The Fauves: ‘We Were Never On Anyone’s Radar’

What keeps a band together for 25 years? JOSH JENNINGS reports on Melbourne’s great rock underdogs, The Fauves.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

The graveyard of independent Australian bands that has burgeoned since the beginning of The Fauves’ existence in the late-1980s (and the paucity of Fauves contemporaries around today) evidences the notion that survival at the grass-roots level of local independent rock music is a rare achievement. Prevailing ageism and image-occupied self-consciousness aside, life gets in the way of bands; death gets in the way of bands and band members get in the way of each other. But what’s preferable: to wind up a member of The Fauves at 50 or a dad straight out of a Big W catalogue?

If you’ve seen the Fauves rockumentary 15 Minutes to Rock or followed their movements over the past few decades you’ll know the band played its first gig at the Mt Eliza Football Club in July 1988. In those formative days as an arguably misguided band shouldering the oxymoronic “art-rock” label, they had something in common with a lot of green bands, says singer/guitarist Andrew Cox over the phone. “I think we genuinely thought we had every chance of being huge.”

By Cox’s account, that first gig was somewhat lacking. The crowd – a beer-goggled throng of footy club stock, acquaintances and half-mates – was also lacking (in the necessary constitution to discern any such thing). Not that the easy-sell crowd deterred the band from embracing the reception. Cox recalls the impact it had on them by the time they de-briefed the next day. “We were talking about record deals by Christmas,” he says.

The following Q&A with Cox is a distillation of what generally happened next and a longer elaboration on why The Fauves are still carrying their own gear and playing shows and making records – most recently, 2012’s German Engines – on the eve of their upcoming 25th anniversary gig at Melbourne’s Corner Hotel.

You’re on record on thefauves.com stating that Doctor’s [The Fauves’ co-vocalist/guitarist Phil Leonard’s] organisational skills are such these days that he’s incapable of phoning a cinema to book movie tickets. But when you recorded debut EP This Mood Has Passed in 1990, Doctor was the one who phoned the studio and booked in recording time. Nobody wants that job. It sounds like he must have been rather fired up at the time. What did he expect would happen?
We were all sort of charged with the allure of possibility back then.

To state the obvious, you guys began in 1988. What was The Fauves’ most quintessentially 1988 attribute in 1988?
[Laughs] I don’t think 1988 was really the essence of what we were. We just happened to be starting a band in 1988. I guess the music industry in the independent world we were moving into was certainly a more naïve place back then. I think if we were to compare The Fauves that started in 1988 with The Fauves that might have started in 2008, I think we were a lot more wide-eyed, a lot more innocent and a lot more unprofessional than bands that start up now are. The whole sort of indie do-it-yourself thing was still really young back then so it was a bit of an unknown frontier.

What was your rationale for starting the band?
I think you just fall into it. I mean, you find a bunch of guys who like picking up guitars and it’s just fun. In essence, that’s how it started. You graduate from playing by yourself in your room and put yourself with two or three other guys and it starts to sound vaguely like music. There’s a bit of a rhythm and someone’s singing and it is a bit of an electric moment.

I don’t think you probably fully appreciate it at the time; it’s sort of when you look back at it. You never really fully recapture that feeling where you get in a room with a bunch of guys and actually sound at least vaguely similar to all those records you grew up listening to. That’s quite a thrilling thing. I know there are all the clichés that you get into a band to meet chicks and that sort of stuff but for us, it was a very innocent kind of thing.

“We were a lot more wide-eyed, a lot more innocent and a lot more unprofessional than bands that start up now.”

What sort of inhibitors to being in a band were you guys dealing with then?
Three of us lived on the Mornington Peninsula but Doug [drummer Adam Newey], had gone to La Trobe uni and was living in Bundoora and didn’t have a car, so it was three guys who lived within five minutes of each other and another guy who lived about two hours away and also required ferrying two and from wherever we were rehearsing, which was generally at my place. That involved a lot of miles basically but the thing is he had a car. He had an accident – a minor traffic accident – and claimed that he was just too freaked out to drive.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think it was just laziness but at the time it was like, “Where are we gonna get another drummer from?” Although drummers are so maligned, everyone thinks they can sing and play guitar, so finding a drummer is generally a bit more difficult. So he really had us wrapped around his finger. We were just driving him up to the city, bringing him down and dropping him home again. It was quite ridiculous when you think about it.

That could have ended many bands right there.
It could have! I guess the first two or three years are the most testing time for a band in a lot of ways and we went through a number of crisis points – any of which could have easily ended our band.

It’s well documented that you guys had your most commercial success with Future Spa [1996]. Did that period have any impact on your civilian life outside of the band?
Not really. We were never big enough for that to happen. Also, particularly living a fair way out of the city … I guess if I lived in Fitzroy I might have got recognised slightly more often but the success of Future Spa is all very relative. It’s success in terms of all our other releases. But in terms of real rock success, it was just trifling … It didn’t really change our lives in any way at all, other than the fact that during that period we probably did earn enough to just be a pure band. No one had to have a part-time job or anything, but beyond that it was just such a modest level of success it doesn’t really register in any other way.

