Two years on since the release of their debut ‘High Risk Behaviour’, Aussie punks The Chats returned with a new line-up and second album ‘Get Fucked’ earlier this month.
In our review of their sophomore output, we said, “There’s no one quite like The Chats. On their second album, ‘GET FUCKED’, they prove that there never will be anyone quite like them, either: they’re pushing the accelerator right to the floor, and there’s no sign of them hitting the brakes any time soon.”
We got vocalist Eamon Sandwith to give us a track-by-track run-through of the record and share some stories from behind the scenes recording it.
We did a couple of shows in a place called Gove in the Northern Territory, and when we got back to Brisbane airport, we were taking our gear to the car, and I saw this car that was parked in the airport car park. The number plate said 6L GTR. We thought it was such a hilarious number plate, we just had to write a song about this dude’s car.
I don’t even know if the car itself was actually a six-litre GTR or anything – to be honest with you, I don’t even know what a car like that would look like! I can’t drive! That was the thing, we were just trying to get into this dude’s head. We were like, ‘When he’s fangin’ it in his car, what’s in his head? What does he do?’ It was a fun exercise. So, it was just about a random number plate that we saw.
To begin with we were using a little bit of Van Halen’s ‘Panama’ in there. That song has a breakdown bit, where it’s like, ‘Ooooh, we’re running a little hot tonight’, so I recorded myself doing that in the breakdown of our song, but then our manager was like, ‘Errrr, we’re probably going to have to flag that’. I’m like, ‘What do you mean? It’s just a little passage from a song’. He was like, ‘I know, but we’re going to have to ask the songwriters’ – which included David Lee Roth obviously – ‘if it’s okay to use it’. About a week later our manager got an email from David Lee Roth’s people that said “NO!”. What a dog cunt.
That one came about from, we were just having a jam. I was on the drums this time, and I just started playing this little pattern, kind of like, ‘struck by – lightnin’!’ I was like, that could work, that could sound pretty cool for a song, so I just went home and wrote a song about getting struck by lightning, like how you would feel, and what would happen.
I heard that people it happens to can’t grow their hair back and shit, which is weird – especially the whole no-eyebrows thing. That would be really scary! I’m really hoping that this doesn’t happen to me, now that I’ve written a song about it. It probably will. Touch wood!
We made a video, for which there was a little bit of stunt work. The premise of the video is, we’re just playing in this shed, some lightning hits us, and there’s one point where I get blown off into the distance, and everyone is like, ‘Aw shit, are you all right?’ and I just dust myself off, and go, ‘Yeah, I’m good’. I did like seven or eight takes of that stunt, and it was pretty fast, like straight off your feet, whoosh!
It’s a silly video, but that night of doing the stunts, we were doing a show, and I had this headache. I thought it was just a headache, but probably it was from being hoisted in the air at such a fast speed. It fucked with my head a bit, and I just started throwing up while I was playing. The thing is, the crowd loved it, and I think they went off about me throwing up more than they did for any song we played.
Five minutes up the road from my house, there’s a prison called Boggo Road Jail. It’s the big jail in Brisbane. In 1989 there was about eight prisoners that escaped, and what they did was, they waited for the laundry van to come in to wash the sheets and that, and they jumped in the van. The keys were still in there, so they all just piled in and drove straight out of the gate. Apparently, all the guards were going, ‘Where have all these prisoners gone?’ Hahaha…
All my life, I always thought it was a really funny story. I remember hearing that [gnarly ’80s Oz heavy-rockers] Rose Tattoo did a live thing there, and when Angry Anderson comes out, and he goes, ‘I always knew we’d end up in here!’ Anyway, now it’s just up the road – I go past it on the bus every day, and I thought it would make a pretty funny song. It’s just so stupid – crazy that it even happened.
The song came to bear more significance because we shot the album cover outside of the jail eventually, up against the wall. There’s a lot of boardroom meetings, clipboards and manila folders, all about this stuff. Spreadsheets, even. The main vibe we were going for with the artwork was The Ramones’ self-titled debut – just us against the brick wall. With the whole design, we didn’t want to rip it off entirely, so how about we put the photo in the middle, and the text above and below, like Sleaford Mods’ ‘Austerity Dogs’.
