Culture Vultures

Californian rockers Redd Kross – the brainchild of brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald – have been together for more than thirty years, and are showing no signs of slowing down their weird and wonderful trajectory. Last year they returned to Australia for the first time in decades to play with old sparring partners Hoodoo Gurus at their Dig It Up! bashes in Sydney and Melbourne, and now – less than a year later – they're returning to our shores paired up with Dinosaur Jr. The major thing that's changed in the interim is that they dropped excellent new album Researching The Blues, their seventh overall and first since 1997's Show World.

“It's kind of weird – we recorded that record by paying for it ourselves and producing it ourselves, with no record label or anything,” McDonald remembers. “When we finished it we didn't even know if anyone would be interested in putting it out – at one point I was considering giving it away for free on the internet or something. I wanted it to be just a completely solid rock record – not a lot of fat, up-tempo for the most part, just real solid. It kind of encompasses everything we've done in the past. That was in the back of the mind, to keep it short and in-your-face.”

The Redd Kross sound has changed a lot over the years, each album having a different tone to the one before it – although they are all grounded in rock and/or power-pop – and Researching The Blues is no exception.

“We've always tried to make each album its own thing,” Jeff ponders. “It's weird because it's more of a subconscious thing – you just kind of get in a mood for each particular record and we'd very much commit to it. So I think when you listen to our albums in order they're very different. A lot of it has to do with the fact that we've become better singers and so on – you just get better tools for your toolbox to create with. I think that's what's happened over the years – we just got better at what we did.

“We were really young [when we started], barely in our teens. Actually Steve, my brother who plays bass, wasn't even in his teens when we started. We made an EP when we first started that became like a local radio hit, and for many years we wouldn't play those songs because we thought they were ridiculous, but now – at our age! – we'll play those songs and it's just completely surreal, it just takes on this completely psychedelic meaning being a grown-up and singing these weird songs. And they were weird to begin with, so it's even more bizarre.”

But Redd Kross are no strangers to the bizarre – indeed they were famous for being pop culture junkies from the very beginning when they were ensconced in LA's notorious hardcore scene.

“Now I think it's more open to people because of YouTube – you can just find anything,” McDonald smiles. “When we really started waving that flag it was really more of a rebellion against a lot of our peers in punk rock and everyone being so uptight – admitting that you were influenced by The Partridge Family or something was just a complete shock to someone like Henry Rollins! It was just us being complete brats. But my whole thing is that if something moves me on any level, then it's good – I don't think of things as 'so bad it's good'. If I'm interested enough to listen to it and want to experience it, it's all good, and that stuff just creeps into whatever I'm doing creatively.”

Redd Kross will be playing the following dates:

Thursday 14 March - The Hi-Fi, Brisbane QLD
Friday 15 March - Collangatta Hotel, Gold Coast QLD
Saturday 16 March - The Hi-Fi, Sydney NSW