Electric Mary

Frontman Rusty Brown on woman trouble, exploding drummers and their studio comeback.

When they burst out of the Melbourne circuit in 2004 – all hooky riff-raff and bloke-next-door charm – Aussies Electric Mary seemed like a band on the up, and so it proved for three albums. But after 2011’s III the band hit personnel bumps and fell into a studio drought, ended only by this year’s thumping Mother. Rusty Brown gives us the real story behind their long absence.

How come we’ve been waiting eight years for Mother? Well, between 2011 and now we’ve lost two drummers. They keep exploding. This album probably could have been out in the middle of 2018, but I got ill, and I had to make sure I was right to be able to finish it.

What kind of illness? I don’t want to say.

How did the recording go?

I used to write all the songs and the band would play them. But [this time], everyone had a say. Our new drummer has a lot of ideas. And that’s usually the death knell for a drummer, but his ideas are pretty good, actually. All our songs have all our names on them, we don’t do percentages.

Because the percentages thing kills a lot of bands, doesn’t it?

Of course. Y’know, the songwriter’s got a four-storey house in every country and the drummer’s got a caravan.

Was Mother an easy album to make?

If I’m honest, everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. I possibly may have lost a friendship out of it, because in the end it was mixed by somebody else and not the guy who started doing it. It just wasn’t happening in the studio. It just wasn’t coming back how I thought it was sounding. Probably the blame for that lays at my feet for not being together.

What are the songs about?

Gimme Love is a strange one; I’d watched a movie about incest. How Do You Do It, about a guy meeting a prostitute in a bar, is total fiction. Woman is self-explanatory. I’m not too good with women. Lots of women in my life I haven’t seen eye-toeye with.

Is that because the music always comes first for you?

Yeah, rock’n’roll is my girlfriend.

“We seem to attract girls that want to mother us.”

What kind of women do Electric Mary attract?

We seem to attract girls that want to mother us. When we tour Europe, there’s always somebody who wants to look after us, cook us a home-cooked meal.

Are you disappointed that you don’t attract strippers and hookers?

Really, to me, that’s shite. There are people that still believe it. Actually, one of the bands we’re friends with, I think they still believe in that – go out and get smashed and have sex with as many girls as you can.

There’s a song called Sorry Baby. What did you do?

Well, I’m actually saying: “I’m sorry for you, because you’re such an arsehole.”

I interviewed you in 2011 and you said you hadn’t made any money. What’s the situation now?

What’s ten per cent of nothing? Nah, we haven’t made any money. HY