That one is 43 seconds – even shorter live! The radio edit is 10 seconds. Our friend Glen has got a bar in Southport called Vinny’s Dive Bar. It’s about an hour and a half south of us on the Gold Coast, so it’s still in Queensland. We went down there for about three days sometime last year, just to do some songwriting. We wanted to get away from Brisbane, and maybe even try and find an Air B&B where we could set up a drum kit and some amps and just hang out a bit.
We asked Glenn because he’s already got a drum kit and some amps at his venue. We were like, ‘Is it cool if we just come in during the day before you open, and we can just hang out and practice and whatever?’ He was like, ‘Yeah sweet, guys, no worries.’ So, we went down, and – I don’t know how to put this – Southport it’s probably a lower socio-economic kind of area. Okay, it’s a total fucking shit hole! There’s a lot of drugs and stuff, and ‘Southport Superman’ was just about this junkie that we saw walking so fast down the street, it was like he was flying. He was just like at the speed of light down the street. This guy could probably’ve beaten Usain Bolt in a race at that moment. He’d probably fucking stolen somebody’s wallet or something.
So, this guy was just, guns blazing, roaring down the street, and Josh was like, ‘Mate, he’s like the Southport Superman’, and we were like, ‘Oh man, that’s a song right there!’
That’s just how we roll. Or I do, anyway. If I’m going to write a song, I kind of get the title and go from there. It’s kind of like, ‘Okay, what’s this one going to be about?’ It obviously wasn’t gonna be a slow number. It had to match that dude’s speed, how fast he was flying, and I feel like, for that kind of song, you don’t wanna stretch it out too long. You don’t want it to overstay its welcome.
That was another one where I was like, ‘Wow that would be a good title’. I have some anxiety every now and then, nothing serious. The great thing that came to me – I was playing the bassline, dum-dum dum-dum, and I was like, that almost sounds like a heartbeat, like a fast heartbeat, like it could be a panic attack thing. Then it all just kind of fell in from there. The panic thing happens in any kind of stressful situation – like if I have to make a decision quickly, that’s kinda hard for me.
As I said before, I can’t drive, so I’m a big public transport leech. This one, I wrote it because I was rolling around on the train, and I bought a child’s ticket because it’s a lot cheaper than an adult ticket, and I got stopped by the ticket inspector, and he started writing me up for fare evasion, and I was like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about, I bought this ticket?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, but this is a child’s ticket…’ So, my mind started racing, and I was like, ‘I’m 14!’ He was like, ‘No, you’re not…’ So I got a fine, but then it never came in the mail! Hopefully the Queensland public transport system doesn’t read this…
This song is the only one on this record which was actually written a while ago, around the time that I was writing ‘Smoko’, ‘Temperature’, and all those songs on [The Chats’ debut mini-LP from 2017] ‘Get This in Ya!!’ For whatever reason, we never recorded it. Back then, we couldn’t quite get the hang of it.
I keep all my songs in my Notes app on my phone, all my lyrics and stuff. One day I’m scrolling through, just seeing what’s in the bank there, and I pull that one out. I thought, ‘Aw yeah, that’s actually an okay song, that could work.’ I’m glad we recorded it, because it’s actually like the one song on the new record which is a bit slower. It’s a bit of a different vibe almost.
I wrote it when I was working at Coles, which is like our version of Tesco. I used to be on the smokes counter, like I would sell the durries [Aussie slang for cigarettes] to the people that came in and wanted to buy smokes. Back then the cigarette tax in Australia was steadily rising pretty much every two months, and by quite a bit, too. They would go up two dollars a month each time, and all these really pissed-off, disgruntled old dudes would be like, ‘You’ve gotta be fucking joking, they were 35 bucks last week, mate! What are you doing?’ Like it’s my problem! They’d be like, ‘The fucking price of smokes, mate, it’s fucking outrageous!’
I suppose that’s how it is when you are addicted to something, you can’t go without it, so you just shut up and pay it. You are just like, whatever… But they had to take it out on me, like I was the one pricing them. I was like, ‘It’s not me, mate, it’s not me!’
