The Drones - Back for a Thousand Mistakes

Known for their raucous live show and powerful poetics, The Drones have found themselves consistent critical appraisal over their ten year career.

With almost three years on hiatus and two successful solo projects for members Gareth Liddiard and Mike Noga, it was beginning to look like The Drones were a waning prospect. With the release of their first live DVD ‘A Thousand Mistakes,’ though, The Drones have returned with an unlikely precursor to a long-awaited national tour. Featuring the Drones live at Melbourne’s East Brunswick Club, and including a specially recorded warehouse rehearsal, it's a chance to see a new side of the drones, and one that front-man Gareth Liddiard describes as signs of their way forward.

What’s the idea behind this live DVD? Is it just a summation of what you’ve done as a band to date?

Yeah, pretty much. Over the years I’ve stashed away heaps of live recordings and heaps of stuff people have filmed when we played. Sometimes they’d film it but they didn’t do the audio properly, so it’d be a bit shit, but over the years I collected a bunch of stuff where the audio and the film were good, so I thought ‘well, it’d be good to do something with this.’ I like to do things that I like. I like a Led Zeppelin live video and like to watch lots of live music and I thought while we were at it - with that Fairfield warehouse set - we could do a bunch of stuff we can’t normally do, something that’s a bit weird that can’t fit into a set-list or the gear and people that we need we can’t take with us because it’s too expensive.

So it's kind of your ultimate live experience rather than the practical one?

Pretty much. In a sense, what you see is the best bits of all that stuff that’s been filmed, so there’s that, we’ve probably played better shows that we never filmed and we’ve played worse. It’s kind of just preserving shit too, you know? One day we could all die in a plane crash. Now at least, there’s a DVD of us.

But there won’t be a DVD of the plane crash…

Well that’d be on the extras.

With the solo work you’ve been doing the last couple of years, have you been itching to get back with the band, or have you been happy in that environment?

It’s been great to do something different like those solo shows, but yeah, now I’m looking forward to getting an electric guitar. It’s been a long time coming, when we took the break, I was like ‘if I never hear a loud electric guitar again I’d be pretty happy’…but now I’m looking forward to it, yeah.

Do you have a bit more enthusiasm for those old songs with the time off, or is it a challenge to dig back to those rich lyrical songs with the same kind of conviction?

I mean some stuff, the stuff we’d never do, would be like what you said - you kind of grow out of certain things - but the bulk of it is still relevant. As you evolve, the songs will evolve with you. Everyone who hears a certain song has a different take on what it is, my take will change as the years roll on, so it keeps it fresh in a sense.

When you wrote songs like 'Jezebel' or 'Oh My,' songs essentially about Iraq or people's attitudes to climate change, were you expecting us to be on our way out of it by now?

Not really. You know, you’re dealing with monkeys, this is what people are, there’s no improvement. Certain pockets will improve; in the developed world you’ve got women’s rights and shit like that, but then as soon as the developed world falls apart, we’ll go back to where we were, and then India will start improving… So everything is kind of in flux, and those songs aren’t specific takes, I wasn’t singing the Anti-Iraq Blues or anything, they’re more general than specific.

Are you more accepting rather than bitter now?

Nah, I’m not accepting of it, but with something like 'Jezabel,' we really turned over a new leaf with the whole September 11 - it was a fresh way of making atrocities. It was imaginative stuff, flying aeroplanes into buildings, chopping people’s heads off while you film it… That kind of song is a reaction to the shock of the new, ‘cos everyone gets jaded, and it’s not like it was nothing that hadn’t happened before, they just managed to make it new and relevant.

I guess nothing’s changed either, there was footage of Sadaam being hanged, there was an execution last week, the themes of the songs are still relevant now.

Are they? I dunno, it’s kind of weird, they’re weird songs, and lyrically they’re quite strange. Psychologically, they’re not specific, they’re kind of vague enough that I think they should stand some sort of test of time for a reasonable amount of time.

Are you writing anything new?

I haven’t written for a while, but I’m planning after this tour to get back into it. The last couple of years I did the solo Strange Tourist album and toured that, then this DVD thing has been an ongoing headfuck, and then I did a thing with Ben Salter ['The Cat', review here] and finally managed to put out a record with the Gutterville Splendour Six which is the band that morphed into the Drones…so I’ve still been flat out really, that and other things like moving house and shit like that, so I haven’t had time, it’s really hard to find a space where I can stick my head down and start to writing.

Do you write differently for the Drones than how you write for yourself?

Nah, not at all, for me that solo thing, I don’t see a difference, it’s me playing songs I’ve written anyway. There’s no difference in writing them, you just don’t take them to the band when you’re done.

Seeing what the rest of the band have done in the break, with Mike [Noga] and Dan’s [Luscombe] other projects, do you get any insight into what they bring to the band seeing what they’ve done themselves?

Yeah, yeah for sure. With a band, generally, someone’s got to lead the fray, and in this case it’s me, the minute you get me to write the songs and play guitar and sing them, you’ll get that Drones sound. Whereas if you look at what Dan’s done with the Blackeyed Susans and Paul Kelly, often when he gets involved in that thing, you’ll hear that big guitar kind of thing, his touch is a classy, classic kind of thing that he does. So everyone has their bit, but generally the pepper in the sauce is me I think, the weird kind of limitations, the quirks.

