recording in what’s now called The Grove Studios – back then it was Mangrove Studios, and it used to be owned by Garry Gary Beers from INXS; he had loaned us this amazing 335 to record with. That was a beautiful thing to use. We had a couple of his guitars that we were using – I think there was a Les Paul as well – but surprisingly, the one guitar from our recording career that has always staggered me was a 335 copy that Yamaha gave to us once, and it’s been a staple of our arsenal ever since. It’s just got such a great tone – you’ve got pop-in-and-out tone knobs that turn each pickup from a single coil to a humbucker, so there’s a lot of variation you can get out of it.

And y’know, we’ve got our tried ’n’ trusties – we’ve got a thinline Tele, a rosewood Tele and an old ‘70s Tele that each have their own sort of characteristics, and they’re our workhorse guitars. We had an SG that we had used for that sort of bite-y sound, and we’ve got a Gibson Duane Eddy signature series Archtop, which has a Fishman acoustic pickup in it, and that just gives us the most crazy tone for solos.

Sorry to move away from the nostalgia for a sec, but we’re coming up on six years since

Wastelands hit shelves… When are we gonna hear album #7?

It’s a bit of an interesting situation, because we’ve all got our own things going on at the moment. Joel’s just had a kid and he’s living in Melbourne, so getting together for writing sessions isn’t as easy as it used to be. But y’know, Joel’s been over here for these rehearsals, so we’ve kind of been chipping away at a new song, which is exciting. It’s taken many different forms so far, but the songwriting process in general has been fun. We don’t have any deadlines or expectations – it’s a really freeing thing to be able to get together and write whenever we want.

Where do you see Eskimo Joe going from here on a creative wavelength?

We don’t really predetermine anything – a lot of what we do just happens in the moment. We don’t sit down and go, “Alright, we want to make a song that sounds like this.” A lot of the time, someone will play a note or a chord, and that’ll just trigger something inside us, and all of a sudden, there’s a song. So we’ll just go wherever the songs take us. We’re not trying to make a song sound any particular way – the song has to tell us, “This is how I sound.”