Repairs

Melbourne’s Repairs are sticking to their less-is-more formula – even if that means being docked half their rider. Words and photos BY RENÉ SCHAEFER.

There is a danger in hyping young bands while they are still finding their feet artistically, although it is understandable when their music connects as effortlessly with its audience as Repairs’ does. The four young men who make up this stark keyboard and percussion-based group are refreshingly aware of the pitfalls of achieving acclaim at such an early stage in their career and then having to live up to heightened expectations.

For a band that played its first show a mere nine months ago, their sound and stage presentation has evolved rather rapidly. Live, they build a formidable wall of sound, both sonically and visually, with two keyboardists being the focus of attention centre stage. Lined up next to each other, Alexander Lee pounds out relentless rhythms and cluster chords on his synthesizer, while Ben Hepworth manipulates a 1974 Crumar “Organizer” (an Italian-made Hammond Organ knock-off) into producing apocalyptic wheezes and shrieks.

Andrew Brocchi and lanky beanpole Jon Koops take turns blending minimal percussion with primitive drum machine programming and both alternate with Hepworth as vocalists. There is a lot of activity on stage for a band that deliberately jettisoned guitars from their musical arsenal. Koops puts it bluntly. “I always said I hated guitars. Before I joined Repairs, these guys were using guitars a lot. From my perspective, I just wanted to get away from that. Using guitars forces you to do certain things, musically.” Hepworth agrees. “I got really bored with playing the guitar. The main idea was to take ourselves outside our comfort zones.”

Repairs evolved out of The Imagists, a band that Hepworth formed with his high school friends, all of whom have known each other since Year 7. “No one would have seen us. At the time it was Alex and Andrew and I. We used guitars and drums and were influenced by post-punk. Then we got into kraut-rock bands like Cluster, but because of our ineptitude it came out sounding different.”

Lee elaborates on the birth of Repairs: “We were dissatisfied with what we had done previously and our sound started getting darker and angrier. None of us knew much about synths when we started using them. It was a process of discovery.”

Rehearsing in Hepworth’s garage, the newly guitar-less band recorded the song ‘Lottery’ straight onto a broken reel-to-reel recorder with two $10 microphones. When they uploaded it to their MySpace page, it received an unexpected response within a few hours. “We had added Blank Dogs [Brooklyn lo-fi musician Mike Sniper] as a friend and he said he really liked it and if we could give him three more songs he would release them on a cassette,” recalls Lee. “It was that easy. We went, “Shit, now we have to write and record three more songs.

“That was really tough,” laughs Hepworth. “After that we wrote about a song per week. We hunkered down and got serious about it.”

The resulting cassette release documented an embryonic Repairs, and a sound that the band feel they have already left behind since they started gigging more consistently since March. While the band was born out of a love of minimalism and utilises a deliberately reduced sonic palette, the musicians realise that continual change is important.

“Too many bands just go on for too long … We have done 10 minute sets. Once the point is made, why repeat it?”

Vocals have come a lot more to the fore recently. According to Koops, having multiple vocalists was initially a way for everybody to have input into shaping the songs and contributing parts. Hepworth sees this as one of Repairs’ strengths. “Vocals will become more important on our records. It’s a different challenge for us to incorporate more singing and to think about how it fits into our over all sound. On recordings, vocals can drive a song.”

While kraut-rock was an acknowledged influence at the conception of the band, the general feeling is that it was just a starting point. “We’ve moved away from that style,” continues Hepworth. “We’re done with our influences and now we just do what we do. We never set out to achieve anything in particular as far as an aesthetic is concerned. We’ve found lots of likeminded individuals who play music, but don’t all sound the same.”

Lee agrees. “The people we hang around with are our biggest influences now, rather than the records we listen to. Everybody goes through a period of hating where they live, but at the moment I’m really happy living in Melbourne. It’s a really exciting place to be. You can get trapped in a really small world, but in a way, that is a really fun thing to do. Even if the band stopped now, we’d be able to look back on this period in 20 years’ time and be amazed. We’ve played with Primitive Calculators twice – that’s pretty cool!”

“Hopefully, we’ll have a residency coming up at the Birmingham Hotel [in Melbourne] soon,” Koops adds, “and we’re really enjoying putting together the line-ups for those shows. There are so many bands we really like and love to play with. If we weren’t playing with them, we’d be going to their shows anyway.”

Lee has been impressed by the positive response from other local musicians and feels this has had an impact on the band, both musically and as part of a wider community. “There are certain bands we see that have had an influence on what we do, like Chrome Dome, Wasted Truth and Naked On The Vague. They are our friends and we enjoy what they do. In a way we’re the last in a line of bands, but we are finding our own little niche.”

Apart from contemplating the logistics of taking the “Organizer” on potential interstate and overseas tours, Repairs’ biggest challenge at the moment is to capture their sound on a recording. This is not a process they want to rush, explains Hepworth. “There’s no point in doing something like an album too early. We have very high expectations of what we would like to put out, so if the quality is not there yet, we’d rather keep working on it until we are happy. A lot of songs might only get played once and then discarded.”

The band, however, have some definite ideas of what they would like to achieve when they do take the plunge. “For starters, it wouldn’t be very long. We would have short songs and at the most, the record would go for about half-an-hour,” Lee states. “Too many bands just go on for too long,” Hepworth concurs. “I think that people are more receptive to our performances for the same reason. We have done 10 minute sets. Once the point is made, why repeat it?”

Koops is of the same opinion. “You want to leave people wanting more, not less. On occasion, people have asked us to play longer. We’ve been docked our rider before for not playing for 45 minutes. We only got half our rider,” he jokes. “If we’re ever in that situation again, our plan is to make as unpleasant a noise as possible until they ask us to stop.”

Right now, Koops prefers to focus on more immediate plans. “Hopefully our new 7” single will be released in October by Fifth Column. On our next recording we won’t be so limited by the instruments that we own, and we’re getting better at playing them.”

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Repairs will perform at the Flip Out festival at the Corner Hotel, Melbourne, on Saturday, September 5, 2.30pm. Tickets here.