How adhesive an effect did selling 15000 copies of Future Spa have on the band members?
That was our third record on a major label and the first two had just been disastrous commercially. I remember we had a launch for the record before that, The Young Need Discipline, at The Club in Melbourne and about 100 people rolled up and there was really just a general sense that this couldn’t go on forever. At some point it was just going to completely die in the arse.

It wasn’t that we weren’t getting along or anything but we were on a major label [Polydor], so there was a certain level of expectation. Not just from them but from us too. We were thinking, “Well we’ve got this far and this just looks completely unviable.” So when that record did get the attention you referred to, it was quite a uniting feeling. It did make us feel like there was a point to being a band in a commercial sense and there was perhaps some sort of viability to what we were doing. And it did come at the time where we needed it to; because we certainly wouldn’t have been able to last any longer at Polydor if that hadn’t come along. And at that stage we probably weren’t resilient enough to keep going as a band either. So it was kind of crucial in that regard.

In 15 Minutes to Rock, there’s a part where the text on the screen says the following: “June 1996. After eight years together, three EPs and three albums, The Fauves owe their record company $150,000 in recording costs.” Do you look back on that stat with awe, horror or both?
Fondness really. It’s quite outrageous. I mean … although you’re $150,000 in debt to your record company, it’s not as though you owe them that money – you only do out of record sales or potential record sales. But it’s kind of amazement that they ever allowed us to spend that kind of money. Our first two records sold about 1000 copies each. We’re talking one of the biggest record companies in the world and they’re just shovelling tens of thousands of dollars into an act that were never really hot. We were never sort of on anyone’s radar.

So yeah, it is a perverse pleasure in having been along for that ride and experienced it all, and having left them that far in the lurch. It cost them that much money and you’re sort of thinking, “How did they make that many bad business decisions?” Because clearly we were never going to be big. And then basically when they dumped us, we sort of just walked away. You leave them with the debt and go on with your lives. I took quite a perverse pride in it, I think.

What’s an example of one of the most rock star-type experiences you had during that period?
I’m trying to think. Even successful times were punctuated by, “Oh shit, somebody go and get the van. We’ve got to load our stuff out.” We never had roadies or a manager. We just sort of had to do everything ourselves. We might have had a full room and the show might have gone really well but there was always the prosaic reality to fall back on. We never got divorced from reality in that way.

There’s a huge tall poppy syndrome within our own band where we cut ourselves down personally and cut each other down as well. And that’s really antithetical to the idea of being a rock star, which does require you to like yourself. Because ultimately the biggest rock star in the world is really just a frail, faulty human.

You guys play your 25th anniversary gig this weekend. What are the motivators sustaining the band today versus those in the formative years?
Once we got dumped from Polydor our sales plummeted and our recognition plummeted and it’s just continued to plummet ever since, to the point where we’re now virtually anonymous. But there can be no other reason for doing it than just enjoying it. And as boring as that sounds, it’s really true and it’s why we’re still going after 25 years - because we still like the music we make and because we’re still best friends. It’s got to a place where it’s got this purity back that we really left behind after the first year of being in a band.

“We went through a number of crisis points – any of which could have easily ended our band.”

What things become more difficult for the band to do as you become older?
You scale back the touring massively because there’s just not the demand; and people have kids and jobs and things and you just can’t be bothered any more. Touring takes a lot of effort. It just mirrors the age you’re at. I’m 46 and you do settle into a comfortable middle-age as a band. We’re probably old age in rock years and there are lots of inhibitors. We still play interstate but on a far smaller scale. We do still lift gear but we generally make sure somebody else is on the other end of the amp now rather than trying to do it ourselves. You just adapt as you get older. You find your guitar just rests slightly more comfortably on that burgeoning gut that didn’t used to be there 10 years ago.

I think it’s a very ungraceful thing to do, to be in a rock band at our age, and if you’re going to accept that and know that it is, then you have to sort of try to find some element of dignity in it. I think it would be really undignified for us as middle-age men to be flaunting ourselves around the country playing in front of 50 people. You just have to do it in a gentler and more civilised way to be able to justify it to yourself primarily.

You’re going to be joined by Doctor’s Orders at the Corner on Saturday night. How does a band focusing exclusively on covering Doctor-penned Fauves material come to be?
[Laughs] Yeah, I don’t know. Our booking agent said he either knew somebody in the band or somebody who knew somebody in the band. Doctor is a guy who doesn’t really push his own songs. He tends to forget how to play a lot of them, which means there’s only ever a very limited number of his songs we play as a band. Plus he tends to turn on his own material quite easily. For us to hear songs we haven’t played and can’t even play anymore, was really exciting for us. If we weren’t doing this show we probably would have hired them for a private party of our own just for our own self-indulgence.

It’s just such a niche concept [breaks into laughter]; I can’t imagine they’d get gigs anywhere beyond their own rehearsal room. It’s probably the biggest gig they’ve ever played and in some ways I think it’s going to be a hard act to follow because they really have the potential to be more interesting than we are.

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The Fauves’ "Catch ‘Em While They’re Alive" show takes place at The Corner tomorrow (Aug 31).