Violent Soho

WITH 2016’S CHART-DOMINATING WACO, GRUNGE-PUNK REVIVAL OVERLORDS VIOLENT SOHO WERE AT THE TIPPY TOP OF THEIR GAME – AND BEFORE LONG, EVERY BUDDING ROCK BAND IN THE COUNTRY WANTED TO BE LIKE THEM. NOW, AFTER A FEW YEARS IN HIBERNATION, MANSFIELD’S FINEST A

Our story begins at the 2017 edition of Australia’s biggest regional touring festival, Groovin The Moo. Headlining the mainstage is post-grunge powerhouse Violent Soho, still riding high on the waves made by their monolithic fourth album, WACO. For a post-internet music scene that seems to churn through a new set of obsessions every other week, that WACO was still on everybody’s lips a year after release was no small accomplishment for the Mansfield foursome. But as far as they were concerned, WACO had run its course – Groovin would be the last distortion-slathered nail in its coffin, and the band were eager to give it one hell of a send-off.

“It was more like a party than anything we felt obliged to be at,” describes vocalist and rhythm guitarist Luke Boerdam. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, we’ve never taken shows less seriously than this.’ And we were headlining!”

The grand crescendo was their hourlong onslaught in Western Australia’s idyllic port city of Bunbury, where after the last rasping guitar wails of “Scrape

It” rang out, the band channelled their inner ‘90s rock dogs and beat the everliving shit out of their equipment. Tuning pegs bounced off amp heads when Boerdam tested the strength of his axe against the foot of the stage (spoiler: even the firmest of fretboards burst when you put enough muscle in it), and then bassist Luke Henery took the amp and smashed that too, because f***it,whynot?

“People have sent us photos of the bits of drum kit and they have in their lounge rooms – one person even has a quad box framed up,” chuckles lead guitarist James Tidswell. “Life itself was pretty hectic for everyone, so we were just blowing off a bit of steam.” It was a well-earned capstone for Soho. When the

WACO era kicked off, they were comfortably selling out thousand-cap theatres and ringing in the sunset at boutique festivals like Mountain Sounds. By no means were they a ‘small’ band, but there was no reason for them to be overwhelmed by their popularity, either.

But not even Soho – who’d already seen their hype boom once when “Covered In Chrome” became an overnight hit – could predict just how fervently crowds would leap the hype train for WACO. It spawned six lucrative singles – more than half the album itself, all of which made the cut in Triple J’s Hottest 100 of 2016 –› and by the end of its run, the band were packing out venues like Brisbane’s 9,500-capacity Riverstage.

“The goal was always, like, ‘Let’s get to a point where we could play Ric’s Bar’,” Boerdam says, “Or maybe The Zoo. The Zoo is 450-cap, so to then hit the Riverstage… It was like, ‘Oh f***, this is out of our control now.’ The cool thing about [smaller] shows is that everyone’s right there and you can see everyone’s

face. But over the years, it becomes more and more just like a sea of bodies. It really does take your breath away – you look out into the crowd and you’re like, ‘Wait, that’s people!? ’”

So began two years of relative quiet for Violent Soho – the ‘Silent Slowho’ era, if you will. The band are adamant that we not call it a hiatus, because they never agreed between themselves to acknowledge their cogs bogging to a halt – “I don’t think our band could ever be ‘done’,” Tidswell stresses – but after such an intense and tireless grind on the back of WACO, they were, admittedly, feeling pretty burnt out.

They’d also noticed first-hand the rising trend in bands influenced by themselves copping mainstream success. Acts like WAAX, Dear Seattle, Tired Lion and Hockey Dad – all cut from the same grungy, punky, retro-tinged alt-rock cloth – were making waves on the Js and packing out theatres of their own; it’s not that Soho felt they’d been usurped in the rock scene, but they didn’t feel like they necessarily needed to carry its torch anymore.