I remember when we did our first UK and Europe tour in 2018, we were like, ‘Fuck, how cheap are the ciggies over here, this is insane!’ Now the price has just kept rising. I quit about three years ago, just because of how fucking expensive they are. You just can’t afford to smoke here, unless you’re a businessman or something. There was one line from the original lyrics saying the cost was $36.50, and I had to change it to $46.50, to bring it up to date!
I heard the phrase ‘dead on sight’, spelled that way, in a TV show or something, and I thought it would be pretty funny if it was about someone dying on a worksite, like ‘on site’. It was another one of those where the title comes, and you fill in the blanks. It’s fun writing songs, better than working at Coles!
This was another one inspired by the Southport weekend. We walked past an ATM that had just had the absolute shit beaten out of it. I don’t know how they did it, but all the glass on the ATM was totally smashed. There was one big hole where someone had hit it with a pickaxe or something, and there was all these shards of glass over the street. We were walking past it and someone goes, ‘Aw gee, someone must’ve got paid late’. It was like, there’s another one – perfect!
We took a photo of that. It must’ve been a total fit of rage. It was probably the Southport Superman who was the culprit. That was a guy who needed cash, and fast.
I’ve been living here in Brisbane for two years now. Josh just lives across the bridge, I ride my bike over to his place, every now and then. Matt is actually moving into my place next week. Till now, he’s stayed up there on the Sunny Coast, he’s a real surfy kind of guy, but he’s finally making the move down here which will be good, to have us all in the same spot again.
So this song was just another one of those things, where we were talking about what would be a good song subject. The original title was actually ‘I’ve Been Kicked Out Of Every Pub in Brisbane’, but I think we ended up going with ‘Been Drunk’ because it just sounded better in the song.
Brisbane is quite a bit hotter than the rest of the country, so it’s one of those places where it’s more acceptable to start drinking earlier. I would say that I have actually been to a good chunk of the pubs here, but if you were go to all of them, first of all it would be hard to even remember which ones you’d been to, and which ones you hadn’t, especially if you’d got fucking pissed. I reckon there would be 900 or so pubs that you would have to hit.
Some of the lyrics are a true story, like the one where they gave me a couple of beers for free – that happened once, at the Grand Central Hotel, I believe, just near the train station – so, some are true, but a lot of them are just rubbish.
It is multi-layered, this one, because some of it’s about an old associate of ours, which I can’t really go into here, but it’s also almost about a kid getting kicked out of home because ‘he couldn’t find the line to toe’.
This one’s about the surfy culture on the Sunny Coast, which is very ‘locals only’. There’s these macho dudes, they’ve always got the shirts off, like, ‘this is my beach, these are my waves’ – kind of like the Bra Boys, who you might’ve heard of. They were this surf gang [in Sydney in the 1990’s], that would beat up immigrants who would come to the beach, because the beach was only for white people.
There’s a really heavy layer of racism in these surf cultures, that no-one really wants to talk about. They always want to focus on the laid-back, chill parts of it, but in reality it’s very, very ugly. You might’ve heard of the Cronulla riots? They just made a movie about it, where all the white blokes in this beachside suburb of Sydney went around and bashed all the Muslim blokes, because they didn’t want them on the beach. So yeah, this song’s about the uglier side of surf culture.
This one is actually Josh’s song, and he sings it. It was a song he had, and I was like, ‘Man, that’s great, we should put it on the record’. It’s almost a continuation from the last song on ‘High Risk Behaviour’, which was called ‘Better Than You’. Now we’re even better!
It’s actual rock ‘n’ roll, because that’s very much Josh’s style. In those early days of his band, The Unknowns, they were a full-on rockabilly band. We just thought that was the coolest thing. We’d never seen any sort of young band, let alone a young rockabilly band. And Josh would have the full quiff – he would comb his hair back and stuff. We were like, this guy is the coolest!
‘Get Fucked’ is out now via Bargain Bin.
Tags: The Chats, Track by Track
They’re pushing the accelerator right to the floor, and there’s no sign of them hitting the brakes any time soon.
They’ve also shared the video for new track ‘Out On The Street’.
It’s time for another weekly roundup of the biggest and best new releases.
The track features on their forthcoming album ‘Get Fucked’.
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