Features
The Vasco Era: ‘We’re Too Old To Ever Get Big’
By Max Easton
Ahead of their Lunchbox performance this Friday (October 7), The Vasco Era’s Sid O’Neil reveals some candid home truths to MAX EASTON.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
Sid O’Neil doesn’t have the internet, he doesn’t have a mobile phone, but with The Vasco Era, he has a much-loved rock band who have spent much of last decade struggling through critical condemnation. Moving to Melbourne from their small-town home of Victoria’s Apollo Bay in the early 2000s, The Vasco Era went on to release their difficult first album Oh We Do Like to Be By the Seaside, a record that O’Neil has explained as being a victim of their youthful tendency to take advice from the wrong places. “At that age you listen,” he says, “but now I know they were no more right than me.”
Recording 2009’s clean-edged Lucille in opposition to their raucous debut, the band was faced with a hold-up at the label’s end which saw the completed record put on hold for almost 18 months, during which O’Neil had what he calls a quarter-life crisis. He quit music, moved to Queensland and began a degree in social work by correspondence.
Four years after Lucille’s tumultuous release, the band have shucked their doubts to release their third and most confident record to date. Self-titled (almost in an acceptance of their own identity), it sees the raw edges of their debut meet the refined polish of Lucille for some welcome middle-ground, which spends its time walking between dark balladry and the jovial recklessness of leading single ‘Child Bearing Hips’.
After an end-of-year psychology exam, O’Neil spoke candidly to M+N about expectations, responsibility and change.
‘Child Bearing Hips’ is doing incredibly well on radio, were you expecting that sort of response when you put it out?
To tell you the truth, I don’t really know how triple j works – what makes them choose a song or not – so I never have any expectations at all. All I do is get our manager to give it to them and see what happens. I don’t know the theory, except that when I heard that ‘Rock It’ song by Little Red, I was pretty sure that was going to do well. Wait, which uh, newspaper thing are you working for?
This is for Mess+Noise.
Oh cool.
So I have to bug you about that whole Nirvana tribute thing…
[Cackles] That was funny.
What was the actual story behind that? It was such a bizarre series of events…
All that happened is, I got a call saying, “Do you want to play some Nirvana songs?”, and what I heard from my manager was, “You’ll be on first, and you’ll have to play 30 minutes of Nirvana songs acoustically”, and I said, “Yeah, I’ll do it … just what is it?” And the next thing I heard about it, I was doing $120 shows around the country with people I didn’t know and a five-piece band. So as soon as I heard that, I went, “Oh, my god”, and went straight onto every website that had mentioned it and said that I wasn’t doing it, and figured I’d let them deal with it. I felt pretty bad for the organisers, but I suppose I should have known more about it before they confirmed and put the news out.
I guess they could’ve told you they were planning an orchestral backing for a Nirvana show.
Yeah, well who knows? They might’ve confirmed it with someone else. You know how it is, a lot of people work for everyone and each other, and maybe they just assumed I wouldn’t have cared less about it, but I fuckin’ would never have done a show like that … and making people pay that sort of money for that – it makes me cringe. It was annoying when I read it, because people assumed that I’d not done it because the response was bad, but I’d not done it because I didn’t even know what it was.
Do those opportunities come up often? Because you had the Sino Music Exchange thing, and you featured on the Key of Sea record.
Aside from the Nirvana one, they’re just all from people we’ve met over the years. Like the Sino exchange. A guy who’d seen us worked at the Australian embassy in China, and just sent us an email saying, “Do you want to come? We’ve got some funding.” So we said, “Yes, please.” The refugee one was an obvious one, because everyone is aware of that issue and I don’t think anyone would say no to that.
I’ve been really enjoying the new record, and it’s a lot rougher than your last one. What led you back down that path?