“It was almost like a feeling of, ‘Wow, there’s all these kids doing it, and they’re doing it really well, so there’s no point in us doing it too if they’re just going to take the baton and run with it’,” Boerdam says. “Literally, in those early 2000s, we had to pick indie-pop bands to support – full-on DJ bands – because if you wanted to get on a national tour, they were the bands that had the funding. Whereas now, it’s like, ‘Pick as many heavy bands as you can take on the road with you!’”

Then there was the all-important issue of public image. Rock ’n’ roll had been doled the mainstream resurgence it so utterly deserved, and though they were obviously stoked with that, Soho were cautious not to be sucked into the allure.

“This thing happened where all of a sudden, everyone was a rock band,” Tidswell recalls, “And it was sort of a ‘thing’. We just wanted to make sure that we were being us, I guess, and never buying into whatever that ‘thing’ is. Because it’s all fleeting moments in music – different things come into trend and others phase out, and we’ve always been the same band regardless of that. So the fact that we got to experience that trend first-hand and be the first cab off the ranks, so to speak… It would’ve been dangerous to buy into that mentality, and it would have only ruined out band. So we decided to just sit back and see what happened.”

Lo and behold, Australian rock music is still enjoying a ripping spell of triumph – hell, when this article went to print, the last three bands to drop albums at #1 on the ARIA Charts were Tame Impala, Green Day and Dune Rats (the lattermost of whom actually opened for Soho on the WACO tour). In fact, shortly after Soho called it on the WACO days,

Tidswell dove headfirst into the deep end of Aussie rock’s new golden age, founding a new home for up-and-coming punks in Domestic La La Records. Having always been close to Soho’s own release plans, it was a long time coming for him.

“I got involved with Violent Soho because I wanted to put out their music,” he says. “I didn’t even play the guitar back then. I called it Victim Records at the time and I sold my car to pay for the first EP. So as soon as the opportunity came up to do a record label on [Domestic La La’s] scale, it just made sense.”

By signing bands with the same passionate morals and DIY ethos as Soho, and knowing how to crack the code to a great pop-influenced rock jam, Tidswell’s first year pioneering Domestic La La was nothing short of enormous, with its second looking even bigger. He takes a hands-on approach sourcing talent for the label – we’ve bumped into him in the pits at every BIGSOUND since 2016, for example – and works closely with the artists he takes under his wing. In many ways, it’s a continuation of a cycle that Tidswell is enamoured to be involved in.

“I feel super lucky,” he says, his smile as genuine as it is wide. “I love it! And I think I love it because Dean Turner from Magic Dirt was [Violent Soho’s] first manager – our first director in a way, I guess. We have this black-and-white photo from ’07, ’08 or something like that, and we’re all sitting around intently, looking in on him; it reminds me of how much we listened to him back then, and how our band really were a sponge to the advice he was giving us – how to behave and how to act, and the correct way of going about things.

“It was so important that we were getting that advice from someone from the ‘90s, when integrity was vital to the way you did things. For example, we had some friends getting sponsorships for all these different brands, and Dean went, ‘Well, would you want to be sponsored by?’ And we were like, ‘PlayStation, man! We want PS3s!’ So he goes, ‘Then sell more records so you can buy a PS3. Don’t sell your band for a $500 video game console!’ I love that I was lucky enough to get to soak up all that information. And to this day, we still live by everything that he taught us. I sort of feel like Obi Wan Kenobi – I got the message from the source, and I’ve got to pass it on to my Padawans if the

Jedi is going to exist.”

Incidentally, that exact strain of integrity is the reason Violent Soho’s new album doesn’t feature the Domestic La La tag. WACO was the second of their two records under contract to I OH YOU – the Mushroom imprint to whom they’d initially signed in 2012 – and at one point, Tidswell did intend to lead the Soho ship under his own direction; that’s part of why Domestic La La was established when it was.

