The Vasco Era Talk Splendiferous Strippers and Stunt Doubles

A pub in Richmond is a rather appropriate setting for my interview with The Vasco Era boys. I say rather appropriate in recalling the time I caught up with them last, also at a pub, this time in Byron.

The lads were on tour for their debut record Oh We Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside (“That was a dumb name for an album, wasn’t it!” according to drummer Michael Fitzgerald). Following the show, we all continued to partake in the consumption of numerous bottles of beer and whiskey and casks of wine (quality, of course), whilst the supporting band for the tour acquired every toilet roll they could find in the vicinity.

From the rooftop of the pub, they proceeded to throw the loo paper at passersby on the street level below. Bassist Ted O’Neil and Michael were two who were targeted by such antics, Ted almost receiving a roll to the head on his way across the street to get a pie.

The subsequent morning, there was an early knock on the door from the cleaners, and we were all promptly kicked out onto the street due to the two ply debris strewn everywhere.

I reminded the boys of this night when I arrived at the Public House this sunny afternoon. They informed me they were given a lifetime ban from the Byron venue following those escapades, despite their pleas of non-involvement (the supporting act were mostly to blame) though it had been revoked in more recent times.

So do they find themselves living the rock’n’roll lifestyle by getting kicked out of hotels regularly?

“No, just that time! We try not to,” Michael convinces me.

Whilst Michael is detoxing before the upcoming alcohol-filled weeks of rigorous touring, Ted has opted for a dark ale today.

“White rabbit dark ale. It’s a bit hypocritical, isn’t it? White and dark at the same time?”

Ted postulates, analyzing the more political aspects of beer drinking.

One would be forgiven for mistaking Ted and Michael for brothers. While the former shares familial ties with front man Sid, it’s rather his relationship with Michael that is reminiscent of the boyish shenanigans that are typical of a brotherly bond.

Our conversation is littered with sibling-like squabbles over particulars like whether or not they actually performed stunts in the film clips themselves.

“He did one stunt [in ‘When It First Showed Up’],’ Ted says, pointing to Michael, “I filmed it first and they wouldn’t let me do any of the stunts, just in case I hurt myself. So Michael pestered them…”

“Oh pestered?” Michael retorts.

“Yes, you pestered.”

“I don’t believe I pestered!”

“One little stunt,” Ted teases him.

“Arguably the hardest jump there was,” Michael defends himself.

“Oh, I don’t think so!”

“I got annoyed and went back and did all the stunts myself that night,” Ted boasts.

“Yeah, and he twisted his ankle doing it!” Michael jumps in.

“No. I twisted my ankle running on the gutter.”

“Ohhh yeaaah.”

“I did!”

“You’re weak.”

No hard feelings though. Jokes aside, the brotherly love shows through with Ted describing Michael as a “lovingly emotional fella”, who in turn tells him he has an “awesomely amazing face”. The boys are humble when talking about their music, Michael laughing at the implication that their debut was a success (“I didn’t know it was acclaimed!”).

As for their new record, he is equally as modest. “We just tried to write an album as best we can, we’re getting better slowly, I reckon.”

Lucille, the title of The Vasco Era’s sophomore release, resounds throughout the ten tracks in a kind of narrative that sets out the relationship between a stripper, Lucille, and her conservative partner, Sam. Ted tells me the inspiration behind this storytelling was drawn from one of Sid’s benders at the Casino.

“When we were looking for subject matter to write about, Sid went to the casino for three days. He just got drunk; he thought he’d stumble across something,” he explains.

“At one stage during the three days, he met up with a couple and got talking to them, for like two hours. The girl was a stripper and the guy seemed really conservative. After he’d spoken to them, he started thinking about all the different emotions that that’d bring up in a relationship, the troubles. So he just decided to face it, to make it a conversation between a couple in that situation.”

The boys turned their verbal dissection of this complex relationship into a visual one, as the confronting film clip for ‘Oh Sam’ features a half naked girl dancing in front of them whilst they are playing. Surely this would have been distracting.

“That was REALLY awkward,” Ted tells me, with Michael giggling beside him.

“During the film clip, they wanted us to look at her, not in a sleazy way or anything. And then every now and then she had to turn and you’d look at each other and I’d feel voyeuristic.”

“That’s what art is,” Michael adds, “A really fine line between that entire thing; us just being complete sleazebags and it being artistic.”

“I didn’t see it like that,” I reassure him. “She was a tastefully dressed stripper, if there is such a thing!”

Scott Horscroft, the man responsible for the production handiwork on the album, complimented their larger, more elaborate sound, Ted tells me.

“Well we sort of talked to him when we were looking for a producer for the first album. Because we were trying to do something real raw, it didn’t really work out,” he explains.

“But then when we were doing demos and writing for this album, we were pretty sure there was going to be a lot more in it, a bit bigger sound. Straight away we thought of Scott; we thought he was the best one to do it. He heard the demos and he just got what we were trying to do.”

“He knew heaps about sounds,” Michael jests. “All that computer shit.”

Ted says laughing, “All that computer shit?”

“You know, like all the reverbs and all the knobs on the…thing.”

“We’re the most non-technical band,” Ted explains.

“We have NO idea about it. He knew a lot about it, so he helped us,” Michael puts straightforwardly.

Ted elaborates: “Because we’d spent so much time on songs before hand, we had a heap of parts for all of them. Some of the parts really worked and others didn’t. I think because he was a bit stepped back from it, from all the music, he could hear where it was too much in parts and take out the bits that were unnecessary. And he just got it sounding lovely.”

The result is something of a musical journey, an amalgamation of influences and instrumentation, a more mature sound, instrumentally, lyrically and vocally.

“Sid was very much about wanting to sing, instead of scream, on this album. He wanted to show that he could actually sing. I think that his voice has matured a lot. Now it sounds quite lovely,” Ted muses. “I’ve said lovely twice now, that might be my word of the day.”

“You should get a thesaurus.”

“Yeah, there’s lots of different ways to say lovely.”

“Fantastic,” Michael suggests.

“Splendiferous,” Ted adds.

“That’s not a word!” I exclaim.

“It is!” Ted asserts.

“I don’t believe you. Let’s look it up.”

“I don’t know if I believe it either,” Ted admits, “but I want to find out.”

We briefly look it up using the thesaurus on my computer. “Well I’ll be damned! It IS a real word!” I learn, retracting my last statement.

“I thought you were making it up!” Michael says in disbelief.

The Vasco Era have incorporated a wider variety of instruments within their sound for Lucille, in contrast to the raw aesthetic that had characterised Oh We Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside.

“I think nearly every band says this, but with the first album, we tried to do it so that we could replicate it live,” Ted tells me. “With [Lucille] we thought, let’s do it as an album rather than worrying about how to play it live.”

The lads made use of pianos, organs, vibraphones and glockenspiels, although trumpets didn’t end up making the cut.

“I tried to learn the trumpet!” Michael proclaims. “I could get everything except the highest note.”

“He tried to learn the trumpet via Google!” Ted laughs.

“I did!”

Aside from attempting to learn new instruments via the internet, the boys inform me they have also undertaken tertiary studies in teaching, “so we could get Centrelink, because we’ve got no money”. Well, a few record sales wouldn’t go astray, and judging by what I’m hearing, that’s certainly not going to be a problem.

Lucille is out now on Universal Music Australia.

Share this article on Facebook