Features
Track By Track: SPOD
Contributions by Brent Griffin
Original page credit: Mess+Noise
Horny zip drives, mouldy penises, a 200-foot robot and ‘Meatballs 2: The Musical’ all inform SPOD’s 2003 opus ‘Taste the Radness’. Ten years on, SPOD himself (BRENT GRIFFIN) deconstructs his every mighty triumph – plus bonus tracks from a new digital reissue.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
‘Letz Dance’
This song came about because I was listening to a shitload of Missy Elliott and was disappointed that she said ‘Freak’ and not ‘Fuck’ in ‘Get Ur Freak On’, so I thought I’d challenge it. I was also pretty fresh into a love affair with Fu Manchu and this was as close as I could get to writing a stoner-rock song on my equipment, entirely comprised of a sampler, a drum machine, a four-track and an Atari ST with Cubase on it, which I made the whole album on. It’s also a song about peace. Political.
‘Totally Rad’
I grew up saying ‘rad’ way too much, but was also quite aware of how “K Mart T-shirt with a skeleton shredding the zone” the idea of saying ‘totally rad’ is. My friend Matt Coyte thought I made fun of Tsubis in it, which I didn’t, but that’s kind of the idea behind it. I’d get totally bummed and pissed off with the whole scene of either a room full of people sitting on the floor of a venue either judging the band or having the band patronise them with their humble genius or on the flipside, a room full of dickheads trying to outcool each other. I kinda just wanted to piss all of them off without them really knowing.
‘2131 (Ride Wit’ Me)’
Ashfield. I really loved it. ‘2131’ was basically me and the band Further’ out in Ashfield being cool legends playing Tony Hawk on Playstation and doing nothing.
I had this beat written and had no lyrics and Jonboyrock made me write and record the lyrics as he liked the beat. I was listening to a lot of Snoop and Nelly at the time, and when it came to recording I had a pretty sweet cold, which is why in the first mix of this song you just hear me sniffling like a gross legend. I was trying to imagine what it’d be like to just be driving around in a convertible if Ashfield had a beach instead of being trapped singing in my gross bedroom. A-Blade sang the shit out of the solo break, as my attempt sounded pretty depressing. Krylon rips up the chorus too.
‘Fuck Yeah!’
For some reason, this song came out of the back of a Syd Barrett obsession but I guess I was obsessed with Kool Keith too. I can see this song in my head, and it seems to make way more sense than it really does. Further do some huge man vox on the “WE DONT FUCKIN CARE”s in this. I love the idea of a bunch of guys shouting that in unison. It’s about having cool times, eat shit. I’m glad I confronted the themes of mouldy penises, cousins giving you head jobs, wives pissing rainbows and Mardi Gras floats made out of soap. It was well overdue.
‘Devistator’
Rock Steady Crew were the first introduction to rap and bewitched me with their robotic electro sounds. That’s where my love for drum machines and sequencers came from and what ended up in making me make this kind of music. I also think it’s cool to imagine a 200-foot robot that can shoot lighting conducting a breakdancing competition and murdering the losers.
‘Makin Party’
SPOD was initially a two-piece band with my mate Mike, a.k.a. Peejay, before he grew up and became a man, leaving me to confront the idea of going solo. He’s a genius at just picking up a guitar and immediately writing an amazing chorus, which is what he did for this song back somewhere in the ’90s. I bashed it into a song, wrote some verses and there you have it: our version of Meatballs 2: The Musical. We actually released an album called Makin Party that has the script of the movie that we wrote around this song in it. I should make that movie.
‘Sumatime’
How good are seasons? I chose to write a song about one and every other season is way too chill to do the running man on a cop car, make your sister cry because you’ve eaten your own pants, and piss in hot tubs. I also wanted to end a song with the most descending key changes I could, which I did.
‘On Heat’
Oh lordy … I wrote the lyrics to this one on a train when I was a youngster and it made a nice lady get up and move seats because she was reading over my shoulder, so she learnt a valuable lesson. Don’t look over young boys’ shoulders who have boners. This shit’s pretty gross, as gross as I could make it at the time, just to see if I could. Anal sex and making love to inanimate objects wasn’t a big topic in the 2003 musical landscape, which I felt I had to fix.
‘Scorpionz of Sexxx’
I wrote this song on Post-it notes when I was breaking up with a girl who hated all of my friends. So I thought I’d write a song about a rare magical strain of scorpions that drive people to make love. Peace.
‘Electric Lips’
This was originally the secret track on Taste the Radness and it’s another Peejay classic. We spent a whole day in the house we rented out at Epping just swapping between drums and guitar, making up songs on the spot. This song was the best of a million songs we wrote that day and was the height of my drumming stamina. It’s about Peejay electrocuting himself on the mic so it’s totally autobiographical. Gettin’ deep in the zone.
‘Nerdz’
From here on out these songs weren’t on the original TTR, but were all written and recorded for the album. ‘Nerdz’ was written directly from a dream I was having about riding a BMX down a steep hill through this brutal rainbow dirt track surrounded by big muscle-y jock-type guys screaming “NERDS! NERDS! MOTHERFUCKIN NERDS!” I think I told them to drink from my dick. This music was pretty much note-for-note from that dream’s soundtrack. I’d watch Revenge of the Nerds quite a lot as a child and played shitloads of Mario Kart. It was destiny.
‘Country of Sweden’
I lived with Andy (Clockwise) Kelly when I broke up with another girlfriend and we invented this drink called the Red Halen, which was just guava juice and vodka. I thought the tale of horny metal Vikings in Sweden needed to be told, so I wrote a song about it. Fantasy metal is amazing and I’m shocked Absolut Vodka never gave us an endorsement for our hard work on their motto.
‘Loooife!’
I was in a band called Dirtbike, which was a two-piece metal band that used a drum machine, with my mate Rob, and we had a song called ‘Life’ that Rob sung. I really wanted to make the most intense techno song ever and found our old tapes of ‘Life’ and this happened. I think JBR and I spent most of the month we did Taste The Radness in just working on this song and laughing ourselves stupid as it got more and more intense. This song also goes out to Darkshine from Shepparton.
‘Born 2 Luv’
This was a Decoder Ring song called ‘Alsace Lorraine’, which had the most dramatic MS20 bass line and synth-string section. It’s a HUGE song up to 1:50, where it turns into a pretty crazy cyberdoof jam. Anyway, Decoder Ring wanted me to remix it, and I wanted to make a song out of that huge bass line and drum turnaround, and I made this into my own song. This is how remixes should be done, I think. I like to imagine this is what 50 Cent would have written if his ‘club’ was Patrick’s in Pennant Hills.
‘Unzip It’
This was one of the first songs I wrote when I bought my sampler and a zip drive. It’s about zip drives. Horny zip drives.
‘Squidgeman’
Basically my idea of a sweet Commodore 64 game that never existed. I was also pretty committed to inventing scientific discoveries at the time. Bojok Plates, Bard’jee Spheres and Silver Air were a pretty big deal and will change the game of life one day.
‘Ohhh Yeaaahhh’
This was a weird ploddy calypso beat that was never going to make the album that was about marrying the wrong woman.
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