Nothing To Fume About

“I’d like to get off the dole”, Steve Merry jokes about what he hopes to come from their forthcoming album. While he has spent his fair share of time of late touring abroad as frontman for The Fumes, with that accent there is no mistaking where Merry calls home. Sundancer, the latest effort for the Sydney duo, is diverging from their earlier sound, he tells me. “Personally, you’re constantly changing, you’re trying new stuff. It’s just a recording of where you are right now, from your equipment to what’s going on in your life.”

These new sounds hear Merry putting down his faithful six string in favour of some tinkering on the old black and whites throughout parts of the album. “I got a hold of a piano last year, so I kinda put a bit of time into learning it. I read a couple of chord books and tried to figure this stuff out. I wrote a couple of songs and they’re on the album, which is pretty cool. I’d like to get a real one, get like a Roland piano-keyboard, you know one of those fucked up old Rolands or an old stand up honky-tonk type piano.”

The lads employed the handiwork of Jim Diamond for this record, who favoured the use of analog from days gone by to capture their raw bluesy-rock sound as opposed to the digital that seems to perforate most music in this day and age. “It just suits us”, Merry explains. “It was good to do it with Jim. I reckon there’s a good chance [we’ll work with him again], he’s a good guy, pretty easy to get on with and knows how to have a drink.”
“We flew him out to Australia and tracked [the album] over twelve days in Sydney at Megaphone Studios. I went over to Detriot about a month later where we spent about ten days mixing it with him in his studio, in the middle of winter in the middle of the city. Detriot’s a pretty fucked up place; it’s just like this economic wasteland, millions of homeless people everywhere and every second building is derelict and empty with smashed windows. It’s a pretty bleak place.”

The Fumes’ hectic schedule saw them return to the States to belt out shows in both Los Angeles and New York as well as a stint in Austin for the SXSW music conference last month. While it may sound like a typical lifestyle for a musician, Merry informs me that it is more difficult for him to tour these days now he has a twenty-two month old daughter. “It’s a bit harder when you’ve got someone at home that you can’t have with you.” Before returning home to take on his fatherly role, they also made a stop by Japan to play a couple of shows.

“We played at Fuji Rock Festival last year, but this is pretty much the first time we’ve actually played our own shows in Tokyo. We got a pretty good turnout, there were 140 people there or so for our first show which was pretty cool. The second show was downstairs in ‘Tower Records’ in Shibuya - it’s this massive record store and they’ve actually got a venue downstairs, but there’s no bar or anything so everyone’s just kinda hanging out.” Sobriety aside, the mild-mannered crowd still got into it. “They were going pretty mad,” Merry recalls.

Fuji Rock Festival was “fucking crazy”, he tells me. “Festivals are a whole different vibe, everyone’s pretty high and sort of you know goin’ off and havin’ fun. The whole vibe of the festival, it’s all pretty rushed. Whereas at our gigs it’s a lot more focused on what you’re doing. It’s a bit more intimate, you get a lot more time with sound check and things like that.”

Back home and back to reality, Merry is starting to feel the economic toll of making music independently. “In all honesty, the biggest challenge for us is financially, ‘cos we paid for everything ourselves and we’ve just travelled around the States, so it’s pretty brim on the financial side of things at the moment.” He tells me that while there may be some monetary downsides, remaining independent from the bureaucratic clutches of the record companies can have its positives also.

“We own the album, we recorded it and paid for it all ourselves. Obviously financially it’s a good way to go; once you’re there it’s good, but getting there is the fucking hard part. You know, it’s really cool. It feels really good to know that you’re not owned by anyone, you’re not giving it away to someone else.” And that’s certainly not something to be fuming about.

Sundancer is out now through Silent Partner/Inertia.

Head to http://www.myspace.com/thefumesoz for tour dates.

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