It was a combination, in hindsight, of not being that content with the sound of the last one, which was nothing to do with Scott [Fitzgerald, producer of Seaside and Lucille] … We’ve been chasing our tails for a number of years, the first one, we thought was too screamy and too harsh, so we went too far the opposite way for the second one and made it too clean. This time, we just said we’d play it live how we’d done at home, which sounds simple, but we hadn’t done that before, so that was exactly what it was – it took no time to record. There were maybe three of the tracks where the vocals were the ones we did in the original take, so yeah, the sound of it is more to do with us actually sounding the way we always should have.
It’s almost like you’ve been running away from the idea people have had of the band for the past couple of albums.
That’s exactly true. We’ve kind of accepted the fact that we’re too old to ever get big and too un-cool to ever be critically lauded, so we’re kind of in between that. But it’s become about the community of people who already like it and making them have a good time; that’s what it is for us. We’re a long way past thinking we’re going to be the next Nirvana like everyone told us when we were 19 – and you kind of believe that at that age – but we’re [also] a long way from thinking we’re ever going to make a living off it. We all do other shit, so it’s become a lot of fun. There are still some constraints to the idea of being in this band, because you want the people who already like it to continue to like it. We’re not going to do an acoustic album with 10 really long songs. The Vasco Era has been around since I was 15 and now I’m 25, so it’s kind of taken on a life of its own … We owe all our parents money [laughs], so we have to keep trying to do it to get that back to them.
So you do feel a responsibility to what you’ve done in the past?
Definitely, definitely. I feel a responsibility to all the people who liked us at the start, a responsibility to my brother [bassist Ted O’Neil] and our drummer [Michael Fitzgerald] who’ve pretty much gone with me and halted their lives over the years, and to my parents, to everyone. It’s definitely become something that is maybe more about the idea of the band than the artistic merits. The bands that are critically acclaimed or whatever, I hear that and I get it completely, and I don’t know if I’d be able to do that if I tried, but it’s not something that we could do with this band, if that makes sense?
The nice harmonic stuff and the dissonance and the restraint, and the repetitiveness, all those things, we can’t do that … so it’s an interesting position to be in. I think I’m gonna start another band – still with the other guys, but with more people – and kind of let that side of us out a bit, maybe next year. Not to say that I’m not still enjoying this, but there are definitely constraints to it.
It’s interesting to hear you say that, and I actually mean this as a compliment, but this record sounds like no one’s trying. It’s a very natural record.
Yeah, that’s exactly right. I’d have a bunch of lines that I think are kind of funny or pertinent to me, and the chords, and we’d go in and play it for a bit and the guys will tell me which bits are shit or whatever, and then that’s it … There are no harmonies or extra guitar parts or anything. I’m interested in getting into that some day, but for us, I think it’s my favourite album by a mile – and I know everyone says that – but just for the sound and just because we’ve learned how to relax a little bit. Before, we were trying to do the whole statement albums; both of them were concept albums. At that age, you think you’re going to be really critically acclaimed, so you make these really detailed concepts in your head about stories and things, and really no one has any idea what you’re talking about. It’s getting to that age where you realise you’re part of a bigger thing than you, and you’re not better than everyone else at it, and then relaxing and becoming self-deprecating, but not in a negative way.
I guess when you were young, you were almost a victim of timing in how you came out of the woodwork around the time of the blues-and-roots surge and that whole Vines/Wolfmother thing. It seemed to me like people kept trying to lap you into something, but didn’t know where you stood.
Yeah, but that’s not really unlucky … Being from a small town [Apollo Bay in Victoria], there wasn’t cool and not cool, or scenes to tell us what was what. We just decided that because we were from a small town, we wanted to play gigs in Melbourne. So we tried to copy whatever sound was the biggest at the time, which I think when you’re 17, that’s not that bad a thing to do. I think everyone does that. So we did start off where I played a lot of slide guitar because we’d seen John Butler do it – he was really popular at the Apollo Bay music festival – then The Vines and The White Stripes came out, so we tried to copy that…
I don’t think we were a victim of timing, I think we were a victim of being noticed when we were a little too young. There are people now that I’m so surprised about, that are 18 or 19, and they know every cool band in the history of mankind you know? And I didn’t. But they get their taste drilled into them by other people, or their brother’s cool friends or whatever, so they’ve already got a head start on us.
