Davey Lane

But Lane ain’t the type of dude to settle for “okay”. This is a guy who’s been a You Am I guitarist for about 15 years, helmed Melbourne rock outfit The Pictures, featured alongside a gaggle of Australian rock royalty in fundraising supergroup The Wrights, played guitar for Barnesy and came within a whisker of having a Melbourne laneway named after him – “okay” my arse. By his own admission he’s been working on the songs for the fabulously titled Atonally Young for years, he had dozens and dozens of finished tunes to choose from and he even had the gumption to tee up a crowdfunding campaign to get the thing off the ground. People are interested.

“I don’t really have a fanbase, so to speak,” Lane understates, “so I was a little bit reluctant to jump into something like the Pozible thing. Even just because of the presumptuousness: ‘hand over your money’ – but you don’t know what this record’s gonna sound like. It might be fuckin’ rubbish. I was pleasantly surprised by the support... I didn’t have 15 grand lying around to make a record. So it’s not something I’d wanna make a habit of but as a means to an end [crowdfunding is] fantastic for independent artists.”

“I don’t really have a fanbase, so to speak,”

Lane found liberation in the act of creation without purpose. Once The Pictures wound up, he says, he just kept writing and amassed a mountain of material. There were no expectations and no limits on what he could do. The result is a predictably diverse listen, from rock’n’roll bangers to bona fide pop, psychedelic head spins and the occasional creepy mood-changer. Graciously, Lane went to lengths to explain the influences he so proudly draws from via a series of webcasts called Super-Record Talky Time. Amongst his obvious heroes (Nick Lowe, Todd Rundgren) are some admissions that come way out of leftfield (Queen, Jay Reatard). The thing that ties each artist to the next on the list is the boldness of the music they make. “I don’t want music to make me feel relaxed and comfortable. I want music to make me feel fuckin’ ‘Booaaar!’

“You have to use social media these days,” Lane says, “even though I find it such a fuckin’ drag... I just thought it’d be cool to do something where I’m not trying to sell anything; [something] that just gets people involved and something interesting. I’m a music fan, first and foremost, and I do it because I fuckin’ love music.”