The Grates: ‘It Was Time To Come Clean’

Back in Australia and touring their new LP 'Secret Rituals', The Grates vocalist Patience Hodgson talks to MATT SHEA about losing a drummer, gaining a new sound, and wanting to crawl around on the stage more.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] I’d heard Patience Hodgson enjoys a chat, and I recently found out for myself the full force of her untethered tongue. The Grates’ vocalist moves her conversations at a million miles per hour, topic after topic being introduced, elaborated upon, and bowled over in record time.

In fairness to Hodgson, there’s a lot of ground to cover. Stuff has been happening for The Grates – serious stuff. First, there was the move to New York to record the new album, Secret Rituals. And then there was the departure of drummer, Alana Skyring. When news of Skyring’s flight to culinary school started seeping into the music press there was a temptation to write the band off: even for a three-piece – that most gang-like of rock groups – The Grates had always seemed particularly inseparable.

But Hodgson and guitarist John Patterson turned what could have been a crippling loss into an opportunity to retool their sound on Secret Rituals. Gone is the angular, somersaulting attitude, replaced by something that’s altogether more considered and fluid. It’s tempting to call it mature – after all, The Grates’ are well into their 20s now – but then Hodgson still loves cheap beer, graphic novels and dancing like a mentalist.

You’re speaking to me from Brisbane, is that right?
Yes! And you’re in Brisbane!

I am. Where are you living at the moment?
Camp Hill [an inner suburb of Brisbane]. It’s a bit of a band house at the moment; it’s lots of fun. Ben [Marshall] just came out from New York – who recorded drums on the album – and he’s coming on tour. I’ve never been on a band camp, but it’s got that feeling. We’re just rehearsing every day, doing six or seven hours of rehearsing. At the moment we’re on our weekend – Wednesday, Thursday – and we go and rehearse, do big long rehearsal days, come home every night, and cook a big communal dinner. My sister’s there as well and it’s just lots of fun. I’m loving it. I never realised Camp Hill had so much to offer! [Laughs]

Is it nice to be back in Brisbane?
I love it.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Are you rediscovering things that you never thought you’d miss in the first place?
Not so much little things that I didn’t know I’d miss. There were things that I certainly missed while I was in New York, like the weather and friends and family and small things like Vegemite. [Laughs] But I really wanted to write the album in New York, so we pretty much spent a year-and-a-half there, and when the album was finished I was just really excited to come home. In the two weeks before we finished recording the album we shoved so much Americana down our throats. We went out and drank so many cheap beers and ate so much Mexican, so many burgers, had so much pizza, and partied so many nights that when we were leaving it was, like, “This is time to go!” Plus, we were mixing the album pretty much as we were exiting, and doing photo shoots, and it just turned into insanity during the last three weeks in New York. It was just time to come home; that was really exciting.

It seems like it takes a couple of weeks to get back into the swing of things, because the pace really is so much slower in Brisbane. Even though we didn’t really have any friends or family and we weren’t interacting with that many people over there: we’d just go into the band room every day and just really work on songwriting. There’s definitely a vibrancy and a pace that I guess seeps into you.

I’ve only ever visited for a week but I get what you mean.
Yeah, it just happened. And I came home and I was like, “Oh my god! This is so slow. Everything is so slow. I can’t understand.” It was a bit of a weird thing. Things I do miss [about the US]: the cheap beer. In Australia I definitely feel like we’ve got this whole weird beer culture that’s just insane and I don’t understand. My mum thinks beer’s really evil. The whole time I was in New York I did not come across one security guard, and then I came back to Australia and I was like, “What are we? A bunch of animals? Do we need to have security guards at every pub?!”

Apparently so.
Apparently we can’t drink beer and not want to kill each other, which just blows my mind. Considering how cheap alcohol is in the States – it’s even cheaper and no one’s killing each other. So that was one of the things I had to get used to coming back to Brisbane: I was just not going to party as much; I can’t afford to party as much.

How did that New York experience feed into Secret Rituals?
I think most of the inspiration from living in New York was really getting out of our comfort zone. Just so many things happened. Alana leaving: that really changed how we wrote songs completely. We didn’t have that security blanket of big masking cymbals over in the corner any more. We started writing songs a lot more quietly, which was a new thing for us, and I don’t think either of us anticipated how intimate it would become, writing the songs. I did have to develop a new kind of confidence in knowing that John could hear everything that I was saying immediately. So I had to get more confident and a lot more direct; no more singing in metaphors. There was no more luxury of time while they [John and Alana] were working out things for me to ponder my lyrics and think about a weird way that I could say something that was really ordinary. Now it’s just about saying really ordinary things but really sincerely and in a way that isn’t too cliched. So that was a big change in how we wrote songs, and I think it was just being out of our comfort zone – in blizzards, just in freezing cold weather. There were two occasions that I remember very clearly, where we were trapped in the band room because it was a complete white out blizzard.