You’ve spoken about giving up on music a few years back. Has that feeling faded now that you’ve got this record out of your system?
I’m always thinking that the grass is always greener on the other side. Now that this album is coming out, I’m really interested in doing something else – not quitting and not doing the album, or whatever – but I’m really interested in this next idea I’ve had. The older I get, the more I think The Vasco Era has had – I’m not ever going to stop it, but I know that it’s not that artistically satisfying for me. It’s got nothing to do with the other guys in the band, because I want them to be a part of it if I do anything else, but just because of the constraints of the whole idea. In reality, we’re still trying to make music that people who already like our band will still like, so that in itself is a form of constraint. I don’t have enough Bob Dylan in me to turn my back on everyone who’s helped us and make some statement. It’d be cool if I did, but it’s just not my personality.
I guess that equates with how comfortable the album feels, maybe just as a realisation of who you are. ‘Rock n Roll Is The Only thing That Makes Me Feel Good’ sounds so much like someone coming out of a depression and realising who they are.
Yeah, and that’s my favourite song by a mile, because I think those lyrics are so true it’s not even funny. So many times I’ll be taking drugs or whatever and I’ll have a week where I just feel shit, and the only thing that makes me feel good is listening to ‘Roadrunner’ by Modern Lovers … It just fixes you. So I really do believe that to my personality, it has a certain sort of healing agent. Because you know, I have tried all those things in the song … I’d be happy if this album exists just so people can hear that song. [Laughs]
Does that mean this might be your last one?
No, I don’t think so. I want to do another one, but I want to do something else too. We have so much fun playing live, and we know each other so well. It’s almost like an in-joke inclusive of the crowd, because we know there are a lot of people out there who might have ideas about what our band is, but it’s more about the people already in here, which probably isn’t a good attitude to have if you want to be our manager or our booking agent.
The last time we spoke, you were talking about going for a record with a lot of space, you were talking about those ’60s Dylan records and all of that.
Yeah…
“We tried to do stereo things, but there was no fuckin’ point. It was like trying to put a piano in the left can of 'Nevermind' … It just wouldn’t work.”
That didn’t happen?
The space thing is really hard with a three-piece band … You have to remember that I change my idea of what I want to do every month, but at that time I wanted to get a lot of session people in and have my guitar barely audible and fill it out with other stereo things. But if the songs we had did sound like that, it wouldn’t have been in-your-face enough to have the effect that it does. You wouldn’t notice it with this album, because the guitars are as distorted as they can get the whole time. We tried to do stereo things, but there was no fuckin’ point. It was like trying to put a piano in the left can of Nevermind … It just wouldn’t work.
It’s a very dirty sounding record actually, is it kind of an ode to those ’90s fuzz bands like Dinosaur Jr or…
[Laughs] Oh yeah, it’s supposed to sound like Pavement pretty much. I mean it ended up sounding a lot more hi-fi than them, but aesthetically, the ’90s is completely where we got the whole idea from. I don’t think there’s any clean guitar on the whole thing, maybe for a few seconds at the start of a song. It’s a good position to be in critically, especially for the websites that are a little more indie, or whatever. I just don’t expect anything positive anymore because of the kind of music that we make. It just doesn’t correlate with what most indie fans think should be able to get good criticism, it doesn’t correlate with those ideas. So when you know that’s not going to happen, you’re not anxious about an album coming out anymore. I kind of already know what people are going to say about it, so it seems a lot less stressful this time around.
So the pressure’s eased then?
Yeah, it’s like lowering your expectations, or realising that what you like and what you think is good, isn’t what critics think is good. You can’t change that ever … so it’s never going to matter. It’s a good thing.
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