What It Takes To Come Out Of The Woodwork

A few years back, when Sydney hard rock aficionados Front End Loader (improbably) won the Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal album award at the 2011 ARIAs for their fifth studio long-player Ritardando, the note that they asked their old mate Lindsay McDougall (of Frenzal Rhomb and triple j fame) to read when he accepted the award on their behalf – the notoriously recalcitrant four-piece of course deciding not to attend the award ceremony – read as such;

“As you were… please carry on… we mean you no harm. We will continue to write Rock Music that we enjoy, play shows when and where we can, and record and release this music as our time, money and circumstances permit. None of these activities concern you so please, move along, and let us never speak of this again”.

Now, you can call these guys many, many things, but you cannot deny that they are indeed men of their word. Since those heady times, they’ve steadfastly continued carrying on at their own glacial pace, touring sporadically and pretty much staying off-grid until something or someone prods them into sloth-like action. But it wasn’t always this way. Forming way back in 1991, the tight-knit four-piece – Bow Campbell (guitar/vocals), Davis Claymore (guitar/vocals), Richard Corey (bass) and Peter Kostic (drums) – used to be a dynamic force on the touring front and released new music at a pretty steady clip as well, building a strong following for the complex arrangements, dumb riffs, semi-ironic rock posturing and intelligent (often humorous) lyrics; in other words, classic use of the ol' smart/dumb dichotomy.

In recent times, however, life has interfered with their dreams of rock’n’roll domination – as it so often tends to do – and Front End Loader has become something of an ad hoc affair (in terms of playing and logistics, at any rate). Fortunately, this has diminished neither their live potency nor songwriting chops – their most recent offering, 2012 EP Fresh Six, proving as strong as anything they’ve put their name to for ages – and, if anything, it’s led to their now sporadic live shows becoming something of an occasion, with people (metaphorically) determined to make hay while the sun shines.

Which is one of the reasons that there’s been so much anticipation for their Brisbane show at Prince Of Wales Hotel in Nundah this weekend; not only is it their first show in the region in a couple of years, but they’ve also assembled a killer line-up featuring old sparring partners Giants Of Science and SixFtHick as well as relative newcomers Grieg (who feature members of HITS, Undead Apes and No Anchor).

Ben was basically stabbing himself in the chest with somebody’s used pork-rib bone that he’d picked up off the ground.

“I’ve been hearing good things about Grieg but haven’t seen them before so I’m looking forward to checking them out,” offers the erudite Campbell of their impending sojourn. “And we go back ages with SixFtHick. Years back a mate of ours organised this tour in central Queensland called ‘The Beef Road Massacre’, which was just us and SixFtHick because we were two of his favourite bands. He flew us all out to Emerald, I think it was – wherever he was living at the time – and we did three or four gigs in mining towns basically. It was great fun, and I’m pretty sure that’s where we first met them, and we’ve played heaps more gigs with them over the years, and I know the Corbett brothers from around the traps. I haven’t seen them play for a long time. One of the first times I saw them was at a gig called the Hootenanny Festival down here in Erskineville, which was in a big tent, and I remember one of them – I think it was Geoff – was swinging from the lighting trusses, and Ben was basically stabbing himself in the chest with somebody’s used pork-rib bone that he’d picked up off the ground. I don’t imagine too much has changed.

“I always enjoy catching up with those guys, and the Giants guys too, of course. [The Giants] stayed at my house a few weeks ago, but I didn’t actually make it to the gig – I was playing at a friend’s birthday bash – so there was plenty of bullshit and drinking, but not much seeing of the band. Their new EP [2014’s What’s Wrong With You And Why] is good though, they gave me a copy of that and I really like it. We played heaps with them back in the day – at the time it seemed that we were both concentrating on rock’n’roll that was both smart and dumb at the same time, and we seemed to share a similar taste in books and role-playing games and, again, bullshit and drinking, which is pretty much the lowest common denominator for any rock band, but we found that our tastes were quite similar in that respect. It’s nice to see them treading the boards again. From what I can gather, this gig should be pretty good, and should bring a few spastics out of the woodwork from across the years.”

It’s been a long time since we’ve had any reason to do any gigs at all.

