The Vasco Era Interview

Heading around the country in support of their second album, ‘Lucille,’ Ted O’Neil from Apollo Bay’s The Vasco Era called Soulshine’s Max Easton for a brief chat about the band, the album and the tour.

The Vasco Era have a reputation for a blisteringly intense live show, playing a distorted, raucous form of Blues-Rock that stands hairs on edge. For over half a decade, they’ve cemented themselves as one of the country’s favourite small venue live acts, a reputation that’s bound to come to an end off the back of the rave review garnering ‘Lucille’, the second album from the Apollo Bay outfit. Setting a progression of sound against the album concept of a broken couple that front-man Sid O’Neil met late at night at Melbourne’s Crown Casino, ‘Lucille’ is a massive step forward for the three piece. In accordance, bassist Ted O'Neil called for a chat about writing, releasing and touring.

Max Easton (Soulshine): How’s the tour going?

Ted O'Neil (The Vasco Era): Pretty good actually. Been about a week and a bit into the tour and it’s been going really well. We were in Wollongong last night, and that’s always had a reasonably good following, and Newie will be a lot of fun tonight as well…so it’s been a lot of fun in general.

Max: With the changes made to your sound with the new album, what can we expect from the live show? Is it still that really loose, raucous sorta thing, or have you messed with the dynamic to suit?

Ted: Yeah, it’s tightened up a little bit; we have a keys player for the album tracks, but I don’t think we’ll ever get super tight or anything…we’ll always jump around and have a good time. We’re definitely trying to play the new stuff a bit more like the album. And it’s been going really well with the keys and everything.

Max: What brought about the new style of songs on Lucille?

Ted: The last album was a very personal album…it was very angry, and there wasn’t really much scope for exploration or anything, but with this album, it’s a story about other people, so there’s no personal tie to it. We feel like we matured a lot as musicians and in general, so we thought we’d experiment a lot more. So we just tried everything until we got here.

Max: Did you set out initially to write a concept album?

Ted: No, not all…we didn’t sit down and say ‘okay, it’s time to do a concept album.’ The lyrics are the last thing we do. As we were writing, we’d written the lyrics to a couple of the songs and it wasn’t really flowing very well, but then Sid came up with this concept based on this couple he met at the Crown Casino and that just pulled it all together really nicely…and then we stuck with it.

Max: Is it feeling like you’ve got the sound you want to have on this album?

Ted: I think we’ve all still got a lot of growing to do, we can still get a lot better…but I think this is going a little bit more towards the sound we’re wanting to be. The first album was very raw and we were young and having heaps of fun…and that was what we knew what to do and how to do it. But now, we had an album under our belt and had seen the recording process and we’d done the touring, seen the industry side of things…so we didn’t want to get stuck doing the same thing over and over again because we’d just get bored. We wanted to try something that we’d listen to ourselves if it wasn’t us and this was where it got us.

Max: Just on the industry side, the word spread sometime last year that you’d finished the album but that your label had sat on it until now…I mean, without saying anything bad about the label or anything, what was the story behind that?

Ted: We finished recording in May, 2009…and I’m not sure of some of the reasons, but it was originally coming out in August and then it got pushed back a bit. The label won’t release anything like us in November, December or January…unless you’re Coldplay or something, because of all the Christmas albums and that sorta crap…so then we were pushed back a bit further. I think they were just trying to find the best time and best way to build it and all, which is completely understandable, but it was very frustrating just having to sit around on this album for so long. But it’s out now, we’re happy, and it’s getting a good response…so that’s the main thing.

Max: Cover songs have always been a big part of your live shows and word has it that you’ve playing a bit of the Beatles and the Smiths on this tour. What do you feel that the cover songs bring to your set?

Ted: Originally, when we first started, living in Apollo Bay, we used to play at the local pub and had to do a three hour set. So we’d do our own stuff, but we didn’t have three hours worth of music, so you’d have to incorporate some covers in there. It’s just fun doing covers that people know, but bringing your own ideas and depth to it…I think people find it interesting to see a different side of them, and a different side of us aside from the album.

Max: What are the plans after this tour? Have you got plans to head overseas?

Ted: Yeah, we’re looking at heading overseas sometime at the end of this year. We just booked in a week of writing for new stuff; so pretty much right after this tour, we’re gonna go away for a week and do that, so we’re gonna try to get the writing process happening fairly quickly this time so it’s not so long in between albums again.

Max: Well yeah, it’d be a long time since you last wrote anything then wouldn’t it?

Ted: Yeah definitely, we finished recording it a year ago and spent like 12 months or 18 months writing it…so we had our down-time without writing much, and now we’re getting right back into it and looking forward to getting some more stuff down.

The Vasco Era’s ‘Lucille’ tour heads across to the West Coast before finishing off in Tassie this week on the following dates:

Thu 29 Apr – Prince of Wales (Bunbury)

Fri 30 Apr – Amplifier Bar (Perth)

Sat 01 May – Mojo’s (Fremantle)

Fri 07 May – Republic Bar (Hobart)

‘Lucille’ is out now on Universal.