“I had it set up so that we could transition straight from I OH YOU over to the new label,” he says, “but in all honesty, it was like we stepped back and went, ‘Y’know what? Nah.’ I OH YOU is an incredible label, Johann [Ponniah] is an unreal dude, and we love the whole team over there. We were introduced to Mushroom through Dean, and his wife Linda still works there! That was our family. So it was about doing the right thing, and paying respect to those that gave us a chance back when we needed one. Because in this day and age – especially with the generation of kids coming up now – we’re so quick to be like, ‘Get yours! I’m getting the next best thing for me!’ But I OH YOU are a great label, and they’ve been so good to us over the years, so why end that now?”

The independence they have under I OH YOU’s roof is a crucial part of the narrative. Freedom is something the band holds close to its collective heart – mostly because they can’t stand the inner workings of music’s business side. “We went to the first AIR Awards,” Boerdam snickers, “And we ended up leaving early because we were just like, ‘This is too industry!’ We had everyone around us going, ‘Dude, you don’t realise, this is the small part of the industry,’ and we were just like, ‘Yeah, f*** that.’”

Tidswell continues, “They all went, ‘What does it feel like to win the Independent Artist Award?’ And we were like, ‘Thisisnotindependent!!!’ Carlton Dry were sponsoring the whole thing – that gave it a weird flavour. But it is independent – and I don’t say that to be rude, I’m saying it as in, like, we’re an anti-industry band through and through, and this is how proudly we talk about being involved with Johann and I OH YOU.”

By this point in the story, we’re at the tail end of 2018. Tidswell is kicking goals on the daily with Domestic La La, Henery and drummer Michael Richards have settled nicely back into their day-to-day lives, and Boerdam… Well, Boerdam is going through some shit. He found himself moving back into his parents’ house, which came as an especially harsh blow given that he’s not only a boomerang baby, but a twice-thrown one, having wound up in the same plight when Soho were dropped by their first label (a major, aiding in the band’s staunch views on independence) in 2010.

Without the constant chaos of touring to keep distracted, Boerdam settled for the next best thing: writing. It’s in his childhood bedroom that the fifth Violent Soho album would start to materialise; the tongue-in-cheek title of EverythingIsA-OK was a ways off, but the first song for it – the sarcastic and angsty and snappily acerbic “Vacation Forever” – came about surprsingly fast. It set the tone for what

A-OK would grow to be: sharp, loud, and distinctly personal – that last one an admittedly unusual trait for a Soho record.

“The first one was pretty personal – y’know, songs like ‘Jesus Stole My Girlfriend’ were straight out of my diary,” Boerdam says, “But then over the next two, everything changed. I was like, ‘I want to write about all this other stuff that’s got nothing to do with me!’ It’s all still about being frustrated with the world, but it’s not directly personal – whereas this time it did swing back around, and I was putting way more of my own feelings into the lyrics and writing more naturally, straight from the heart.”

This is the part where we’re supposed to tell you how the rest of EverythingIsA-OK came together in a bright, summery ‘80s movie montage with lots of belly laughs, clinking pint glasses and romantic walks along the beach (with the obligatory spotting of a pug in the distance). But alas, that’s just not how it works. Boerdam certainly wasn’t going to catch a break – viable song ideas were few and far between as he braved the storms of his personal life, and the rest of the band weren’t exactly champing at the bit

I SORT OF FEEL LIKE OBI WAN KENOBI – I GOT THE MESSAGE FROM THE SOURCE, AND I’VE GOT TO PASS IT ON TO MY PADAWANS IF THE JEDI IS GOING TO EXIST.

to kick the ol’ machine back up again.

“We were just dragging ourselves to band practice,” Boerdam admits. “Even with the new songs, we were like, ‘Ugh, let’s get this over with.’ But then we started joking around about making this new record, and I don’t know, that kind of kicked it off. We were like, ‘Oh, we should call it Johann’s mobile phone number’ – the working title was literally +614, etcetera – and we recorded it in a house with Greg Wales for four weeks, and we just had all these cool little ideas, and everybody got excited about it again. We were excited about taking ownership again, and breaking the cycles we’d gotten ourselves into.”

