Chick Magnets

In case you’re wondering, the two on the left are in the band and the guy on the right, who looks a bit like a geography teacher, is our friend and occasional contributer Adam. Adam went to the interview straight from working on his thesis in the library. What a guy! Photo by Natasha Bowron It’s a shitty, raining Thursday outside of the Sydney Entertainment Centre and a bored crowd is milling around on stained concrete. It’s some four hours before The Gallows are due to play alongside Aiden and The Used in the Taste of Chaos tour and the car park is overrun by white school kids with black t-shirts and bad skin. Pressed up against a hurricane fence is a mob of wailing 15-year-old girls and their complete attention is directed at a loading bay, outside of which a couple of roadies are smoking cigarettes and ignoring them completely. This situation is preoccupying the Gallows members, Laurent Barnard and Steph Carter, who I met in the staff canteen in the bowels of the entertainment centre. They’re sick of getting harassed by girls in their early teens, and Laurent tells me that they have now taken to checking the IDs of prospective groupies. Vice: And what do you do if they’re underage? LB: We sue them for sexual harassment, of course, with the help of a competent London barrister. It’s called “the Gallows’ sting”. So how come this tour is called “A Taste of Chaos”. That doesn’t sound like very much chaos to me. Why not a whole mouthful of chaos? A stomach full? LB: Ha! I don’t know. Maybe the organisers were worried that there would be too much chaos. SC: They wanted to offer people just a taste, not a gob full. Wouldn’t you rather be playing in smaller venues? This place is a dump. LB: Of course we would. We talked with some friends about sneaking off and doing an unadvertised show somewhere, but it’s not possible. First of all, our timetable is really tight, and secondly, we’re contractually obliged not to perform outside of the tour for its duration. Q: And what happens if you get caught breaking the rules? LB: Then we get back to the UK and we don’t get paid. And then we’d be in a lot of debt, totally financially fucked. So, did you get to see any other cities? SC: Yes. We played Adelaide. What’s with that place? It’s like half an hour off Sydney time. Since when do time zones step in increments of half an hour? What’s the point? I think it’s to do with the farmers’ wives worrying that daylight saving will fade their curtains. LB: That could be our fake name band if we played another show here, “The Farmer’s Wives and Their Beef Curtains”. Gross. What are you trying to do with your music anyway? I played some of your tracks to an emeritus professor of art history and all he could say was “where is the melody?” LB: That’s exactly the point. We really value noise. All of the best sound engineers, the best people you can work with, they go home and listen to the most incredible, fucked up, dischordant noise, stuff with this extraordinary energy, and that’s what we’re doing. Do you have any sources of inspiration outside of the obvious, like; do you listen to classical music? LB: Actually, I quite like Phillip Glass… and Lethal Bizzle. That’s interesting, but the tracks I heard sound more like my kid sister’s Screeching Weasel CD. SC: Yeah, but they only play three chords. LB: And we play four each. You got that? What we’re going for is total dischord. Total dischord. That’s the name we want to play the fake gig under. Total Dischord. ADAM JASPER