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Big Heavy Stuff.
 Big
Heavy Stuff is one of my favourite bands. Their previous album,
2001's 'Size Of The Ocean,' is up there as one of my all-time
favourite records. So it was with great pleasure that I talked
to the Heavies' bass-player (and former editor of games magazine
'Hyper') about their much-anticipated follow-up, 'Dear Friends
And Enemies'. Eliot Fish, however, explained that after such
a long time away from the music world, the Heavies' are not
getting back into things quickly.
"I've been relaxing at home, actually," he says, which may not have been the really excited rock response I was perhaps expecting. "Getting energised for the tour. We've all been, you know, laying low."
It may take comparatively longer for the Heavies' to energise before a national tour - after all, they don't do it often. In fact, it has been nearly two and a half years since they graced any Adelaide stages. "We're really looking forward to it, because it's a chance to play a lot of these songs we haven't played before. We're one of those bands that tend to get a little impatient, we're always playing songs before they're finished. We're usually writing a whole batch for a new album before we've even toured the album we've just released. So we've been good this time and we've not played a lot of the material on 'Dear Friends And Enemies' and we're looking forward to actually playing it. It's gonna be a lot more fun this time, because the songs are still fresh to us as well."
Fish also says that they will play many songs from their last two albums, including 1997's 'Maximum Sincere'. For those of you who are yet to own a copy of it, Fish claims they're still available. "I know most shops don't have it, unless they've got it in secondhand or something, but I think you can still actually order it online. I'm pretty sure they have it at Chaos Music. I had a look there and they didn't have the new album yet, but they did have copies of 'Maximum Sincere'. Three variations of it, I'm not actually sure what they are..."
One thing that stands out about their brilliant new album and differs from its predecessor is its length and the level of emotional complexity. "Greg [Atkinson, singer/songwriter]definitely worked harder on the lyrics this time, he was torturing himself over them a bit, because I think a lot of the songs have a more personal meaning than previously. But everything was more intense this time around, but intense in a positive way. We were all really enjoying each other's company and feeling happy.
"When we did 'Maximum Sincere', which is another long and epic album, the band was internally going through a difficult time. We just had too much material, we had thirty-five songs or something, and it was so hard to whittle it down, and so we ended up recording way more than we needed to. There were four or five songs we recorded that just got left on tape. So when we did 'Size Of The Ocean' we said, 'Alright, we're going to be far more concise this time, we're not going to write too much material, we're just going to select a bunch of songs that we think are really strong.' And we brought Wayne Connolly in early to start producing us, coming into the rehearsal studio going, 'Come on guys, you can cut this out, it's unnecessary...' We were quite strict on ourselves in that way, we rehearsed the album a lot before we went in and did it. I think when we came around to doing 'Dear Friends And Enemies,' we wanted to throw all the rules out and be a bit indulgent. There's a lot of material which didn't make the record, and we just ended up going, 'Oh, we can't leave this off...' The album was created over a much longer period, we didn't really rehearse it, we would go in and record songs sometimes that we'd only half gotten our head around, and they would change quite dramatically in the recording process. We'd recorded a lot of it with Wayne Connolly, and then we had about three months away from it and we came back and did extra recording with Dave Trump, who did 'Maximum Sincere' with us, and the 'Covered In Bruises' EP, so we were doing all this extra stuff with Dave and the songs were becoming more layered and totally changing direction and we were re-recording bits. It was a much more indulgent way of recording... We were making it for ourselves and this was what we came up with!"
Ben Revi
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Big Heavy Stuff play at Fowlers Live on Sat 6 March with Bluebottle Kiss and Centipede. 'Size Of The Ocean' is out now through Redline/Shock.
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