When I was really young, my parents took me to a frightening annual hippy jamboree known as the Port Fairy Folk Festival. Even though most of it’s a blur now, I have two distinct memories of the weekend — one is of copping my first nose-full of marijuana smoke (arguably responsible for a subsequent ten year addiction) and the second is…

… seeing all the performers from the weekend — balding dudes with banjos, barefoot and braless ladies with tambourines, young guys who resembled a scruffy Jesus on the trumpet, everyone — get onstage together for a final impromptu jam.

After I got over being horrified, I actually got into it. It was the first time I ever got totally lost in a set and appreciated the fact that a bunch of people going nuts on instruments can create awesomely mesmerising music.

It’s pretty much the same way I felt when I first saw good time party collective, !!!, busting out one of their eight minute percussive acid house infused moments of genius. They share a couple of members with dance friendly bands Out Hud and LCD Soundsystem and sound like a frienzied ball of energy and it’s all good.

In a vaguely confusing twist, !!! were recently invited by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers to support them on a massive world tour, which meant that all nine members of the band had to quickly adjust to playing to 50,000 people instead of 500 people a night.

Vice: You guys have been going for ten years. Great effort. How has the journey been?
When we started out playing ten years ago, we were just playing parties. Every week there would be a dance party. We wanted to play music that was getting us exited at the time. We weren’t hardcore kids or emo kids, we were listening to Michael Jackson and Prince and James Brown and Kraftwerk or whatever — stuff that had soul and rhythm. We had no grand scheme. On our first tour we lost shit-loads of money and would play to Emo kids in living rooms and people fucking hated it. It was a nightmare tour. But it was also really fun and new. Most of us had never travelled before so it was also super exiting. The next tour was a little better and the one after that a little bit better again and then we started breaking even. I don’t know at what point we crossed over from a house party band to an actual band but it was a slow, gradual thing.

It’s kind of disconcerting to think that you guys toured with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. How did you guys hook up?
John Frusciante saw us play in and L.A. and was really impressed so he called Anthony Kiedes from our show and that was it really. I know it sounds like a myth. Then they contacted us and we played on tour with them in the UK for three weeks. When you’re playing to 50,000 people, everything else ceases to matter. It’s really a fuck load of people.

We are consistently surprised by how incredibly bad most band photos are. We hear that instead of traditional press shots, you made cardboard cut-outs of yourselves which people could do with whatever they pleased. What was that all about?
Well, it’s more of a time saving device than anything else. Because we live in different cities, when we get together, we’ve really gotta make music, you know? Its not like we can take days off and say “Hey lets do press today!” They never turn out any good anyway. Even our friends’ bands look like dicks. We can ship our cut-outs anywhere in the world and be doing ten different shoots simultaneously. It’s really very versatile.
FANDANGO

!!! play around Australia on the following dates:

Sydney – Thur, 8th March @ The Forum (Tickets available from: all Moshtix outlets, on 02 9209 4614 and online from inthemix)

Brisbane – Fri, 9th March @ The Columbian (Tickets available from: Etix and 1300 762 545, Rockinghorse, Skinny’s, Butter Beats (Valley and City), Moshpit Music, Sunflower Music, Music Mania and Central Station Records and online from inthemix)

Melbourne – Long Weekend Mon, 12th March @ Prince of Wales (Tickets available from: The Prince and 03 9356 1168, Missing Link Records, Polyester, Greville Records and online from inthemix)