Storytellers: The UV Race

The UV Race’s ‘Driving in Our Car’ is much more than a beatnik ode to the road, writes SHAUN PRESCOTT.

‘Driving in Our Car’

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Even if you’ve already pored over the liner notes for UV Race’s debut LP and read the typically unpunctuated and breathless explanatory notes (from Marcus), you might still have trouble understanding the understated perfection of ‘Driving in Our Car’. Imagine: you’re stuck on the outskirts of the little Victorian town of Warragul, you can’t get a tram into the centre of town, and even if you could the trains to Melbourne take a couple of hours. You’re locked in your township. There’s nothing to do.

Kids in the city don’t understand the frustrations of rural Australian life. A day on foot wandering the main drag of a town like Warragul is slow and without consequence. Nothing much happens. Your town is big enough for a Maccas but too small for commuters to explore. Most people in the world – in the city nearby – don’t even know your world exists. If you’ve got a car, or a mate with a car, you get in it and drive. Driving makes life seem quicker and more exciting. Velocity and respite all in one. The landscape isn’t allowed to become oppressive – it floats seamlessly by. You can’t stare at it. Driving in a car, in rural Australia, is an escape. This is why cars are so important to kids in the sticks and suburbs. This is why young thugs do laps. It’s a way out.

There are two songs about transport (escaping) on UV Race’s debut LP. The other song, ‘Meet Me Under The Clocks’, is about how Marcus would arrange for Melbourne friends to meet him under the clocks at Flinders Street Station after his commute from Warragul into Melbourne, and how exciting that moment of arrival is.

‘Driving In Our Car’ is just about driving though. The song is very different to the rest of the UV Race LP: it’s lethargic and satisfied, adorned with lazy bass and longing saxophone, eyes half closed and feet on the glove box, window all the way down and the hot regional wind battering like a masseuse on your face. It’s about journeys that go nowhere – travel on the close peripheries of your comfort zone for the cathartic hell of it. Escaping the landscapes that are branded on your every day. Seeing the world anew, in ways too intimate and insignificant to voice. It’s much more than a beatnik ode to the road though – it’s travel as survival instinct, recalling Laughing Clowns in sound and The Triffids in spirit.

Marcus Rechsteiner on ‘Driving in Our Car’

This song came about when we were having a jam, and it was real cruisy and slow compared to the others songs we have. I wanted to write lyrics that suited the cruisy nature of the song, a topic that went along with the song that felt like a journey. I then wanted to put a summer feel to it cause it felt like a summery song to me. I thought about car trips to the beach and how fun they are. When I was a teenager for my birthday my parents would drive my friends and I to the beach for the day cause my birthday is in January. I then expanded that to road trips.

I had never gone on an unplanned road trip but I imagined it would be exciting just getting some friends and camping gear and setting off on the road. That’s why I sing, “I don't know how far we will go?” The meaning of this song has changed for me, because since it has been written I went on an unplanned road trip with a friend of a friend.

My father passed away in August and I went back to work shortly afterwards. I work with people with disabilities and it was stressing me out a bit, as well as the fact that most of my friends live in Melbourne and I still live in Warragul. I was waiting for my friends to not be so busy and spend time with me but I had a total mental break down and got very low and depressed. I got two weeks sick leave from my doctor and I stayed with an older friend of mine and her husband and she encouraged me to get away. They had a friend who wanted to go away as well, so we went on a road trip together. I didn't know her but I soon did. We went through Gippsland, through the coast to NSW, we got as far as Batemans Bay and it was an amazing trip. It broke the severe depression I had and it was very liberating dropping everything and being on the road. This song means a lot more to me now and I hope to do many more road trips when I have a couple of weeks to see where I get to.

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The UV Race’s self-titled debut is out now through Aarght!.