The Vasco Era Interview

They’ve just returned from China, written a song with an Iraqi singer for The Key of Sea compilation and now they’re back home to tour Australia. As Max Easton writes, there’s been a hell of a lot going on for The Vasco Era in 2010.

Peking Duck, Hu Jintao and The Great Wall of China aren’t exactly the first things you think of when you picture Apollo Bay’s three-piece rock powerhouse The Vasco Era. Releasing their long-awaited second album Lucille earlier this year, they were invited by the Australian embassy to tour the great communist state of China, a trip which put a strange spin on the well-trodden struggles of international touring.

“Everyone thought we were a lot more well-known than we were,” front-man Sid O’Neill muses, “There were no westerners at all at the first festival we played at, so even walking through the crowd people were taking photos of us before we’d even played…just because we were a group of white people. You know…there were 6,000 people there watching us [cackles]…which is really funny because that’s bigger than any crowd we play to in Australia.”

The Vasco Era’s audience has always been something hard to get a handle on. From modest beginnings in Apollo Bay to a cult following from their early gritty-blues festival sets, they’d amassed a set of associations which always seemed to flow inaccurately and weigh on the band’s idea of itself.

“There have been stigmas our whole life which I’ve been trying to get away from,” O’Neill acknowledges, “we made our first EP and everyone said we were Blues & Roots like John Butler and Xavier Rudd…and we went nooooo we’re not. So on the first album, we kind of went as deliberately loud as possible to get away from that, which I think was a mistake because those songs are so much better live than they are on that record. We made the guitars and songs as loud and screamy as possible…to get away from the Blues & Roots thing, then everyone’s all ‘oh my god, he just screams the whole time.’ Then I was a bit afraid to go too hard in the studio for the second one cause I didn’t want to be known as some guy who screams.”

The Vasco Era, surprisingly, are quite a young band. Recording their first EP at 17 and only just marking off 25th birthdays, they have faced their fair share of youthful mistakes, a list of which Sid O’Neill all too readily acknowledges.

 “It’s just being young and caring too much about what people say. I remember when I first moved to the city and I was into Neil Young and The White Stripes and things like that, and I’d meet all these people who’d say ‘nah man, that’s not right, you should be into Pavement and Roxy Music.’ So I got into that and listened to that, [because] at the time, I thought that those people’s taste was superior to mine. At that age you listen, but now I know that they were no more right than me. You get people who know nothing about playing music who look down at you and tell you you’re doing stupid stuff and should be doing something else, which is such a bad thing to do to a young person I think. I won’t do it to any young musicians.” Sid pauses to laugh, “I’ll go, ‘good…on…you.’ ”

Yet throughout all the misadventures that Sid talks about from The Vasco Era’s past comes what he views as something especially promising coming out of their camp in the collection of songs they’re amassing for album number three.

“This is the first time I’ve been confident,” he admits, “Last time [for Lucille] I had a quarter life crisis, moved to Queensland, and decided not to be a musician anymore. I thought everyone would hate it and whatever…but this time I’m confident; very much so. I just turned 25 the other day, so the older you get the more you realise that if you do something you think is good, then it most likely is good [laughs]…not saying that I’m awesome or anything, but there’s no use worrying about people not liking it.”

With this newfound confidence comes even more change, albeit for very different reasons to the hard-rock and more introspective left turns taken on Oh, We Do Like to be By the Seaside and Lucille.

“The first two albums were concept albums, and this one…uh…isn’t,” he laughs, “I’ve written lyrics to half the songs and they’re still about things, but I’ve tried to be a bit more concise and get the whole story onto one song so I don’t have to waste the whole album on it. I don’t think that many young bands in Australia that I know of are really doing many stories anymore. It seems like so many of them are writing songs about partying or something…with obscure, oblique lyrics. It’s so cool to be apathetic you know...it’s a lot easier to act like you don’t care and talk about nothing because you don’t risk anything. I’m not saying that I have the answers to everything, but I want them to put something out there rather than just throw words together.”

“It’ll be heaps different [to Lucille.] It’s gonna have rougher edges sound-wise, since Lucille had a million things happening, which was cool for what it was, but we want space. We haven’t had space in our recordings [because it seems to be] a hard thing to get, but realistically it’s not…you just put the drums in the middle and the guitars out the side and don’t put too much in. I want to have that. Just talking to engineers in general, they reckon you just can’t make records like that anymore because the sound is different or whatever, but I’m just gonna say that we have to. You know those records that Bob Dylan did in the late 60’s, the drums are almost in the background and they’re ten times louder…the vocals are ten times louder again and the guitars are off to the side and I love that. So I’m definitely gonna just go in there and say ‘can we just do that please?’ “

Sid O’Neill brims with a jovial restlessness, happily venturing into off-the-record asides amongst his distinct sentence ending cackle and stilted speech…all the while pausing occasionally in concern about spending brother and band-mate Ted O’Neill’s credit on the phone call. Not that striving to make money to get phone credit through record sales fazes him at all.

“You know, everything needs to be so polished to get on radio now,” he sighs, “but man, who cares. You just get the sound right and…no, actually…they need to get the sound wrong more.” Sid pauses to reaffirm his consideration and cackles, “yeah, just get it allllll a bit more wrong.”

The Vasco Era continue their Back From China tour around the country on the dates found here.