The Collapse Board interview – Fire Witch
CB: Now that I’ve found you, tell me more about Fire Witch — the basic stuff.
JEM: We all live in Melbourne, southern most point of the mainland. It’s the second largest city in the country but by far the biggest for music. I run the label WeEmptyRooms and manage the various bands I play in. I do whatever I can to pay the bills along the way, as music is an expensive hobby. Work at a bar, teach drums, labouring or whatever else is required.
Tommy does land management stuff; killing weeds, planting trees etc, and sometimes he works as a fireman. He’s a man that much prefers to be out hiking or surfing than stuck in the city. I imagine he’ll move out to the bush eventually.
Patto also plays in a kick arse band called Wicked City. He works as a sound engineer and kitchen hand to pay the bills. Like me music is his life passion but he gets away with doing a lot less managerial work because [he] is such a good bass player.
We’ve been jamming together since high school. We were lucky enough to switch to a different school for our final two years that actually valued music rather than tried to stamp it out. We were mates first, our passion was music and it just made sense to jam together. We started doing gigs in 2003 which was our final year of high school. I had actually been gigging regularly since I was 13 or 14 in a band with a bunch of older dudes. My parents were very supportive of that and didn’t mind that I was out in bars till 2am on school nights.
So I really took a senior role in the band and got us gigs from the get go. The first two years were kind of frustrating. The laws here surrounding licensing are fucked and so we were [allowed] to play gigs in pubs but none of our mates were allowed to come and watch. And the underage gigs were all run by conservative parents who wanted nothing to do with us ‘cos we had no singer. Apparently they knew what the kids wanted and we weren’t it!
How do you feel like you guys stand out Melbourne? And the country as a whole?
Well, we are virtually unknown in Australia. We have a small but dedicated following in Melbourne, for which we are very thankful, and a handful of people around the country who know us. But there is no shortage of good bands to play with in our city who are great to watch and good to work with.
After Mogwai popped out of Scotland, I feel like the US has been overwhelmed with instrumental post-rock bands — has this happened in Australia as well? How do you stand out from the pack?
Generally speaking I hate post-rock. I think it has dated really badly and is usually completely lacking in groove. But I can respect that the Liars record could be considered as post-rock. There definitely were a bunch of post-rock kind of bands around while we were starting out but I don’t think we played many (if any) shows with them. We were mainly playing shows with stoner bands ‘cos they appreciated our love of riffs and good tones and bottom end. So the post-rock crowd probably never knew we existed. And the stoner crowd knew us as those funny little kids with no guitarist or singer. And it varies from city to city. In some cities the punks will come and see us and in others they don’t even know we exist and we get a more arty crowd. It’s the same music though so I can’t explain that.
We were most influenced by bands like Funkadelic, WAR, Pink Floyd, Neil Young and Kyuss. We generally were pretty uninspired by music of our own generation until we started discovering the underground stuff. But we never tried to sound like anyone in particular, imitating someones sound seemed like a lot more work than making your own.
Honestly, I don’t know if or how we stand out but I don’t think there is any other band here like us. We’ve never considered ourselves “instrumental.” We just never sang cos we weren’t great singers and the songs didn’t need it. But I guess we hate tags in general.
The best thing we ever did as far as getting noticed here was to stop playing shows. We went on indefinite hiatus in late 2007 and I think the myth began to take form in that time. We started playing again in 2010 and more people seemed to know us than before. -> -> ->
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