Storytellers: Gully Platoon

Acid eaters, mushroom farmers, fucking fridge pissers – Melbourne hip-hop collective Gully Platoon channel John Birmingham’s 'He Died With a Felafel in His Hand' on their “accidental” radio hit ‘Coat Of Paint’. JODY MACGREGOR talks to Dialectrix (aka Ryan Leaf) about the song’s origins.

‘Coat Of Paint’

‘Coat of Paint’ begins with a squelchy bass beat, clapping hands and the authoritative voice of Pegz rapping: “I used to live in a small apartment, my bedroom looked like a laundry basket.” It’s the kind of stuff anyone who has lived in cheap accommodation can empathise with – he can put up with the cat piss on the stairs, but what really bugs him is the fact his lazy landlord won’t fix the heater. When the chorus kicks the rest of Gully Platoon (Dialectrix and Joe New) join him to share in the cathartic public shaming: “My whole life needs a coat of paint, a couple nails won’t hold me straight.”

Dialectrix takes the second verse, relating his story of living with filthy housemates who are “so grubby that they wouldn’t flush a shit in the dunny”. Again, you can probably empathise. I certainly can. Then again, I used to live in a place where mushrooms grew up through the holes in the bathroom floor after it rained and I just left them there to add to the “ambience”.

In the final verse, delivered by Joe New, the bass drops away for a moment leaving the drum front and centre as he rhymes about the flatmate who never washed his clothes. It ends with a quote from John Birmingham’s He Died With a Felafel in His Hand, appropriately enough, which catalogues hellish housemates – “acid eaters, mushroom farmers, fucking fridge pissers!” – before the door slams shut on all their filthy hovels.

Dialectrix is at pains to explain that, although ‘Coat of Paint’ was doing the regular rounds on triple j at the time of its release, that wasn’t their intent when writing the track. “We never sat there and consciously went, ‘Our album’s dark and it’s avant-garde and strange. We need to make a radio hit or something that’s a bit more accessible.’ That just came naturally.”

Dialectrix on ‘Coat of Paint’

I said that we should try and do some with a bit of an umbrella theme which all of us can relate to. Then Pegz sent through his verse for ‘Coat of Paint’ so he was the one who was the genius behind that track if you will. I read the lyrics straight off the page and thought it was funny as shit and tried to do a verse in a similar way. Joe got both mine and Pegz’s verses and did the same, so that was the way it all came together. We’ve all lived in sharehouses so it was easy for us to milk the subject matter out of that.

“We’ve all lived in sharehouses so it was easy for us to milk the subject matter out of that.”

My parents came from the working class and the whole artist/alcoholic lifestyle didn’t really fit with where they were at, so they sent me to get a job or piss off. I didn’t believe them until I came home and all my shit was on the front lawn.

My verse was actually about when I was living with heroin addicts. Cause the track was so light-hearted and humorous it really didn’t fit – talking about people on the harry – so I left that out and just talked about how dirty they were. They were all injecting heroin behind my back and me not knowing it cause I was only 17. We all had pretty gnarly circumstances. Joe led a big bachelor life for many years and I actually lived on Joe’s couch for a bit when I was homeless. We omitted these things that didn’t fit with the nature of the song … Still, I think I got across what I wanted to: the finer details of how fucked up shared living conditions can be.

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Gully Platoon’s The Great Divide is out now on Obese.