Campbell explains that there hasn’t really been any major reason for their lengthy absence from Brisbane stages in recent times, putting it down simply to the vicissitudes of life.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve had any reason to do any gigs at all really, apart from ‘we haven’t been there for a while’,” he shrugs. “Normally we can’t do anything anyway, unless we have a pretty good reason for doing so and unless we’re getting paid enough money to do it; because we’re old and tired we can’t drive places anymore, we have to fly, and we have to employ somebody to drive us around because we like to drink. The whole thing just becomes something of an expensive exercise.

“We’re currently in the middle of writing a new record, if I can use that term loosely; that is, we go to the rehearsal room every couple of weeks and play some riffs and yell some stuff over the top, and then leave it a few weeks and then try and remember what we did last time. But the last time we put out a record we did a fairly extensive tour and that was fairly good, actually – that tour was actually the first time we got off our ass and employed somebody to do merch for us properly.

"We own all of our back catalogue so we pressed up a whole load of them and we had shirts and all of that palava, and rather than just throwing open a suitcase onstage at the end of the night we actually paid someone to set up a little table and do it properly, and at the end of the tour we were going, ‘Fuck, we didn’t lose money! How about that!’ So we can do it properly when we have to, it just takes us a long time and a fair bit of effort.

"So, yes, it’s been a fair while since we’ve been to Brisbane, but I think the line-up and the money was good enough to get us off our asses this time to come and do it. I’m looking forward to it very much.”

It’s been nearly 21 years since this scribe first saw Front End Loader rock out in Queensland – opening for Supersuckers and Killdozer at the Roxy in ’94 – but there have been countless run-ins since. Have they enjoyed their myriad visits to Brisbane?

[Brisbane is] a fairly thriving, creative place perhaps because of its history with oppression over the years.

“Always,” Campbell responds without pause. “And it has changed, I can definitely tell you. When we first started coming up in the early ‘90s, it was still a bit scary – no disrespect to your Brisbane readers, but it still had a bit of the wild west to it, or the ‘Deep North’ as we liked to call it. Maybe there was still a bit of a hangover from the Joh era, but I remember seeing some hideous fights between punks and skinheads outside one of those venues in the Valley and just thinking, ‘Hmmm, okay’. But the amount of bands who have come out of there that have just kicked ass all over the world now, it’s a fairly thriving, creative place perhaps because of its history with oppression over the years. And the weather’s nice. And you’ve got a river, which is always nice.

“But we used to go anywhere – we’d go anywhere and play anywhere as often as we could, and those places that liked us, we tended to go back to more often than not really, as opposed to somewhere like Geelong, which we fucking hate. No disrespect to anyone who lives in Geelong, but fuck you. And I guess ZZZ has a lot to do with it – anywhere that has a functioning community radio station that would play us and have us in to talk was always high on the list, and we were always able to see a direct correlation between functioning community radio and a healthy live scene and a welcoming environment for touring bands. Brisbane ticks all of those boxes really.”

This teasing mention of new Loader music in the offing is exciting for followers: it’s always hard to articulate the vibe of music in its nascent stages, but is there much of a departure from the band's standard template? Will there be orchestras or any collaborations with Flume or Chet Faker?

“Ah, no,” Campbell deadpans. “No is the short answer. There’s a reason that the last one was called Ritardando, the term that meant gradually becoming slower. That was an acknowledgment that we are old and fat and drunk, and a lot of the tunes were written with that in mind, which is why it was such a raucous, all-over-the-place record. So what we would like to do with this one – and we actually do have a working title for it, and titles for a number of songs that we haven’t written yet, so half the work’s done really – but we just want to make one more nasty, really heavy rock record before we're too old to be able to do it anymore. So if anything we’re going to try to tighten it up a little bit, and get a little bit more focused, with a bit more shredding and a bit more technical – if that’s possible for us – just to see if we can.”

So Campbell is fairly happy with the new material to date?

