Sauce

After touring Europe, you’d have to forgive The Drones’ Dan Luscombe for just wanting to settle down back in Melbourne with a nice, hot Lemsip to soothe his addled vocal chords. But it’s any wonder the band made it back at all, what with travelling around in a peanut-sized van with a tour manager as incompetent as the waiter from Fawlty Towers…

So where are you?
I’m just in Melbourne. I’m drinking Lemsip … a lot of Lemsip. I’ve got a cold! [Laughs]

Oh, no …
Yes … We just got back about two weeks ago from four months of touring in summer, and now my body’s not coping with this winter bullshit!

Was that in Europe or America?
That was in Europe, Scandinavia, and then England.

Beautiful! What sort of hijinks did you get up to over there?
Oh, well … we got robbed! We got mugged … Mike, the drummer and I got mugged. What else? We traveled 26,000 kilometers by road in a van the size of a peanut! But we did have good shows, essentially. And we didn’t kill each other, which is the best bit.

That’s handy.
We still love each other, which is amazing.

I was going to ask – how do you keep the friendships alive when cooped-up in a traveling peanut?
Um … well, the trick is to have a detestable tour manager, which we did. We had a chap from the north of Spain, who drove us all around Europe … and insane. He couldn’t read a map! He’d never tour-managed before. He had strange ways; strange, infuriating ways.

Can you give an example?
Well, he’d just do things like forget to book ferry tickets and stuff, you know? We had to cancel a couple of shows, because he simply didn’t get us to them! [Laughs] He had one of those GPS devices … I don’t know what kind of setting he had on it, but it was taking us through these tiny villages, when we should have been on highways! And whenever he’d leave the band, we’d try to correct it, but it was all in Spanish – we couldn’t do it. Yeah, he was an odd guy – kind of dim. And we were stuck with him for four months. And because we had a common enemy, we all got along great! We’re going to take him on the next tour!

Uniting against a common enemy will bring people together.
It’s a good idea. If there’s any band out there who’s thinking of doing a long tour, I can highly recommend bringing along someone that you loathe; give them some kind of task, but the most important thing is just making sure they’re there the whole time. Every band needs one!

Every band needs a hate mascot!
Yeah! [Laughs] They really do work!

So you’re just about to start touring again – how are you preparing for this one? Are you going to find another hate mascot?
Nah … [Laughs] We’re going to have to, you know, just get along! Luckily it’s not anywhere near as long as that tour – it’s just a quick whip-around the major cities. And then we’re off to America; America and Canada, for about a month and a half.

Gala Mill was made down here in Tassie. Why was that? What drew you to make an album here?
Well, essentially … we played at the Falls Festival a couple of years ago, but not in this band; Gareth and I were playing with Dan Kelly and his band at the time. A whole bunch of us came down and spent a week just traveling around Tasmania. And Mike, obviously, is from Tasmania – the drummer. We all really love Tassie; there’s a real other-worldliness to it, I guess. It’s a spooky place. It’s a very pretty place. And Mike heard of this property out in Cranbrook. There was no recording studio there; it was a disused mill. So we just took everything down in a van, set up … I guess it was just a novelty, but it turned out to be a really great idea. It’s always a good idea if you can get some sort of seclusion when you’re making your record, you know? [You] make that the only thing that’s on your mind. And a lot of the songs on the album deal with Australian history, particularly things that occurred in Tasmania too, so it seemed kind of appropriate.

Sort of the nexus of that historical focus, in a way?
Yeah, exactly … If you really want to get deep into [the songs] – particularly those songs – I couldn’t think of a better environment, you know?

Seeing as the album was made here, how is the Hobart show going to be? Is it going to be a bit more special than your normal shows?
[Laughs] We try to make every show a bit more special than the last one, and Hobart will be no exception. We’re going to be playing with some friends of ours – a band called Que … Yeah, and the Republic’s always really good and nice. They always look after us. We’ve had some great nights there. Last time we were there … we had a great night … so hopefully we can repeat it. We get pretty noisy in the Republic, though – that’s the only thing!

Listen to The Drones get noisy at Hobart’s Republic Bar on October 6th.

Listen to the full interview Below, where Dan reveals the top three songs that scared him as a kid!