British India
By Angus Fontaine
There's an uneasy beat driving the new British India album. Hunkered down in their Surry Hills recording bunker vigorously applying final touches to their second album, Time Out can't help noticing the dark thread through their scrawled squall of song titles: ‘God Is Dead', ‘Death From a Bruv', ‘You Will Die & I Will Take Over', ‘I Said I'm Sorry'.
The latter track, says singer Declan Melia, is "angsty, pissed off, confronting, sorta Fleetwood Mac fucking with Radiohead - a pop song with a big abrasive edge." Pounding out of the mixing board is proof of its potency (we're offered a sneak preview before even the band's record company have heard it). Observing our slow-spreading grins as crunchy chords, polished strings and big hook choruses collide, Melia chuckles. "John Howard's gonna hate it isn't he?!"
"Everyone else is going to love it", says the rangy old rooster head-banging on the sofa. Harry Vanda was lead guitar in The Easybeats, the first great Australian rock ‘n' roll outfit (and "five very young and pretty boys," according to playwright Joe Orton), plus producer of the first seven AC/DC records. "I wouldn't be working with ‘em unless I thought they weren't one of the most exciting, thought-provoking bands around," says Vanda. "They remind me a lot of The Easybeats - same fire... only the penny drops a lot faster in terms of incorporating what they see into the music."
Vanda and British India have been at it seven weeks, an epic compared with the frenzied fortnight for 2006 debut, Guillotine. "The sound is thicker, bigger, broader," says guitarist Nic Wilson. "The songs are more pointed and we've let them branch out from the original seed of an idea."
Fifteen bad seeds blossom as 10 deliciously dark, dynamic tunes on July 19 - among them songs called ‘Mona Lisa Overdrive', ‘Cocaine Christians' and ‘British India Sabre Dance' (one of Harry's titles) - all inspired, say the boys, by "Vaseline amputees with neon coughs".
"'Nick the Poet' is fierce - not many bands could put out a song like that - it's At the Drive In gone pop... or is that Val Doonican meets Bert Weadon," Melia reckons. "‘Golden Years' is inspired by the Fred D'Aguir book Longest Memory, which although I read it many years ago, sorta nested at the back of my mind then hatching out of the cerebral cortex and demanded to be turned into a song."
A sure sign of great art? More, says Vanda, of "a great, cluey rock band. People make pop music these days that's nothing more than empty, expensive well-designed commercials. These boys capture how the kids feel and speak for them, broadening their horizons without losing the essence of what they're about. That's true pop music."