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Royal Crown Revue.
I knew that Royal Crown Revue guitarist was Australian before we spoke, but it was still odd hearing a distinctly Australian accent down the line - especially considering the band in question strikes me as being so definitively American. Mark Cally, however, sounds perfectly comfortable in his role.
"I grew up in Melbourne and moved to NY in '92. While I was there I worked a lot in the scene, with bands that knew them," he explains. It's the first time I've talked to someone who moves between 'us' and 'them' when referring to the band they play in, something Cally does throughout our conversation. "I moved to LA in 2001 and they were looking for a guitar player when I moved to town and they knew about me...so it just sort of fell into place. They were about to do a European tour and they needed someone. I just happened to be there at the right time."
Despite this fortuitous timing, the move to Los Angeles was actually for family reasons.
"At the time my son was about a year old and I didn't want him to grow up in New York City - it's a hard city to be a family in. [In LA] there's more space; I'm not cramming him into a small space in Manhattan. He has a yard to run in! In New York you live in an apartment, and I grew up in Melbourne, the Australian experience."
Royal Crown Revue are once again gracing our shores on the back of their new release 'Greetings From Hollywood'. It's a collection of songs either long out of print or never released, along with some new recordings - Cally's first recorded outing with the band. "You can split the CD in half: the first half is the older material from the1994 cassette ['Hollywood Tales'] and then there's a couple of things like Come Fly With Me from 1998, and then all the second half of the CD is stuff that we recorded last year. The interesting thing about the CD is that even though it's a review of the last 10 years, none of the stuff on there has been released on CD before. "
The reason for the album's release is very simple. "Because of the fans. We had a lot of people over the years saying they wanted to get 'Hollywood Tales'; they only made 1000 cassette copies at the time. We toyed with the idea of bringing it out and we thought well, we've got all this new material that we play in the band - why don't we put that on it? And Come Fly With Me, which we recorded in '98 for a compilation CD which never came out. It's just been sitting in the vault and the fans have been talking about that forever as well, that they'd love to get their hands on it, so we thought why don't we get all the stuff that people have been itching to get their hands on for a long time and make it like a big thankyou to the fans."
Suicidal Tendencies once re-recorded their debut album with the newer lineup - in part to prove that they were ten years ahead of their time - but this option wasn't a consideration for Royal Crown Revue. "No, because 'Hollywood Tales' was released just before Ted Templeman picked them up for Warner Bros. Then they did 'Mugzy's Move' and 'The Contender'. A lot of the stuff on 'Hollywood Tales' is earlier versions of stuff that ended up on the later records. Some of the tunes, they took half that tune and worked it into something else, so from that point of view its very interesting to go back and look at it like that."
For someone who's only recently joined the band, Cally is remarkably across their history. There was no orientation period at all was there? "That's right - I had to go away on a Swing Camp!" he laughs. "I had a lot to do with this album, I designed all the artwork and put all that together so that took months of doing that. Over the last few years I've had to deal with a lot of history, with where they've come from 'The Mask' [soundtrack] forward. And my career had pretty much run in a parallel - I was always aware of them and they were always aware of the bands that I was in too."
Wade Howland
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Royal Crown Revue play Fowler's Live on Sat 16 Oct with The Satellites.
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