WB’s Thomas Mendelovits chats with Mike Noga from the Drones, while in the midst of the Melbourne band’s latest US tour. Soft-spoken on the telephone yet brutal behind the kit (check out the coda of lead track ‘The Minotaur’ off their new record for proof), The Drones kick off their Australian tour this week in support of the peerless, and brilliant Havilah.

WB: Wow, are you really in America? It sounds like you’re calling from just down the road.

MN: [laughs] Yeah I know, it sounds pretty good. But yes, I’m in a lovely old hotel in the middle of San Francisco.

WB: And your shows there are going well?

MN: Yeah, we’ve down quite a few already, actually. We were in LA for a couple of weeks and did a few shows there. Right now we’re on our way back from playing up in Seattle, which we did a couple of nights ago- that was really good. We’ve got a show here tomorrow night and then another back down in LA. Then we head over to the east coast to start our tour there.

WB: I didn’t realise you’d been there so long already. What’s that, two months?

MN: Yeah, we left at the start of August. We played Splendour in the Grass up in Byron Bay and then in typical Drones style had to get up at 6am the next day to fly to start another tour.

WB: And is Dan [Luscombe, guitar] going to be writing a tour blog again?

MN: Yeah, I think he’s gonna write a short one for Mess + Noise…

WB: Damn, we should have gotten it this time. I guess I’ll still read it again anyway even though we’re competitors.

MN: Oh no. [laughs]. So you liked it? He’s sitting right here next to me, I’ll tell him … He says a lot of pain went into that.

WB: [laughs]. Yeah, you can definitely tell a lot of anguish was channelled into it.

MN: It was one of the most horrible four months I’ve ever spent. [Laughs]. Horrible.

WB: Was I reading between the lines, or was the tour manager really that bad?  

MN: Look, he was absolutely horrific. In every sense of the word. It was awful. It was like dragging a kind of retarded Basil from Fawlty Towers around with you for four months. Sorry Manuel, because he was Spanish. We didn’t get along- put it that way.
 
WB: To move onto the recording of Havilah. I read it was recorded in two weeks…

MN: Two weeks is actually long for us. We did the last one, Gala Mill, in about six days. We kind of went in and slapped that one down pretty much live. But with this one we made more of a concerted effort to, I dunno, put a bit more thought and a bit more work into it. Try out some different stuff, different sounds. Nut it out properly and get a bit professional, you know.

WB: And where did you record it?

MN: It was in a town about three and a half hours north of Melbourne, called Myrtleford. It’s at the foot of Mount Buffalo, around the skiing area up there. Gaz [Gareth Liddiard, vocals/guitar] and Fi [Fiona Kitschin, bass] are living in a house up there at the moment. It was a beautiful old mud brick place at the foot of a mountain in the middle of nowhere, so it was perfect for recording, because we could make as much noise as we wanted whenever we wanted to. And the rooms all sounded really good, they were made of wood and mud brick, so they were sort of custom made for recording in.

WB: I read something Gareth said about studios being like hospitals for sick bands. Is that the approach you guys all have?

MN: [Laughs]. Yeah totally, I totally agree. And I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t go and record in a nice place these days. It’s just a matter of dragging the computer there and a bunch of gear. It’s so easy now. That’s kind of our theory. Let’s just do it somewhere nice and where the clock isn’t ticking and we don’t have to keep thinking about the money we’re spending. And you can take a nice walk in the forest when you get sick of everybody.  

WB: That sounds beautiful. And the result is just great.

MN: Aw, thanks, well, we’re really happy with it. It’s a bit different for us, which is kinda good. You can kind of hear that we’ve branched out, though it still sounds to me like a Drones record.

WB: Yeah, I especially didn’t expect ‘Your Acting’s Like the End of the World’, the last song on the record…

MN: That was just us sitting around one night, literally sitting around almost jamming in the kitchen with a bunch of acoustic guitar. And that’s where we recorded it, right there. It sounds to me like Van Morrison or the Stones, you can hear a bunch of stuff in there.

WB: Yeah, or one those acoustic Dylan songs from Highway 61… Upbeat and acoustic, but still rock.

MN: Yeah, totally that one was a surprise. I’d agree with you there, I was like: “Oh right”. It’s kind of become my favourite.

WB: It’s really, really nice. I noticed on your MySpace that you have a huge bunch of 7”s, and heaps of different records…

MN: Yeah, but most of that is just because our label is based overseas so different stuff is always coming out in different places around the world. They’re kind of introducing us to different audiences in different countries so they’ll pinch a song off Gala Mill and a live song and then release that as a 7”. There’s a lot of things like that going on.  

