Passing The Acid Test

Psychedelia might be a watered down terms these days, but Sydney’s Dolly Rocker Movement are unashamed to call themselves a psychedelic band. PATRICK EMERY steals some with songwriter Daniel Poulter and keyboardist Martin Walters during a business trip to Sydney.

In common – and uninformed – understanding, psychedelia is many things: swirling colourful patterns, tired rhetorical flourishes exploited into pop culture submission by Mike Myers’ Austin Powers ’60s cliche and a euphemism for industrial strength consumption of mind-altering substances. At an artistic level, however, psychedelia is more about exploring the boundaries of experience and committing those experiences to artistic form.

Psychedelic music continues to evolve, moulding the original elastic visions found in the 1960s psychedelic scenes in San Francisco, Texas, London and beyond into a contemporary guise, emerging occasionally from the style’s natural underground environment to infiltrate the minds of the mainstream.

Formed in 2002, the Dolly Rocker Movement found early critical favour when the late Greg Shaw (Bomp Records) gave his blessing to some of the band’s early tunes posted on MySpace. A debut album, Electric Sunshine (described in part as “chemical country”) was released in June 2006, followed a few months later by the space-ish Purple Journey into the Mod Machine. Despite early promises of four albums in a calendar year (and the odd acid-tinged rumour), it was another two years before the Dolly Rocker Movement released its follow-up record, the Sound for Two EP. Now, after what seems to be an eternity, comes the third Dolly Rocker Movement album, Our Days Mind the Tyme.

Having endured a day of corporate planning on Sydney’s picturesque Darling Harbour and a dinner surrounded by very un-psychedelic work colleagues, I’ve managed to get away mid-evening to meet Dolly Rocker Movement singer, guitarist and songwriter Daniel Poulter and keyboardist Martin Walters.

After scouring the streets of inner-city Sydney for a suitable licensed venue, we’re left with a “bowling club” replete with brightly coloured pokie machines and the rich tapestry of life that tend to populate such venues. It’s an establishment a million miles away from the luminescent and stylish environment generally associated with psychedelic pop. Conversely, it’s precisely the sort of world that chemical additives can render illuminating, if only for a few choice hours. Tonight, however, we only have schooners of domestic beer to help us on our journey through the Dolly Rocker Movement’s new album.

The first two Dolly Rocker Movement records, Electric Sunshine and Purple Journey into the Mod Machine, sprang from songs composed almost entirely by Daniel. What did you do differently for this album?

Daniel Poulter: It was a longer process than recording at home. Before, it was like a quick burst out of my brain, so this was a little bit more time taken. And I think that’s reflected in the production aspect of the record.

Martin Walters: I think there were still elements of spontaneity in recording the album.

DP: It was just a different environment to what we’ve done in the past.

Your last album Purple Journey into the Mod Machine explored the theme of a journey through space, complete with Kubrick-style ’60s psychedelic space effects. Is there a theme visible within Our Days Mind the Tyme?

DP: I think the placement of the tracks and the order they’re in is important. And the lyrical content is a reflection of where my mind was at that time – late 2007 to mid 2008. It’s very cinematic with songs like ‘The Ecstacy Once Told’ and ‘Borne With Gills’, with the strings and the harpsichord.

Where did the inspiration for the Baroque-influenced Sound for Two come from?

DP: That was definitely spontaneous. I was just sitting on the couch strumming out the three chords, and jotted down some lyrics, which is basically the way I write songs. It was a nice jerky 3/4 time and then Martin came in with this ‘Golden Brown’-esque feel.

MW: It was good to get the harpsichord back in there.

DP: I like to think of the album as two big breaths of fresh air: inhale and exhale.

Do you think that classic style is in danger of being lost in the world of online access to music?

“As an artist or musician you love to get inside yourself, and drugs are a way of doing it … I think what it does is unlock a door into your own life and make those reflective experiences so much more intense, which is good for writing music.”

DP: Obviously this isn’t the golden era of making albums like in the 1960s or 1970s. I think today it depends on the band – a lot of bands these days are putting a lot of effort into their albums and producing really great albums. I think it was probably like that in the 1960s – there were some bands that put a lot of effort into albums, whereas other bands just put together song after song after song. I guess it wasn’t until about 1967 when album sales started overtaking single sales and bands starting putting more effort into the album-listening experience. We just try and do that – we make it an album. With Our Days Mind the Tyme, it’s like a completion of our work. It feels like it’s one big piece of work from start to finish.

