Move Over Satan

After quite a lengthy layoff, Syndey punk miscreants Nancy Vandal are back with a vengeance to celebrate their 20 year anniversary, armed with brand new album Flogging A Dead Phoenix. Back in the day they shone like a beacon for all things irreverent and disrespectful before calling it quits in 2001, and while they've made a couple of subsequent forays back into the limelight, this is their first full-blown reunion since the heady days of that original incarnation.

“Dr Flabio [drums] mentioned last year that this year was going to be our twenty-year anniversary since we got together, so we just started thinking about what we could do commemorate it,” explains Fox Trotsky. “I'm always a bit wary of bands getting back together to play a show and then disappearing, so I wanted to make it a bit more of a commitment on our behalf to ensure people that we're taking it seriously.

“Once we got the ball rolling it all happened pretty fast and we got into the swing of things again. It's quite a specific mindset doing Nancy Vandal songs, and I haven't been in that mindset for a long time so it did take a little bit of coaching to retrain whatever lobe of the brain that is. It's the musical equivalent of method acting – you have to be the fucking idiot, you can't just try and write like one. You have to really embrace the persona. ”

Once the Nancy Vandal crew had fully immersed themselves back into their imbecilic identities, it was just a matter of channelling their inner idiot to come up with new material.

“It's quite hard – when we started the band we were in our early-20s and you're always like that then, but when you're a bit older you've got to coax it out of yourself a little bit,” Trotsky laughs. “I think the thing was that if we did a new album and it wasn't really spunky and a bit crazy people would go, 'What the fuck?' I know personally with bands that I like when they're getting on, if they sound like they're going through the motions you just go, 'Oh god!' It's a bad look. Even with our rehearsing for this tour everyone keeps saying that we've got to make sure that we're not playing songs too slow, that it's all as it was – it's hard work. We set a very difficult precedent back when we were young.”

“I always liked watching bands who had fun and made you laugh, so that was always one of our priorities. Although that's probably less of an act and just how we are normally – we don't mind a bit of foolin' around.”