Mikey Young: ‘I'm Really Worried About Getting Too Big A Head’

Eddy Current may be one of the biggest garage bands in this country, but relative notoriety hasn’t changed Mikey Young one bit. He’s still the down-to-earth, nonchalant guy that wrote “shitty” disco songs in his bedroom, writes MARK HEWITT.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] It’s 7.30pm on a Friday when Mikey Young walks into the front bar of Melbourne's John Curtin Hotel. He cuts an unassuming figure in a hooded grey jumper, and is lugging a heavy-looking bag – which I assume is full of records since he's DJing here tonight. He takes up a stool beside me, removes the bag from his shoulder and places it on the bar. He pulls out a tiny radio – a white, boxy thing with an aerial and handle, ghetto blaster-style. It's old, but the silver grill across the speaker is shiny, and it looks like it’s been well maintained over the years. He holds it up, looking across to the bartender. “Hey, Leon,” he says with a cheeky grin. “I brought this in, so we can listen to the footy.”

For one of the most active and revered members of Melbourne's music underground, the 33-year-old guitarist/engineer/songwriter is strikingly unpretentious. In conversation with Young, the fact that his garage-punk quartet Eddy Current Suppression Ring has gained such a formidable following seems beside the point; so too does his ever-growing resume as a recording engineer, which spans most of Melbourne's noisemaking community. On the subject of ECSR's spike in popularity – culminating earlier this year in a sold-out launch at the Palace for the band's third album, Rush to Relax – Young is ambivalent. “I feel like we're in a weird position – we're sort of, almost, a popular band. I try not to examine why we got any kind of popularity. I don't really want to be aware of it. I'm really worried about getting too big a head.”

“I'm not as bound to the city as I used to be. I can imagine living in the country, setting up a house with a large room and just recording there.”

His reluctance to embrace the attention certainly comes through in his account of the Palace show. “We've played Meredith [Music Festival] and stuff before, but this was the first show that was our show. And to get that kind of reaction ... I walked away feeling really numb. I did enjoy it, I just didn't know how to take it. I was looking out and there were people really intensely looking at us, singing every word...” He thinks for a second, as if still trying to process an image of the crowd. “It was just ... weird!”

Still, Young is grateful for the response. He’s aware that his band – still without a manager, major label, or any history of solid touring – has garnered the kind of audience that others would kill for, solely upon merit and word of mouth. “I felt [the Palace show] had a really positive, goodwill kind of vibe. It definitely had that aura of a happy celebration. Everyone seemed like they were proud of us for getting this far.”

In his formative years, Young composed instrumental music in private – a far cry from the ragged rock‘n’roll for which he’s become known. He played guitar in a few bands as a youngster, but nothing ongoing. “I realised I didn't really like being in bands. I couldn't really get my ideas across, or I just didn't find the right band that I wanted to do stuff with. So I ended up buying a computer and making a bunch of solo stuff, just for my own fun.”

Despite the lack of ambition, in 1999 some of his early recordings – which he affectionately describes as “instrumental soundtrack-y stuff, with the occasional shitty disco song” – ended up in the hands of Modular Records, and the label was keen to release them. This never eventuated for various reasons, but the process indirectly laid a foundation for Young. “I never played this stuff to anyone. But my friend liked it and gave it to a friend of his, and I ended up getting sort of signed for it. I got some money, and bought all my recording gear.”

Armed with a computer and a vintage 8-track tape machine, Young has since recorded the likes of My Disco, The Frowning Clouds, UV Race, Fabulous Diamonds, Super Wild Horses and Deaf Wish, not to mention his own side projects, The Ooga Boogas, Brain Children and burgeoning synth-punk outfit Total Control.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Initially not knowing what he was doing, he cites the recent Fabulous Diamonds II – a record made in a tiny bedroom above a shop in North Melbourne with “lots of space echo” – as a kind of personal recording breakthrough. “Sometimes I walk away scratching my head, thinking, ‘I haven't really nailed this’, and I feel bad for the band. And that was one of the first things where I thought, ‘I think I've done a really good job on this.’ And they are really happy.”

By the same token, he’s quick to argue that his good results always owe more to the artist. “It's easy when you work with good bands,” he says, matter-of-factly.

Young has cut his engineering teeth on Eddy Current, too. Though the band had a brief flirtation with a real studio on 2009's Australian Music Prize-winning Primary Colours, the modus operandi has remained the same no-frills affair: Mikey's old tape rig, and an unorthodox, minimal approach (not too many microphones, and everything done in a day or two). On Rush To Relax, Young decided to take the band out of the sterility of the studio and back into a basic rehearsal room (Revolver in Prahran, Melbourne).

“After every album, you listen to it and you think, ‘What's missing? What did I not quite get right? What do I want to do now?’ Our best performances are when we're not really thinking about recording, or where we're the most relaxed. So I thought, let's just do our normal weekly jam, and I’ll just go in an hour early and set up the recording gear and we’ll just play our songs. I went home that night, it sounded good, and that was it – ‘All right, this will do for the album.’”

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] The reversion to a non-traditional work environment reflects more than ECSR’s musical primitivism and the natural immediacy on which they thrive. Young sees proper recording studios as dubious workspaces, where bands think too much, tense up, and as he plainly puts it, “perform their worst”. If he is going to continue recording bands – something he sees as a potential long-term occupation – he wants to use a comfortable, laid-back space.

“I'm not as bound to the city as I used to be. I can imagine living in the country, setting up a house with a large room and just recording there, and having it always set up. People can come to me, and stay for the weekend or whatever. I always wanted to have a studio that didn't feel like a studio, that just felt like a lounge room – somewhere you would want to hang out anyway.”

In the meantime, Young remains focussed on his own music, with a decent amount of his schedule dedicated to playing live. ECSR have already toured the US on the back of Rush to Relax, and Young is currently in the US playing with Total Control, who are on tour with The UV Race. Nevertheless, he talks about touring the States as if it’s more of a holiday than anything else – an excuse to catch up with friends made on previous tours and an opportunity to play smaller and more intimate shows.

“I think that's why I probably like touring more now than playing in Melbourne, because [Eddy Current] only plays 400- or 500-capacity venues [on tour]. In Melbourne, it's really hard for us to do that.”

Getting back to basics, back to the roots of things, seems to be a recurring theme. “I think subconsciously that might be one of the reasons I start other bands that people don't care about – so I can go back to those dumb kinds of things. Like, ‘Let's play in a pizza shop or in a country town’, and not feel the pressure. It's probably why, after that Palace gig, I just want to let things die down for a while, let it chill out.”

Only half joking, he adds with a laugh: “And hopefully people will forget about us again.”