Paint It Red

The release of the first full-length album by orchestral art-rockers The Red Paintings was no mean feat. It was, however, a long time coming – five years, to be exact. Frontman Trash McSweeney poured his heart, soul and something close to $200,000 into the creation and completion of The Revolution Is Never Coming, and while the result was nothing short of epic, those five years were full of hard knocks for the dedicated McSweeney.

“I put all my time into this album. I put my whole life on the line; my girlfriend left me, stupid shit happened because I was just so relentless with the sound and what I wanted to achieve, but you need to do that in art I think,” McSweeney explains.

The relationships lost and the less-than-desirable financial situation he found himself in were only just snippets of the drastic changes McSweeney went through during the rigorous recording process. Unhappy with the state of the music industry in Australia and with the added intention of reaching a larger audience, McSweeney relocated from Brisbane to Los Angeles, which is where he got to working with Brian Colstrum (Rob Zombie, Alice In Chains). This partnership came at the most opportune moment; McSweeney was just about to give the album the flick – it had just taken so much from him. Prompted by an invested friend, McSweeney gave Colstrum a chance, and together they had one last try. Evidently, that perseverance paid off, as McSweeney expresses; “I guess that's lucky that I was able to finish the album with someone like him, because I definitely feel the energy of the two people in that mix and that mix was perfect for what I wanted to achieve.”

What started out as the visions of one man being realised progressively extended beyond personal successes and advanced into a project almost entirely reliant on its followers. McSweeney recalls the early days of the band and the inability to complete a full-length album in the past due to a lack of understanding by co-operators. On paper, The Revolution Is Never Coming is inherently a product of McSweeney's ideas alone, but the funding and participation of fans contributed greatly to the completion of not just the album, but the stage shows that have become such a highly-regarded staple of The Red Paintings.

McSweeney aims to “build stage shows that are a metaphor of the message of the song”, and for the upcoming tour of You're Not One Of Them fans volunteer their talents as painters as well as their bodies to be human canvases in order to create a unique, theatrical metaphor. Even with all the intensive planning that goes into these convoluted performances, there's still no guarantee as to what the outcome will be – all that is up to the participants, to which McSweeney brightly comments, “It's a fragment of time that fits the moment, that's why it's so magical! Every Red Paintings show will never be the same, because you never know what that person is going to paint, what their actions are going to be onstage, how they're going to react, are they going to get over-emotional... It's just part of the experience.”