On those sorts of occasions were you wondering what you’d gotten yourself into?
I was okay for a while and then I’d be like, “Alright, I’m really hungry now. Is this just it? Do we just have to [stay in here]?” John loved it: no calls, no nothing, and of course they had a beer-vending machine at the rehearsal studios with $2 beers. So he was completely fine – he’s the kind of guy who can go all day without eating food. I’m such a foodie, though, and I’d be like, “I need some FOOD! I’m stuck in this band room!” [Laughs] But it was good. It pushed us. This was just after the first time we came back to Australia – over three weeks during the summer of 2009 and 2010 – and there we were, stuck in this blizzard, and I think everything just culminated into a point, and we got the real spark of inspiration for [the songs] ‘Turn Me On’ and ‘Change’ and ‘Crying All Night’. That happened all in that day, so there was a silver lining!

The album is a big step from your earlier work. But listening back to it, are you guys still a bit surprised by exactly how different it sounds?
I’m not really surprised. Those things were definitely catalysts that changed how we did things, but I could already sense that there was a shift towards new territory. It was already underway. I could feel that we were wanting to search out new sounds and wanting to do things differently than we had previously. So I think that was bound to happen, but I do think Alana leaving was a catalyst: it made it happen a lot quicker than what would have happened had she not left … I’m sure that Alana would have left at some stage anyway, so this just ended up being such perfect timing.

We had all of these new chapters while we were in New York, and even just getting bass on the album changed things: having another instrument playing harmony to work off – John could stop! We started adding more instruments on the second album, but this time around it was just nice to have it sound more authentically like a band. And just working backwards – working towards the drums – changed things. Drums can really set the energy of the song immediately, whereas when it’s with the guitar, you can slow or you can speed up the pace of playing a melody or a chord. But if you really want to change the mood or the tone of the energy of this song you need to change what you’re playing on guitar. I call it writing backwards: for some reason I feel like we’d always written really heavily with drums and guitar at the same time, and for the first time now it was guitar, then it was bass, then it was drums – often it was guitar, bass and then synth.

Obviously, this is not an experimental record, but we did experiment a lot in the band room while we were writing. John fucked around with heaps of vintage synthesisers. Just for me, it was fun to have the open space in the band room without having drums there – just to mess around with how I was doing my vocals and singing in a really low register. Like [the songs] ‘Change’ and ‘The Night Won’t Start Without Us’ both have really low register, and I got such a kick out of being a girl and getting as low as I possibly could sing. That’s been a challenge, getting them down live, because I’m fine at singing them right now standing in a room, but the second I do a little dance it becomes really hard. [Laughs]

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] I did want to talk to you about that a bit later, but one of the first songs on your first record is ‘Lies are So Much More Fun’. It made me laugh listening back to it given you’ve talked a lot more about being honest with this record. What drove that? Do you think it dripped into the music as well?
I think it did. I think it was something about being in the room and writing songs for John really changed my approach to vocals and lyrics. It was really intimidating, me singing vocals just with John there, alone. And I think there were times when I’d say, “We can’t look at each other. You have to turn around! I can’t handle knowing that you can hear every single word.” You can hear all the flaws in a person’s voice – the timbre and all the character in it – but when you’re singing with drums so much is hidden, and I really came in touch with how my voice actually sounded just in a room. That was really intimidating for me. But I think once I started getting over that hurdle I started feeling a lot more comfortable with writing honestly, and I’d never written proper songs about break-ups or relationships or how I felt about people in the past, and when I had – like on ‘Lies are Much More Fun’ – there’s so many things in that song to do with John and Alana and a relationship I was in that you would probably never get because it’s so hidden in metaphor.

I just felt it was time to come clean and I feel like getting over writing alone in the band room with John helped me feel like I could be more honest. With the song ‘With You’: it’s about that obsession you get in the early stages of a relationship, where you just want to wrap yourself up in that one person, and no other thing in the whole entire world can be as good as just spending time with that one person. The song’s just about being obsessed with somebody, and I would have never written a song like that before, I don’t think. Also, I do feel like I needed to become more direct, because all of a sudden I’d be singing things that felt silly in front of John – knowing that he could hear them immediately – so I would just change to being more direct. I don’t think you can get much more direct than a couple of the lyrics on the song, except for ‘Borrowed Skin’: that one’s a bit more cryptic. You would have had to read this graphic novel called ‘Black Hole’ to get it. [Laughs]

It sounds like John almost became your therapist.
Oh no! No-no-no-no-no! He’s not my therapist! [Laughs] You don’t argue with your therapist, do you?

Your mother, then.
Yeah! [Laughs]

One of the things that I was really interested to read was a comment John made about ceasing to try to be so original.
Yes!

