Features
Track By Track: The Spinning Rooms
Contributions by Peter Dickinson
Original page credit: Doug Wallen
The Spinning Rooms’ self-titled debut is almost a small-town-Australian horror story, judging from the commentary of singer-guitarist PETER DICKINSON.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
‘101011’
In my mind, this whole album takes place in some hole-in-the-map country town, the kind of backwater where you subconsciously push some weight on the accelerator as you’re driving through and everyone agrees that the bakery an hour down the road probably has better pies even though no one’s eaten since Orbost and the person riding shotgun is smoking their last cigarette. You know the type: one school, one footy oval, one church, two pubs and a shitload of flies. There’s almost certainly an abattoir or some type of obscure factory that makes pre-packaged tomato sauce sachets or some shit like that and employs half the township, financing their weekend drinking and casual ice habits. This is the landscape in which the entire album is set and this first song is a preamble, of sorts. It’s about a couple of homecoming city dwellers trying and failing horribly to reconnect with their small-town roots.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] 101011 by TheSpinningRooms
‘Good God’
This is probably the oldest song we’ve got that we still play. We lifted the bass line directly from the Morphine track ‘Thursday’. Tom Lyngcoln (who recorded and mixed the album) really whipped this into shape from being a freestyle live thing into something with actual parts and dynamics. Just like a real song by a real band.
This is the real Wake in Fright moment on the album. You know the feeling: brutally hungover, sweating bullets, delirium tremens and a swollen tongue that tastes like paint thinner. It’s the horror of waking up in a strange bloke’s bedroom, realising where you are and … good God, did we really get pissed last night, go spotlighting with some locals and bash a kangaroo to death? (Come on, we’ve all been there.)
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Good God by TheSpinningRooms
‘Reverting to Type’
A handy one to have in the back pocket, this one. Joe [Greenway] plays a really nice, sad sax and the mood and tempo breaks up the brutality, giving the album some breathing space, which is something that we were quite conscious of doing. This is the soundtrack to walking out on your wife after losing her family home to a bookie after a bad run at the track.
It’s a really simple song: one verse repeated, no real chorus and a single change at the end. This was first recorded on a noisy two-track of [bassist] Noah [Wilson]’s. First recordings are hard to recapture/recreate. Tom loved the demo and really pushed the vocals to get back to that sound. In the end, I think we ran a mic through a space echo and a shitty Laney keyboard amp that had been sitting in lost property at the Tote for a couple of years. We double-tracked the vocals and I tried like hell to rip the Colin Newman/Graham Lewis combo as heard on Wire’s ‘Used To’.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Reverting to Type by TheSpinningRooms
‘Caught in a Brawl’
Like most of our songs, we start by ripping something off, jamming the shit out of it and turning it into something of our own. This one, strangely, started life as a Dead Moon riff, which we then put through a psychedelic wringer and banged it up with Lux and Ivy’s blood. This song is about getting so drunk that you get involved in a punch-on with which you have nothing to do and from which you are utterly incapable of escaping unscathed. And then Mum gets a call from the cop shop to pick you up from the drunk-tank. Again.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Caught In A Brawl by TheSpinningRooms
‘Know No Secrets’
Really happy with the way Joe drives the song with the sax in this one and how it takes this long in the album to get a traditional sax riff thing happening. What he does usually is create all the spook and discord. Like pretty much all the album the only thing that was overdubbed was the vocals, so what you get is the sax locking in tight with the rhythm section. It’s probably as close as we get to an ‘up’ song and would be best enjoyed while E’d to the gills in a Manchester warehouse, circa 1992. Fuck.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Know No Secrets by TheSpinningRooms
‘A Cask in the Park’
This song came out in a rehearsal fully formed and ready to go. I had just watched Mean Streets and wanted to do a song with The Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’ drumbeat. Ianto [Kelly] played it, Noah plucked a riff out of the air, Joe started playing this really low, sad and spooky line and I tried to sing like Frank Black in ‘Hey’.
This was recorded during that golden hour of the recording process where everyone has consumed the exact right amount of alcohol and everything works. I can’t remember why, now, but I lay down the guitar line separate to the band. Then I lay down. Then Noah had an idea for a line on the Farfisa. Got up, did it in one take. Sat back down again. That’s the type of song that it was. It was just easy at every step of the way. I think the only thing that’s changed since the first time we played it is the title, which was originally ‘Truckin’ With Coach’. I’m the only one who still likes that title. But, yeah, ‘A Cask In The Park’ it is … what can I say about it? A man, a cask, a park, a list of problems as long as your arm.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] A Cask In The Park by TheSpinningRooms
‘Don’t Stop Me’
We rehearse at the Tote and while on a dunny break I caught some graffiti that read ‘I don’t want to think about it’. Returning, after that highbrow inspiration, I started barking the line over a riff that is an, ahem, homage to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘State Trooper’. You know that feeling when you’re doing something that you know is really bad for you but fuck it and fuck you if you try and stop me I’ll just set my banana lounge up on this median strip with a bottle of Bundy and shoot at letterboxes with this shotgun that I found in my uncle’s wood shed cos that’s what I do for kicks now and I’m that fucking crazy? You know that feeling? This song is about you. Please stay away from me.
That same dunny has since been cleansed by fire after some champion threw a Molotov cocktail through the window a couple of weeks ago. Ever read Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake, where a fictional character comes to life and haunts the person who invented him? That’s kind of how I felt after I found out that this had happened. Spooky.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Don't Stop Me by TheSpinningRooms
‘Buddy’
This is like if Buddy Franklin played drums and was a deadbeat from Traralgon who was rooting your mum and trying to be your mate.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Buddy by TheSpinningRooms
‘Fire’
You know that bit in Twin Peaks where they’re in that bar and they’re playing that song? That’s fucked. They should’ve been playing this song.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Fire by TheSpinningRooms
‘Cheap’
This is surf noir from the back paddock dam and it’s at this point that the album takes a chase-music-from-a-1987-BBC-produced-cop-show kind of turn. So, you know, probably a good thing that we stopped it here. Listening back, it’s pretty much two totally different songs gaffa-taped together, but it works in a really dark sort of way.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Cheap by TheSpinningRooms
‘Gotta Get Some Kip Under My Belt’
There’s also a bonus track if you get the digital download card when you buy the vinyl. You need to be over 18 to listen to it, though, and it’s definitely NSFW.
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