Your lyrics are almost as colourful as your music. What significance do you attach to the lyrical content of your music?

DP: Lyrically, most of [the new album] is a bit of a downer. When I’m writing lyrics, all I do is put down words that come into my head. I love writing phrases, so I just build some rhyming phrases out of the jumble that comes out of my head. I only really understand what I’ve written about three or four months after I’ve recorded it, and then I can see where my head space was at the time. I like to have this slightly cryptic feel – I don’t like it to be too obvious. I write from my subconscious, but ultimately it does have some meaning, and I hope that other people can listen to it and get some meaning out of it as well – at least, that’s what I hope for. That’s what I like about releasing the album. I don’t own it anymore, it’s for other people to interpret and relate it to their life.

MW: My subconscious is holding me back. My aim is to rephrase some of those lyrics with some catchy advertising endorsements. I’m working on that [laughs].

Psychedelia is invariably associated with drugs. What relevance are drugs to the band’s music?

DP: I definitely came to psychedelia through drugs, smoking marijuana and taking LSD in high school. Taking LSD and learning about the ’60s tend to go hand in hand. And drugs and music do tend to go hand in hand - it’s part of the lifestyle. I suppose as times go on, I look at it like a dream, it’s just one of elements. Drugs ultimately did have some long term effect on my brain in those early years, but it wasn’t the means to all ends. As an artist or musician you love to get inside yourself, and drugs are a way of doing it. If you haven’t been fruitful with your life, if you haven’t done anything with your life, then if you take drugs it’s not going to do anything. I think what it does is unlock a door into your own life and make those reflective experiences so much more intense, which is good for writing music.

Apologies for the stupid question, but what do you define as psychedelia?

MW: I wrestle with this every day [laughs].

DP: The dictionary-style meaning is music that evokes a drug-like experience. That’s where it came from, it came from the influence of psychedelic drugs on society. In this day and age, it’s really hard to tell and obviously drugs have changed. So psychedelic music ... I suppose it has so many different offspring. With the influence of dance culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s you’ve got psychedelic dance, psychedelic trance, psychedelic pop, you’ve got bands like MGMT who I consider trippy pop.

I think we definitely take on the ’60s aesthetic of psychedelia. It’s definitely a visual experience. I think there’s certain types of psychedelia when you want to sit down and close your eyes, whereas ours, I think, has a sense of movement; a mixture of melancholy, happiness, sadness and imagery mixed into one. I think for me that’s what psychedelia is. Even though psychedelia these days has become such a watered down term, I’m not ashamed to say that we’re a psychedelic band.

What about playing live? Do you try and bend the sound according to your mood on the night?

DP: I think that that’s the most psychedelic part of our show when we do go into those free-form moments, and if we’re all in the same mindset it gels. It’s like the drug experience – it could fall down at any moment.

A few years ago people were waxing lyrical about the Sydney psychedelic scene, including bands such as yourselves The Lovetones, Astral Kaleidescope, Belles Will Ring, The Laurels and Richard in Your Mind. What’s your view on that so-called scene?

DP: What people perceived as a psychedelic thing was always just a social thing. There was definitely a honeymoon period when people were really enthusiastic. But to be honest, and without being cynical, given where we are on this planet, down in Australia, it’s hard to get some backing to keep it going. At the same time we are still all friends, but people all move on.

Has the Sydney psych scene peaked?

DP: It’s hard to say. Where do you get your judgment from? From the media? I don’t know. But there seems to be a lot of new bands coming up these days who are tagging themselves as psychedelic, and I wish them all the best in this industry.

MW: It’s great that there are all these bands around but from a critical mass perspective, it’s really difficult to keep things going in Australia. And I suspect if it did happen, we wouldn’t like it anyway.

DP: If it went above ground it might end up in the hands of people who don’t understand it, which is what has happened with all types of movements in the past. You’ve got your pioneer styles that might be rehashing things from the past but are doing it in a mature sense, and then commercialism gets a hold of it, and all of a sudden you’ve got these horrible watered down versions, a lot of flash in the pans. I definitely don’t see us in that regard. We haven’t peaked in any sense because we haven’t had any commercial upbringing, and we’re happy to evolve in the way we want to evolve.

And going back to what psychedelia is, and what Martin says, we’re just going to continue to do what we want to do – obviously being aware of what’s around us, but going on our own musical journey.

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The Dolly Rocker Movement will launch Our Days Mind The Tyme on Saturday, May 2, at Red Rattler Warehouse, Sydney.