Once they found themselves in a decent rhythm (pun intended), the focus quickly shifted to a late 2019 comeback. The band met often to piece ideas together, and though they ultimately chose not to record the album live, its inception very much revolved around the four of them being in a room and playing through the songs as one taut, well-oiled unit. “We spent heaps of nights and weekends jamming for this record – more than we ever have for any other record,” Boerdam says. “And I think you can hear that.”

The past two Soho records came to life at the

The Shed in Brisbane, with longtime collaborator Bryce Moorhead behind the console. But since The Shed was axed in 2017, the band decided to step outside their comfort zone, enlisting iconic producer Greg Wales – whose work you might’ve heard on a Bloc Party, You Am I or Wolfmother record – to produce A-OK at The Grove Studios in Sydney.

The new setup came with changes to the way Soho worked at their core. In a press release, Boerdam declared, “We spent an entire day getting the guitar sounds right, so it’s probably the first time I’ve ever been completely happy with the guitar sounds.” For a band who’ve always lived and died by their guitar tones, we have to wonder: why did it take so long to get them articulated?

“Because for some reason,” Boerdam sighs, “Greg went, ‘I’m not going to let you use any guitar pedals.’ I was like, ‘Ah, go f*** yourself dude’ – because I love guitar pedals! They’re my favourite thing in the world! But then I was like, ‘Nah, alright, you’re producing, I’ll follow your lead.’ He wanted to use all amps – and that makes sense, because y’know, tubes give you the best top saturation, period. And it took eight hours because Greg has this crazy mic technique; I personally tried to replicate it when I was doing some stuff with Tired Lion and it’s just impossible.

“So we had two amps: one was an old metal amp, a Framus Cobra – it’s like 100 watts and it has heaps of headroom – and we blended that with an

Orange OR that they had lying around in the studio. I’m usually more of a Marshall guy, so that was a bit like, ‘Oh God, this is all different for me!’

“[Greg] had to line up eight capsules and eight mics to the phasers – that’s really, really, really hard to do, I found out. And then Greg was really happy but I wasn’t – I was like, ‘It’s still not tough enough’ – so the other guys had to drive over an hour and a half away to get a Soul Food pedal from this music store in Sydney city. James was like like, ‘Boerdam

betterf***ingneedthispedal!!!’ So we put that in on 20 percent and suddenly it was like, ‘Oh my God, this is the best sound I’ve ever heard in my life!’”

As far as the guitars themselves go, Tidswell brandished a strikingly simple rig: “It was just a Jazzmaster plugged straight into the amp with a smidge of Soul Food.”

Being the gear nerd he is at heart, Boerdam’s kit was a little more fleshed-out. “I used a 2017 [American Professional] Tele Deluxe,” he says,

“But I put in these pickups from a guy in Adelaide named Brierley – he hand-winds these P-90s and all these cool vintage pickups, so I ripped out the humbuckers and put in this one P-90, and took out all the tone knobs so there’s just a volume knob.

“I actually want to buy an old ‘70s one. I’ve been playing these old custom ‘70s Teles – like, proper ones – that Greg has in the studio. I picked mine up and I was like, ‘That’s good,’ but then I picked up a ‘70s Custom and I was like, ‘Phwoah!’ It’s like triple the weight, but it’s such a great guitar But I am very happy with what I’ve got now – I only take two guitars with me on the road and they’re the exact same… James, we need to get you a red ‘70s Tele.”

“Hmmm… I’ll compromise: a red Strat. And then put the Jazzmaster pickup on the neck, at least. You cannot replicate a Jazzmaster’s neck pickup sound – it’s so clean! And once your ear listens to that and not even the distortion, if you lose that pickup, it’s just like, ‘Well, where’s the guitar? Where’s the tone?’ So a Strat with a Jazzmaster pickup in the neck… And maybe a Seymour Duncan humbucker in the back. I don’t know, though, that might be a little too much. But I want some crunch.”