How do you feel fronting a band with players of their quality?

I feel very good, they’re amazing. The Fairfield Warehouse thing on the DVD, there’s the proof. We’re a band of players, we’re not a bunch of guys who can only play the songs we made up and we’ve had to rehearse, we can play all sorts of stuff in all sorts of different times under all sorts of different scenarios; we can improvise. These guys throw their personalities into the music because they can, because they’re proper musicians, they’re not just indie people who’ve learned a few chords - not that that’s bad, I’m not putting that down - but there’s more full-time musicianship going on there and you can hear it.

What do you feel the opinion of the Drones is? I guess you were a closet band for a while, but you’ve had brushes with recognition.

Yeah, I don’t know. Everything is going well, we’ve never made any massive leaps or anything like that, everything’s been progressive, but for me and for Fiona, we don’t live in the city, so I have no gauge on anything. If I go into town, like a country town half an hour from where I live, I’ll go there, no one knows who I am, and if they did they wouldn’t like what I do. So yeah, it’s weird, I don’t have any gauge of where we’re at in the whole scheme of the Australian thing.

What sort of intent do you have for the Drones now? It seems kind of up in the air with the time you’ve had apart.

At the time [before filming the DVD] we were this weird flat out kind of punk band thing, and you slow it down and you show a bit more light and shade or whatever cliché works… So that was sort of an introduction to this, and when we do this tour, we’re going to base it around that session on the DVD where we use weird gear and do weird arrangements of songs that appeared on the albums. Once that tour is done, I kind of want to do a thing where I say ‘alright, The Drones, we’re breaking up. I’m gonna start a new band - called the Drones - and we’ll start again.’ I just want to wipe the slate clean, because you get bogged down, and we want to get out of there.

It’s funny, you can be a slave. You might not necessarily be one, it’s not the public’s perception of us, it’s more our perception of the public’s perception of us…but we stick to that perception to a point with every album, and it’s always a bit different, but I want to make more of a change than that. It’s hard because I’m not twenty-something anymore, I can’t keep doing stuff like this forever, there’s a much more physical element, whether it’s the live thing, or even just the sound is physical and hostile, there’s a sort of rage in there. But as you get older that turns from that physical and cathartic thing into a more intellectual thing, more refined and sort of mature for want of a better word. So yeah, that’s the sort of plan, to morph, to do a big evolution in a short period of time.

So you’re starting to feel more like going into writing than those earlier records that were just getting loose or whatever?

Yeah, and we’ve done that. Originally I wanted a band that had two guitars, bass, drums, that raw sound with the rawness of Led Zeppelin or Black Flag, but had that kind of Bob Dylan or Guy Clarke, that kind of songwriting within it as well. I’ve done that and we’ve done that, and of course we’re capable of much more, and there’s always more room for us to grow…not many of us in the band listen to much rock 'n' roll anymore, so we want a big change.

When I spoke to Mike earlier in the year he was saying how he never listens to anything like what the Drones play.

Yeah and neither do I, I mean, I listen to the Velvet Underground or whatever, but I haven’t listened to rock 'n' roll for yonks. If I’m listening to rock 'n' roll it might be some fuckin' Brian Eno thing or something like that, I might listen to Hungarian folk music or Saharan staff, or something from Mali or shit from India, it’s all good, because the music’s really good, you can get stuck in this sort of Ramones kind of thing, I’m not interested in that anymore.

You’re not going to learn anything from the Ramones at this stage, I guess.

Well that’s it, look the Ramones are fucking amazing, but there’s more to life than just that. And I’ve done that... Once you’ve heard the Stooges, and 'Exile on Main St,' that’s the best rock 'n' roll, that’s the best of it, so why listen to any more of that? Let’s go and listen to weird obscure jazz from Ethiopia.

So you don’t keep up with Australia's rock scene?

Not really, I don’t live in the cities, I don’t know, I mean everything is just a throw-back to the eighties at the moment. My generation was a bit seventies, but I know what the 80s is, and I think it’s kind of weird…cos the 80s, whatever you think about it, it was really original; they made that shit up. Madonna or Joy Division, or any 80s shit was really unique and people really used their imaginations. Going back and doing this retro thing is missing the point; the 80s was about inventing new shit.

I guess at the time they were dealing with such new, fringe equipment…it’s gotten to the point now where there are bands basing their entire sound around 30 year old technology.

Yeah, exactly. Now there’s so much potential for new shit with all the technology, it’s just strange. I think what’s happened is that everything changed so fast that everyone’s overwhelmed by it all, so they want to go back to the comfort of what there used to be, so if you grew up in the 80s you want to play the music that’s got that 80s thing. Everyone’s a little bit timid because everything’s so intense and everything’s changing so fast that it’s hard to be modern, but there are bands doing it…Radiohead, that’s a great example, they’re fucking huge and they’re still doing it, fuckin' Deerhoof, there’s still great bands that are underground and current, but the bulk of it is very retro. I mean, when does this shit end? We’ve got to do the 90’s next, and then when it catches up to the age of retro, what are they gonna do? Retro retro? Fuck that, you know? It’s weird.

'A Thousand Mistakes' is out now on DVD, while the Drones are currently on tour around the country.