Australian indie rock band – and string quartet – FourPlay have four previous albums under their belt. This time, they return with This Machine and an Australian tour. Violinist Lara Goodridge takes some time to chat about the new album. By Patrick Muller.
Your new album is called This Machine. What is that referring to?
You’re the only person who’s asked us that. It’s referring to consumerism and the world at the moment and the dire state of the world, and the state of the environment being eaten up by consumerism and money essentially. So that’s what it’s about, trying the save the planet and the machine that we’re all caught up in.
This is your first album where it’s purely originals right?
Yeah, it is. We’ve put out a few albums over the last 18 years and all of them have had originals on them but we’ve just been writing more and more. We wanted to come back this time with some point of difference and that just felt totally organic, like the right thing to do for this album.
How is the process different between rearrange popular tunes and composing originals and which do you prefer doing?
I think more and more we’ve preferred to do the originals for the last 10 years or so. Since Shezno joined the band, he’s such a great player and improviser that it’s really a fun process to be creating together, more so than the covers. And also for some reason, and I would say that it’s that no great songs have been written in the last 10 years because there certainly have been, but for some reason we’ve just found it harder and harder to choose what our next cover would be, so we’ve tended to writing our own. So the process itself is that we sit around and jam a lot. We love doing that, rather than sitting around and picking apart a cover.
That actually leads to my next question. What makes a so worthy of being covered?
If one of us gets inspired by something they’ll bring it to the band and we try it out, so long as someone doesn’t hate it for some reason. We try to choose inspiring musicians and bands and find which song suits us. Sufjan Stevens, we felt would work really well for us because it’s so orchestral and melodic. So we tried that and we certainly had to loop ourselves to get more of an orchestral effect and layer it up. Then with Rage Against the Machine it was such a classic song itself. We really wanted to rock with something and that felt like the right one. It’s just us thrashing around ideas and seeing what works.
So you worked with Tony Buchen (Megan Washington, Ronan Keating, The John Butler Trio) on this album. What was it like working with him?
Tony’s fantastic. We really feel that we get each other. He recorded us when we did the Neil Gaiman performance which was turned into an audio book. We’d worked with Tony over the years when he was producing Bluejuice and all sorts of bands where he’d get us in for a quartet and I recorded my French album with him in the band Baby et Lulu. So we just thought he was the guy for us. We all got each other and just had a lot of fun.
What can fans expect when they come and see you on this tour?
It’s a very energetic show. You’re possibly going to get some political commentary, but it’s really energetic and it’s quite exciting and fun for audiences who’ve never seen us before and certainly for people coming back. It’s something that you don’t quite get on the album that you will get live.
The Machine October tour dates:
October 10: Brisbane – Black Bear Lodge
October 11: Canberra – Street Theatre
October 16: Newcastle – Lizottes
October 17: Katoomba, NSW – Kindlehill Performance Space
October 18: Sydney – The Basement
October 19: Adelaide – Governor Hindmarsh
October 24: Melbourne – Caravan Club
October 25: Melbourne – The Toff In Town
November 22-23: Mullum Music Festival, Mullumbimby NSW
For tickets and tour dates, visit FourPlay’s website.