“Yeah, it’s great,” he continues. “I tend to write the slightly gay poppier numbers and Davis writes the weird time signature rock numbers, and Richard and Pete make them sound way more intelligent than they actually are. And that’s still going on. Pete’s actually been writing more too – he wrote a few riffs on the last one – and Richard can if you twist his arm. But the format hasn’t changed – it’s very rare that someone would come to the rehearsal room with a completed song and go, ‘Here’s how the song goes’. It’s more like, ‘I’ve got this bit’, and then someone else will go, ‘Well, I’ve got this bit – maybe we could stick them together?’, and before you know it it’s turned into something.

APRA-wise – royalty-wise – it’s always just been a straight 25 percent split ... I can’t play the drums so why should I take money for drum parts?

"They don’t always go together – quite often it will be, ‘They don’t go together, what a dumb idea’ – but it’s always been a very collaborative process, if for no other reason that I can’t play the drums for shit, so I’m not going to dictate how a drum part should go. I think that’s part of what’s kept it interesting for us, and hopefully for the people who’ve listened to it as well over the years. APRA-wise – royalty-wise – it’s always just been a straight 25 percent split, for the same reason; I can’t play the drums so why should I take money for drum parts? And that’s not just a reward – everyone gets 25 percent of absolutely fuck all – but I think there’s also a sense of obligation if everyone has an equal share in a band in a songwriting sense to contribute. I think that’s put us in good stead over the years as well.”

Not being facetious (well, slightly) but do they feel that there’s any additional creative pressure this time around now that they’ve joined the esteemed ranks of ARIA winners?

“I don’t know, is there?” Campbell rails. “Last time we spoke was just after that ARIA thing – no, it was just after we made the beer – and I think I told you at the time that I’m not aware of anyone winning an ARIA ever having made a difference to anything ever, then or now. One thing we do know now is that if you release an album within a year, somebody might nominate you for an ARIA and you might win one – how that happens I don’t know, but I do now know that it can happen. You think you think it’s funny, try being us! [Ritardando] was probably the hard rock, and the next one we make will be more the heavy metal one. We do both kinds of music.”

Anyone who’s seen Front End Loader in the flesh will attest that there’s an overt camaraderie between the four bandmates, and Campbell believes that this friendship has contributed to their remarkable longevity as a functioning single entity (over two decades and counting now without a line-up change).

“This is going to sound fairly cliché, but we are still friends,” he ponders. “That’s not to say that we haven’t punched on from time to time, but I think it still has to do with the fact that this isn’t a dictatorship, it’s a true democracy. Everybody has the right of veto about everything, which is half the reason that it takes us so fucking long to do anything ever. Democracy doesn’t work, let’s face it.

Richard did sack us all once, but I think he’d had a lot of tequila, and I think he hired us all again the following day.

"If we wanted to release an album a year and do tours and be successful, somebody would have to take the reins and kick the others into gear, but that’s just never happened. Again, I think there’s just a sense of mutual obligation but also mutual reward and respect for what is achieved. We have taken long hiatuses for personal and family reasons – and that’s fine – but the other thing I think is that we’re all far too stubborn to be the one who’s going to break up the band; ‘Fuck you, I’m not going to break up the band’, ‘Fuck you, I’m not doing it either!’ Richard did sack us all once, but I think he’d had a lot of tequila, and I think he hired us all again the following day. But I dunno, there’s plenty of ego in this band but it’s never really got in the way because more often than not if you start being a dick someone will tell you so.

"And, as well, we do genuinely enjoy each other’s company, which is always going to help. Davis and I went to school together, and Richard and Pete played in a band together for a couple of years before we started, so the relationships were already formed, and I guess if you spend enough years in a van with three other men you’re either going to work out how to get along or you’re going to implode. Luckily for us we’ve gone the ‘get along’ way.”

Has the Loader raison d'être changed over time? Is there a different approach to the band now they have jobs, families and lives vying for their time and attention?

“Well, not by choice,” Campbell tells. “I reckon if we won the lottery we’d probably do nothing but sit around and write songs and play music and do gigs and stuff. Unfortunately we never made it to the Powderfinger-esque lofty heights of being able to buy a yacht, and therefore we had to have day jobs, and as you well know, having a day job tends to destroy your soul and leave you very tired at the end of any given day. But making music is very good for the soul, and therefore we’ll keep doing it because it does actually have a psychic value, if not a monetary one.  We don’t do it really – and this is a bit of a wanky thing to say – but we honestly don’t do it for any other reason than we like it. And having put in the yards over the last 20 years, there’s enough people – and I’m not saying there’s heaps of them – but there’s enough people around the country that are willing to pay to see a show or buy a record or buy a T-shirt or a stubby cooler or a hunting knife or whatever that we can continue to do it.

