Features
An Horse: ‘We Don’t Have Much Of A Presence At Home’
By Doug Wallen
One of our biggest indie exports is an unassuming, no-frills duo from Queensland. But despite their overseas success, An Horse drummer Damon Cox tells DOUG WALLEN they have unfinished business back home in Australia.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] For all the flamboyance that’s resurged in music lately, there remains comfort in a straight-ahead rock band. That’s An Horse for you: singer-guitarist Kate Cooper and drummer Damon Cox don’t resort to grizzled blues or blown-out loudness for their Brisbane-formed two-piece, but rather the kind of finely honed songs that cut to the bone.
Embraced overseas thanks to a US record deal and tours with Tegan and Sara and Death Cab for Cutie, An Horse has just answered its scrappy debut Rearrange Beds with the crisper, clearer Walls, a ringing collection of guitar-and-drums anthems defined by Cooper’s distinctly gulped vocals and wounded lyrics.
Having done time in the Brisbane bands Iron On and Intercooler, respectively, Cooper and Cox started An Horse while working together at the dearly departed record store Skinny’s. Their subsequent rise has been decidedly an overseas phenomenon, but the Melbourne-based Cox says that even with the band living on different continents, there’s a strong desire to re-establish their presence at home.
It looks like you two are split between continents at the moment.
We are. We’re on the road a lot, so we’re together most of the time. But when we’re not on the road, I’m living in Melbourne now and Kate’s living in Toronto. It’s fine. There’s only two of us in the band, so it’s quite easy to get together when we need to, for work and for touring.
Is that distance ever a good thing, after being around each other so much on tour?
It’s kind of cool. I mean, we talk every day, regardless of where we are, just to keep everything moving. It has its challenges as well, but for the most part it doesn’t matter too much in this day and age. If there was five of us in the band, it might be a different story.
I know you met in Brisbane, but where are you each originally from?
I grew up in country Victoria, in Shepparton. I moved to Queensland when I was like 18, once I finished school, and lived in Brisbane for years and years. Kate grew up on the Gold Coast. We played in other bands in Brisbane for years before, but quickly after we started An Horse we were touring a lot, especially overseas.
Yeah, you’ve done very prominent support tours.
It’s been really cool. Not too long after we put out our first record, we were doing big support tours in the US. So we got used to playing with each other in bigger rooms, which is different. In other bands we’d played in, we’d only ever played smaller rooms. We still play small clubs on our own, but I think when we do get thrown onto those bigger stages with other bands, it feels more natural to us. Because we started out playing those bigger rooms, it feels a lot better. We’re more comfortable playing in front of 1000 people than 100 people. [Laughs] But it definitely helped us grow musically and learn how to play off each other. We’ve played hundreds of shows over the past few years. We’re really looking forward to coming back home and doing some shows finally, because it’s been way too long.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
For a two-piece, your band doesn’t sound like it’s trying to mask anything or make it sound bigger than it actually is. Was that something you had to arrive at?
Not really. [When] we started playing together, we were kind of frustrated with our other bands we’d played in. We weren’t really happy and we were just bored, I guess. We were good friends and we worked in a music store and listened to music all day. We always loosely talked about maybe playing together one day, and we eventually did. We didn’t really talk about what kind of band we wanted to be or what sounds we wanted to make. We just got into a rehearsal room and started playing songs we’d written. We just wanted to make honest music that we liked.
And being just a duo keeps it very direct and no-frills.
Yeah, definitely. It’s always just guitar and drums and two vocals on stage. With the new record, we wanted to make it sound a little bit bigger or more layered or just sonically better than the last record. But we didn’t want to make it so big that it sounded like more people.
You recorded this album in Vancouver?
We did the first one in Brisbane and then mixed it in Vancouver. We sent it to Howard Redekopp [Tegan & Sara, The New Pornographers]. We worked with him [as producer] on the new record. So we got to spend a couple months in Vancouver in the summer. We were off the road at the time so we didn’t have any distractions. We had to plan it a lot more this time and talk about what kind of record we wanted to make, whereas the last one was just a couple of EPs that ended up being put together. It wasn’t the most cohesive record. It was two people playing together, very early in the life of the band. We hadn’t played many shows when we made the first record, so making the second one was a lot more exciting.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] An Horse - Dressed Sharply by anhorse
You’ve had a lot of big breaks in the States, like playing Letterman and doing those support tours. Was there a certain turning point for all of that?
We’re signed to an American label [Mom + Pop] and our manager is based in America, so the opportunities just presented themselves more so in the States. And we’ve toured Germany and the UK a bunch of times. It just happened that way. It wasn’t that we were avoiding Australia. When we first started, we were playing quite a bit at home. We just felt like we needed to move where the opportunities were. And we’ve met a lot of bands along the way. A lot of the bigger bands we’ve toured with has just been from meeting them and knowing them and them asking us out of the road.
Does Kate write all the lyrics for the band?
Yeah, basically Kate will send me acoustic demos of songs she’s written. [Later] we get together in the one room and pull the songs apart and put them back together and rewrite them together musically.
“We worked in a music store and listened to music all day. We always loosely talked about maybe playing together one day, and we eventually did.”
There’s a line Kate sings in ‘Swallow the Sea’ – “Maybe it’s my convict blood.” Do you ever feel disconnected from Australia from touring abroad so much?
I do. My girlfriend’s in Melbourne and it’s really great to go home and see her. I do feel a little disconnected from the music scene. We don’t have much of a presence at home, because we don’t really play here a lot. Which, again, is something we really want to change. I want to be able to play for people at home and build something at home that was built overseas.
Do you get out to see bands in Melbourne much?
Yeah, I do. I mean, we spend so much time in clubs and seeing bands [while touring] – I’m always seeing bands and around bands. But definitely. I live in Northcote, so I’m always looking for something cool if it’s on. I went to the Laneway Festival a couple months ago and that was really cool. I hadn’t been to a festival at home in so long. Such a good line-up.
I know you didn’t write the lyrics for ‘Airport Death’, but does that have anything to do with travelling and touring?
I’m pretty sure that song’s about an experience Kate had on her own in an airport. I think someone approached her about something. I don’t know exactly what went down, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience.
Is it strange for you to not know the full stories behind Kate’s lyrics?
No, it doesn’t bother me. I don’t drill her about what the songs are about, because as the songs grow and we put them together and play them more, they always take on their own meanings for me. It’s open to interpretation. Anybody who’s listening can get what they want out of it. I like that mystery about the songs.
+