WB: Okay, good, that means that there’s not a lot out there that we don’t get here! Does Gareth have a lot of material that never makes it to record?

MN: To be honest, I don’t think Gaz does have a stockpile of songs lying around, just simply because we’re always on the road. We’re always pretty busy touring. He doesn’t have a lot of time to sit down and write.

WB: And coz you’re always moving around, you don’t have time to preview it live either? To sort of bang it out and see how well it works?

MN: That’s exactly right. You can try a new song in sound check, but fuck, it never works like that. Sound check is sound check and you wanna get off the stage as quick as you can. So yeah, I know with this new record he actually sat down and pretty much wrote the whole thing from scratch in a couple of months.

WB: And after that how long did you rehearse it together before recording?

MN: About a month, pretty much every day. It was like getting up every morning and going to work. That was another thing we’ve never done before. With Gala Mill, I’d hardly even heard the songs before we got to the recording studio. So we’d just bash them out. But with this one, you know, we spent a lot of time slicing bits off and adding bits in.  

WB: Because you were back for about six months before you left again, right?  

MN: Yeah, we did a tour over here with Band of Horses, and that was last August. But actually, then we came back. We’ve just been trying to lay low a bit so we didn’t really play, just one-off shows in Australia. But this will be our first national tour. We’re even going to Canberra for the first time, which will be interesting.   

WB: I’m sure there will be plenty of Drones fans there by now. How about in the States? Are you noticing a lot of growth, playing much bigger venues this time round?

MN: [Laughs]. We’ll see about Canberra. But yeah, we are playing bigger places now. We’re about to start 15 shows with Built To Spill and the Meat Puppets on the east coast. Then it’s the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in New York, so that’ll all be good.

WB: Are you looking forward to that? You’ve done a couple of ATPs before…

MN: They’re so much fun. They’re a real music fans festival.

WB: And people must almost deify you if you play those sorts of things?

MN: Yeaaaah, kind of… you haven’t been to one?

WB: No, no, no…

MN: Yeah, it’s amazing. Everyone that buys a ticket gets a little chalet to themselves and their friends. And they have an in-house TV station and the bands get to programme the TV shows. It’s just a really well put together festival and the line-ups are always amazing too. They’ve got My Bloody Valentine curating this one. But yeah, no, it is getting better and better over here for us. But it’s a really tough cookie to crack, the States. You’ve just gotta keep plugging away. There’s one billion bands over here so it’s kinda hard to stick out. But the Band of Horses thing really helped. I really noticed that the other night in Seattle, coz last time we were here we did two shows with them in a really big venue and I was interested to see when we came back how we would go. And you can actually notice how crowds are getting bigger and a lot of it’s due to that tour.

WB: I guess Band of Horses are huge over there and that you’re fans would cross over a bit too. Just to go back to recording though, I read that ‘Cold and Sober’ had been recorded before, but never made the cut…   

MN: Yeah, they are getting huge. Well, with that we were going to put it on Gala Mill but in the end it didn’t make it on.

WB: It’s great on Havilah. What was wrong with it before?

MN: I dunno, I guess it just never felt quite right, like we never really nailed it, like we never listened back to it and just went: “yep, that’s exactly how it should sound”. We actually have tried it a few times but we’ve never been able to get the right groove. But for some reason, the recording that’s on Havilah was maybe the second take. We just bashed it out really late one night and it just worked. And all of a sudden everyone knew how it had to be. Then Dan went in and recorded that lovely piano and it was just perfect. If only every song were so easy.   

WB: So some songs didn’t come so easily?

MN: Nah! No, no, some took a fair bit of hammering and a bit of time. A few frayed tempers.

WB: Were there any songs in particular that you knew you just had to get right, and that’s where the frustration came in?

MN: Yeah, definitely and there’s some long songs on there too, you know. So if you’re playing them all together and you wanna get a completely live take, and someone fucks it up, you’ve gotta go back and start again.

WB: So there were no cut and pastes of sections of songs?

MN: No, we’re not really that kind of band, we try to avoid that as much as possible. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that but it just doesn’t really work for us. So yes, there were a few touchy moments. [Giggles].

WB: But you’re laughing about it so it cant’ have been too bad…

MN: I can laugh now!

WB: Just to finish up, is there any meaning behind the name Havilah, apart from the place in Victoria, which I guess is near Myrtleford…?

MN: Well, yeah, it was the name of the town the house was really in. It means place of gold and it was an old goldmining town. We’re terrible with coming up with names, so we’ve been tending to just name our albums after where we record them. So we thought that’s nice, bugger thinking up something else.