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Hoodoo Gurus.
The Hoodoo Gurus are like Gods to me. No, seriously – I’m one of the fortunate few who cannot actually remember a time when Like Wow, Wipeout was not a staple for every aspiring Aussie cover band. I cannot remember the days before the marvellous chorus of I Want You Back, or the brutal rocking The Right Time. I’ve grown up with this quintessential Aussie fourpiece as they brazenly attacked commercial radio with their fantastically melodic garage rock style, and I was simply sitting in awe as I talked to guitarist, Brad Shepherd.
"You know what? I was actually playing in the Hoodoo Gurus before you were born," he laughs, when I tell him how old I am.
"No existence without the Hoodoo Gurus! We’re like the Pyramids, we’ve just been there forever! The Sphinxes of Australian rock!" he laughs.
"I just hope it’s a good thing, Ben, that’s all I can say. It’s nice for me to have been blessed enough to have the luxury to have been a performing musician who actually gets a pay packet every week for some considerable amount of time. It’s what I wanted to do with my life and it’s a long shot when you commit yourself to something like that – you know, your parents tell you that you need something to fall back on..."
Surely not! But if you were thinking the Gurus may have been simply old commercial rock sellouts, think again. "Rest assured, I still have a very vivid memory of driving across the Nullarbor Plain in 1983 because we couldn’t afford to fly to Perth to play shows to promote the Tojo single.
"We were on a national tour for about six weeks just to promote that single, and we drove across the Nullarbor Plain which is probably something you don’t want to do too many times in your life. And particularly when we did it twenty years ago, you can imagine: the roads were just dreadful, we spent two nights getting there and both times there were no petrol stations open. If you thought you were going to run out of gas soon, and it was 4am, then you would just pull up to the petrol station and sleep until 6am when they opened, you know! I think we kinda earned our stripes. There’s a lot of touring like that, and we would tour like that routinely in the US as well."
After their (now seemingly temporary) break-up in 1998, I ask Shepherd how he feels to once again put on his Hoodoo Gurus face and play in front of people.
"The truth is nothing’s really changed that much: I’m in the Persian Rugs with two other Gurus, I’ve seen these blokes every week since we called it quits in ’98 anyway, it’s pretty much business as usual. It feels like nothing’s really changed at all!
"The nice thing is we’ve got some new music to play, and that feels good, but from the personal side of it, well I see these blokes every week anyway. I think at the moment we’re just looking at it as a one album, one tour proposition. But let’s see – there are no rules, we can continue if we like or we’ll call it quits... I think that if somewhere down the line if we write enough songs that are appropriate for the Hoodoo Gurus and we’re capable of performing them then there’s no reason why we couldn’t do it; that’s the same reason as we’re doing it now! It just happens that circumstances are such that it seems like a good idea."
But this isn’t just in front of people – this is the main stage of the Big Day Out, in front of thousands of screaming teenagers young enough to be their children!
"Actually the one thing that concerns me is there may be some young people who just won’t get into what we’re into, they will just buy into some sort of shitty philosophy that we’re old guys, but we will put paid to that very, very quickly. I think that the hard part is for Dave to be able to sing the right lyrics. They may have only heard us on the NRL ad!"
I stop him to tell him that we live in Adelaide and only get real footy.
"You haven’t heard that then? You don’t have a team in the NRL? I guess you don’t, do you? That’s My Team has been an enormously successful ad campaign, and that’s what’s going to be hard for Dave, I think, we re-recorded the songs with different lyrics: it’s not What’s My Scene? it’s That’s My Team! To start singing, ‘I’m a little bit crazy for my rugby league team!’
"You know, from time to time I bump into guys I went to school with, and they’re walking down the park with their son who’s ten or something and they go, ‘this is Brad, he’s a mate of mine, went to school...’ and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, so what,’ and then it’s like, ‘You know that song that you like, the footy song, well he plays guitar on that!’ And then I’m a God to them, then they’re like, ‘Oh, cool!’ It’s very funny.
"And they did compensate us appropriately to use that song, yes."
Ben Revi
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The Hoodoo Gurus play the Big Day Out Blue Stage at 6.30pm.
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