q&a: sand pebbles
Having just released their fifth album, Dark Magic, Sand Pebbles are an enduring psych pop band. They have a member born in each decade between the ’50s and ’90s, with each bringing his own unique influence to the group’s sound.
Lip chats to oldest member, Andrew Tanner!
Can you tell me a bit about how Dark Magic came together?
It’s kind of unusual for us because we’ve been churning out albums sort of one a year for quite a few years, all kind of independently financed. We pretty much do them all ourselves then take them to a label, but this one was a rather difficult birth and rather painful. It took three years and went through a lot of phases, including phases where we didn’t know what the hell was going on, where it was leading, and so…in that regard, it was quite atypical for us I suppose. But you know, it came together at the end. I guess it was a cliché of a whole lot of people adding their creativity to it…and all the extra hands certainly made light work in this case. We kind of pulled it out from what was a fairly confusing set of songs at certain stages.
Having Wes Holland now in the band, was he a very different influence to have on the album too?
Wes is the youngest member of the band now, you know the press release which famously said we had members from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, and Wes is the 90s kid, but yeah he’s…paradoxically enough, as the youngest in the band, he’s also probably heavily influenced by 60s…Keith Moon and all those mod bands and the whole Brit rock kind of influence so he brings a lot of energy and enthusiasm to the rhythm section, so that’s been great.
Given that the band members are at those different stages of life, is it difficult to be in a band together? How do you negotiate that?
Yeah you’d think so wouldn’t you? I mean it’s a pretty shambolic outfit, there’s certainly not a lot of organisation, but it’s relatively easy. It’s impossible to talk about this stuff without sounding like a wanker but I will anyway, that kind of transcending through music, you’re just kind of looking for sounds and grooves and tones and combinations of sounds that will take people somewhere, get them out of their head and get them kind of moving somewhere else so I guess that common interest means you can always find an area where you can all live together. There’s not a lot of philosophical debate about what the band should sound like and be like. It all starts with people playing and picking up on what other people are doing.
I suppose that’s essentially what music should be setting out to do – going beyond people’s everyday experiences to have some kind of commonality.
I think that someone in Sonic Youth once said, which I think is really smart, that people pay money when they go to a gig to see people on stage taking risks, and I think that’s really true. There’s nothing sadder than going to a gig and seeing someone duplicate something that’s exactly the same as what they’ve done on their record, you actually want to see people getting out on a ledge. That’s an exciting gig as opposed to what you’ll often see which is, well that’s exactly what the record sounded like and why I didn’t just stay home and turn the record player up.
So with supporting Dean Wareham, is that something that you’re all consciously thinking of, perhaps onstage collaborations or anything like that? Anything that you’re going to do differently given that you’ve worked with him before?
Yeah, Dean’s sort of fervent to get us on stage to do an old Luna track or two I think, so that would be a lot of fun…I don’t really know what to expect. I mean Galaxie 500’s a different kettle of fish, but I’m just really looking forward to watching from the sidelines and who knows, maybe we’ll get together on something as well.
On a slightly different note, I’m getting information from Wikipedia here so I apologise if it’s incorrect, but I read that you were part of the Christian music scene in Adelaide. How do you go from there to psychedelic rock?
It’s an interesting journey. My dad was a minister of religion so I kind of grew up in the Uniting Church so a lot of my first experiences were kind of within a church setting and I guess music was one of those things that fascinated me so I spent a bit of time I suppose exploring that passion within the setting of the church but soon discovered that Christian rock was overwhelmingly a pretty naff kind of thing. I thought the idea of using music to explore spirituality was really cool but what I guess turned me off in the end was that it was so didactic, like it was we gave you a solution before we even asked a question. And that kind of led me on to listening to people like Patti Smith and Bob Marley, just people who were also looking at spirituality through music but they were looking at the dark side as well as the light side and all those greys in between and I guess that ultimately led me to where I was, onto your Lou Reeds and your Velvet Undergrounds and your Iggy Pops who covered the whole human experience.
It’s a bit of a deviation!
It was a bit of a deviation but everyone starts somewhere, and it was a place to start I suppose. There were some good people I found in my church beginnings, and some idiots, as you would [find] I think in any kind of culture.
Last question, just again to clear something up from Wikipedia. Were you actually banned from the Meredith Music Festival?
I don’t know if there’s an official ban. We opened up on a Friday night of Meredith and we had this great idea to do a sort of tribal love-in with a whole lot of people playing percussion for our end song, so we invited all these people along, some of whom we knew, some of whom were friends of friends and we didn’t really know. So we all ended up with Sand Pebbles artist tags on, and afterwards, we kind of hunkered down and some people stayed overnight and others left and went back to Melbourne but one of these people who we’d invited along decided to get really drunk and took a lot of drugs and I think invaded the stage when Rose Tattoo were playing. So anyway, the end of it was that one of our guys in the band woke up on the Saturday morning to find this pair of legs sticking out from a rolled up carpet…it turned out basically they’d rolled [this guy] up in the carpet to stop him from doing more damage. And the story from there came that we were this sort of violent band that got drunk and invaded the stage and I think it sort of put them off us a bit and ironically, no one in the band was involved in it. But you know, we lived off that myth for a while.
Certainly adds to that rock ‘n’ roll mystique!
That’s right.
Don’t miss Sand Pebbles supporting Dean & Britta playing a selection of Galaxie 500 songs tomorrow night at Melbourne’s Corner Hotel!
