Taxiride: Turning Japanese.

Taxiride play the Treasury Casino on September 26, Twin Towns Services Club on September 27, the Beenleigh Tavern on September 28, the Nambour RSL on September 29 and Rumba at the ANZ Stadium on December 11.

“Just before I get home, there’s a shitty little bit of road that the phone always cuts out on,” Tim Watson explains after our interview is abruptly disconnected. “I totally forgot about it. I should have driven home another way.”

Fortunately, all is back on track, both for this interview, and for Taxiride, who are about to embark on some serious touring in support of their new album Garage Mahal..

“The last little tour was called the ‘where’s the buzz’ tour. It was just something to get us fired up. We wanted to get a lot of people down there, friends, even record company people, to just get back into it a bit.”

“When we did that tour the album wasn’t out, but we had three shows in a row in places like Sydney, and by the end of the run there were people who had been to all three shows that were singing along. We even had a couple of people that were out from Japan that had come along to the show.”

Not too surprising really, considering the Japan runs a very close second in terms of the successes the band have had here in Australia.

“We’re back in Japan in October. The album’s been released over there, and we’ve got shows in Tokyo and Osaka. The ultimate aim with somewhere like Japan would be to be able to do a concert hall, or get on the bill for something like Fuji Rock. That’s what we’d like to build up to, but you have to be doing pretty well to get on the bill.”

While the new album is the obvious focus of the coming tour, but as with any successful release there will always be a demand for the bigger tracks from Imaginate. Rather than meander through songs the band have already played to death, Taxiride have taken a fresh approach to their past hits.

“We did a reworked version of Get Set, and a few other things from the old set to make it work a bit better. Closer to what this album sounds like.”

Garage Mahal is a very different record to its predecessor Imaginate. Sure, there’s hooks for days, and you can still see a big chorus coming a mile away, but the band have put together a grittier recording this time around, and adding loops, samples and electronic effects into the mix. The same approach has been taken with their older material for this tour.

“I think you have to approach the older songs with a fresh viewpoint. There was one track that we were trying to rework into the last tour, and it just wasn’t sitting right, so we left it out. I guess you get your enthusiasm back for them with the new versions. For Get Set I took the track and went into a studio and took it apart and did some programming, so theirs loops and samples through the song as well as a meander guitar riff. Now it sounds like a cross between something like Nine Inch Nails and Stone Temple Pilots. We’ve played this song so much that we really needed this fresh angle to get into it.”

“Sometimes when you play an old song, people go, yippee, that was a hit and we get to hear it again. You’ve got to weight up the fact that if you mess with something too much it might put people off. I think this one has worked really well.”

The band spent time in Los Angeles recording the album, a move that previously paid off for them with their debut release.

“It was cool. We did a couple of weeks pre production for the record where we just kind of sat together and played things out live. I think what attracted us to working with Fred Maher (Dave Matthews Band, The Breeders) was that with a lot of people that’s he worked with, like Lloyd Cole, Matthew Sweet or Lour Reed, he’s obviously got the gift of not making something sound like someone else, giving it an individual approach. He’s very much a musician’s producer, I believe. You learn from everyone you work with.”

“We had 40 tracks written for the album, and we did demos for 22 before it got cut down to the 13 on the album. We really wanted that big bombastic sound for the album. We started seriously recording 16 tracks, and the last three just kind of got dropped off, because they weren’t coming up like the others. We might re-write them for the next album, but with the time we had they were off the list. Some of the songs we did as demos will be coming out as B sides.”