"We’ve never personally taken any money – unless we’re flat broke and have to borrow some – but we’ve never personally taken money from a gig or from an album, it always just goes straight back into the band account, which means we can make another one. It’s never really been anything other than a self-sustaining hobby, I guess. In our early 20s, maybe we thought we could make a living out of it, but that’s long gone. Now it is a hobby, but if you’re going to have a hobby, then free beer and travel and playing rock’n’roll with your mates is a pretty good one to have.”

There must have been many career highlights over the journey – they’ve oft been heard discussing the ‘90s tours they undertook with Canadian punk icons Nomeansno in glowing terms, is this the high water mark in terms of fun?

“In terms of career highs, they’re one of our favourite-ever bands, so doing a tour here with them was amazing,” Campbell enthuses. “They first came out with DOA – they were supporting DOA – and the promoter said, ‘Hey, do you want to come and open for DOA?’ We were like, ‘Yeah, that sounds kinda interesting’, and then he said, ‘I’m bringing this other band out from Canada with them as well, maybe you’ve heard of them – Nomeansno?’, and we were, ‘Fuck yeah! We’re there!’ So we did that and it was one of our first-ever big tours – it nearly killed us, but it was well worth doing – and as a result we got on well with those guys, and they said, ‘If you can get yourselves to Europe come and play with us over there’, so that was pretty fucking amazing, touring Europe with Nomeansno.

"I guess in terms of meeting your heroes and going overseas and stuff that remains a highlight, but to me there’s great gigs and great tours but there’s also just great experiences. You can have as much fun having a delightful meal and a quiet beer somewhere in a beer garden at sunset in a beautiful pub somewhere where you wouldn’t have been unless you’re in a touring band, and every now and then you can have a moment where you go, ‘Fuck, this is alright, isn’t it? I would never have been here if I hadn’t chosen this particular path’. So for me those little highlights happen quite regularly.

“But there’s been huge gigs too. My 20th birthday I think we played at Salinas in Sydney on a bill that was Beasts Of Bourbon, You Am I, Front End Loader and Frenzal Rhomb – on my 20th birthday… that was pretty loose, as you can probably imagine. That always springs to mind, but there’s been heaps of other amazing line-ups like that, and just meeting people and going places... Living the life of a pirate has its ups and downs, but mainly ups.”

Finally, we ask Campbell to tell us something (usable) about each of his bandmates in turn that we might not already know, and he accepts the challenge with relish.

“Did you know that Richard was once on Sale Of The Century?” he asks. “He was terrible, he fucked it. It’s on video somewhere, I’ve seen it, but from memory he didn’t go too well. Maybe he choked, I dunno, but for a very smart man he completely fucked it.

"Hmmm, there’s so many things I could tell you about Davis that you don’t know, I’m really spoiled for choice here… Let’s do Pete – did you know that Pete is quite an accomplished visual artist? Basically all of the drawing or artwork that’s ever been on any of our albums or posters was done by Pete. All that 'Good Time Larry' stuff from the first album – all of that – right down to font choices and all of that sort of stuff as well. My dad is a graphic designer and he’s done all of the layout and print-ready stuff, but the artistic vision as it were has always been Pete. So all of those drawings on the front of Ritardando was all him – I don’t know if many people know that. A mate of ours, Keith Hamlyn – who used to play in Midget – he had a retrospective exhibition of his work the other night at a gallery and that’s truly retarded, which is probably why that’s in the forefront of my mind.

"And Davis… Davis’s first girlfriend’s father was an officer in the Police Tactical Response Group! I think it all ended reasonably amicably and they’ve seen each other since, but for a while there it was fairly tense for all of us. Seriously, the things I know about Davis are more than anyone needs to know, but that one springs to mind as something that’s interesting but won’t get us in trouble.”