So now we’re nearing the end of 2019. The first shows back have been announced (coincidentally for another festival, Good Things), and Violent Soho officially have their fifth studio album, EverythingIs

A-OK, wrapped up and ready to stamp onto wax. It’s a homely record for the band – they did everything on their own terms, worked at their own pace, and didn’t even consider the prospect of hiring A&R.

Such is reflected in the LP’s deliberately vanilla artwork: it’s a photo, taken by Henery, of a house each member has walked past at least 1,000 times each. It’s in walking distance from where Tidswell grew up and where he lives currently. It belongs to Ken, aged 83, who feeds his birds every day at 3pm on the dot and was ecstatic when the band asked if they could immortalise his abode in a jewel case.

But nothing is a greater testament to the record’s informality than the actual material on it. The band had no grand plans to make any particular record when they started writing it. There was never any discussion of a Violent Soho metal record, or debate over whether they should roll in a keyboard or two.

All of the stylistic growth that Boerdam displays in his songwriting – and the band en masse in their performances – came not through calculated reinvention, but natural artistic maturity. As Boerdam explains, “Those kind of things happen naturally through writing a bunch of shit songs and going, ‘That doesn’t feel right’, ‘That’s derivative of WACO’, ‘We already did that on HungryGhost’…

And then finding the songs where you can go, ‘Okay, this one we could work with!’

Boerdam looks at A-OK as his most sophisticated effort. “I think the thing I like most about this record is that it’s more mature,” he reflects. “All the other records felt like we were just trying to punch holes in the wall, whereas this one’s more like, ‘Nah, let’s have a discussion.’ I don’t think Soho will ever get rid of the heavier riffs because… Well, we love them. But in the themes and the way we get the message across, there’s something more laidback – I think we were just more calm and confident.”

Tidswell is quick to agree. “All the other records that we’ve done, I can hear the anxiety,” he says. “And on this one, there’s none. We’re not anxious. We’re not aggressive. We’re just, like, sitting back and being. It’s almost like what you try to do when you’re meditating y’know? You have to be in the right headspace and let it happen – and when I listen back on these songs, I’m like, ‘F***, we did it!’ I’m so proud of that.”

There’s no shyness when it comes to branding

EverythingIsA-OK the band’s magnum opus. For reference, we’re sitting in the beer garden at the Lansdowne Hotel in Sydney, where in three hours, Soho will play a set for 200 fans that lined up outside a record store at 4:15am to buy tickets for; when we dive deep into the record, the axe-wielding duo rave about their favourite tracks as if they’re the punters that have started lining up downstairs.

“Slow Down Sonic” is one we all mutually agree rules – it’s a mid-tempo jam that canters along with a battered sizzle. “Pity Jar” is classic, grungy mosh food with some of the best percussion in Soho’s catalogue. “Canada” will undoubtedly reign as a festival favourite. Tidswell and Boerdam have a near infinite amount of reasons to be proud of

A-OK. Whether it really is their best album is up for time to decide, but it’s objectively the one they put the most effort into, and that deserves praise.

“We cared so much about each song,” Tidswell says, “And we just did the absolute best that we could with it. And there’s so many little things that are completely new for us – the time signature changes on ‘Easy’ at one point, for example, and that’s nothing we’ve even remotely attempted before. But we thought it sounded good, so we did it. Y’know, we’ve always focussed on making the songs sound as poppy as possible – we want them to be catchy as f*** – but with this record, we just wanted to just sound our best. We’d like to think that it’s going to take four or five listens before you realise how good it actually is. With the other ones, we served it up like, ‘If you don’t get it on the first listen, you don’t get it at all.’ But there’s a bit more going on here.”

At the end of the day – for you reading along at home, at least – there’s only one question that really matters: is A-OK a good album? Well, that’s completely subjective, and we recommend you give it a spin for yourself to decide. How would we answer it, though? Simple: “Hellf***yeah!”