And not being afraid to learn from your favourite songwriters. Some would think that’s taking things in reverse.
Yeah, I think that we just spent too much time on the last album trying to be original – it just took away from the songs. I just don’t think they were as good as they could have been because we were looking for ways to set them apart from other bands.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Always looking for that right hand turn.
Yeah, rather than going, “Let’s just forget about looking for ways to set it apart and concentrate on how the song feels to play. How does it feel when we just sit down with guitar and bass? When it’s just this stripped back, how does it feel?” It was that instead of relying on the gimmick of a drum roll or a weird keyboard line. Even though I still love doing things that are just a little bit left-of-centre that aren’t too cliched. Like, on the whole album we only used one guitar. John’s got a Harmony guitar, and that’s not a very common guitar. Your normal guitar is a [Fender] Tele or a Stratocaster – but that’s a really common sound. So I think there were still little ways in which we could bring in a new flavour, while not trying to be, “Oh my god! How original can we be about this?!” And just sitting down and talking to each other about the bands that we liked: we’d never done that before. I love the Breeders, I love Kim Deal: I think she’s my most favourite songwriter and musician ever, and John didn’t know that much about them. But then he really made me listen to Sparklehorse and Butthole Surfers.

Let’s talk about the live dates you’ve got coming up. Are you looking forward to playing in Australia again?
Oh my god! I’m so looking forward to playing in Australia again. [Laughs] I can’t wait – it’s been so long. Just going back down to Sydney, hitting Melbourne, it’s been yonks since we’ve been to Perth, and also there’s like this whole other added element of excitement because we get to take Ben around and he’s never been to Australia before.

He’s having his mind blown as we speak.
He is having his mind blown! He loves Australia, and he’s actually so cute about it. He keeps talking in an Australian accent all the time, and he always says, “Thanks seven mate.” [Laughs] He loves 7mate, he loves the television, he loves pies, and then the other day it took me about 40 minutes to understand that he wanted a lamington. He’s really excited. Then I’ve got a friend of mine from high school [Miranda Duetsch], who’s just one of those amazing people who picks up any instrument and she plays. She’s coming on tour: we’ve got a long history together and she’s a bit of a food hippie like I am, so I’m really excited. We’re on hydration patrol every time we rehearse; the guys have got it sooooo good. [Laughs]

This is what I wanted to ask you before. That measured approach in the songwriting – that’s being reflected onstage?
I think it’s going to be. I really want the songs to speak for themselves. These songs have their own confidence.

“We didn’t have that security blanket of big masking cymbals over in the corner any more. We started writing songs a lot more quietly.”

They do.
You know what I think it is? I think it’s the rhythm section on the album. You can really get your head into a groove – your head can lock into a groove and we’ve really worked on trying to make that the same groove for the whole album and limiting the amount of drumbeats that were in a song. I think that’s the thing that changes these songs live, when compared to the old ones, because there were so many different drumbeats in the previous Grates albums: I was always jumping from one particular beat to another, and I think it was a way for me to keep the audience up with what was going on. But now I think they’ll just get their heads locked into a pattern and will get the groove, and then it will just stay on that groove for the whole song. I just want to do a bit more psychedelic ’60s dancing. I just want to crawl around on the stage more. I’ve been crawling around on the floor in the band room recently – I really feel like I want to get low. [Laughs]

You’ll have to pick your venues if you want to do that.
I know! There are some gross floors out there!

Looking beyond June, what are the plans for the band?
We’ll just do more touring. We’ve got The Hives support, which is so fucking awesome. I can’t wait to go on tour with them – I’m going to learn a thing or two about showmanship, definitely!

You’re trying to dial down your live performance and you’re touring with The Hives?
I’ll be trying to dial it down and he’ll [singer Pelle Almqvist] be diallin’ it up. They’re one of those bands that if you haven’t seen them before, you have to see them. And then, Splendour in the Grass: holy f-balls! This will be Miranda and Ben’s first experience playing a big festival like that, as well. That, I am so excited about.

It’s been a couple of years for you now, hasn’t it?
Yes!

You guys used to be a bit of a staple at Splendour.
I know. Well we’re back now! Get your meat ‘n’ veg! [Laughs] But I reckon we’re going to come up with a bit more than just bread and butter this year, hopefully. We’re starting to get ideas together now.

But you feel you’re ready to translate that confidence in your songwriting to the stage?
Well I hope so! Let’s see how we go on this first tour, but it feels good. I think something that will be fun is that all of the old songs will have a bit of a new and different dynamic on them. We’ve added bass to songs that previously never had it before and taken the keyboards out, so it’s going to be new.

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‘Secret Rituals’ is out now via Dew Process.

‘SECRET RITUALS’ TOUR:

Fri, June 24 – Oxford Art Factory, Sydney, NSW
Sat, June 25 – Corner Hotel, Melbourne, VIC
Fri, July 1 – The Hi-Fi, Brisbane, QLD