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Peabody.
Peabody's drummer Graeme Trewin is sounding chipper, despite just having had a uni exam on the morning of our interview. "I think it went all right," he says, clearly relieved. "I'm a bit of a last-minute crammer but I think it went OK - I'm a year away from finishing the course and I've never failed anything, although I'm sure I've come close on one or two occasions."
Trewin is doing a degree in Primary School Education. "I went back as a mature-ager a few years back. I really enjoy it - and it's a good rock job too, casual teaching. I'll probably do that for however long I'm in a band."
Peabody have just returned with their new single in a good long while, the storming Got You On My Radar. "There's four songs - the first will on the forthcoming album ['The New Violence'], then there's a song that didn't quite make the cut, but we really like it [Killing Ira], and the other two [Copy You, Copy Me and Oh Cyrano] are sort of demos that we recorded in the lead up to recording the album, but they're still really good. There's nothing worse than buying a single with just two songs on it."
The album's set for release early next year. "I can't wait for it to come out," Trewin enthuses. "I mean, I was really happy with the first album [2002's 'Professional Againster'], and I know every band says this, but I definitely feel that we've grown a lot in the past few years. It's pretty starkly different to the last one - it's more diverse, but still cohesive. We weren't reactionary to the whole New Rock thing or anything, but we wanted to validate for ourselves that we were being creative, not jumping any bandwagons or playing it safe."
It's interesting that Trewin says that since, for my money, Peabody have had a stronger claim on the New Rock than a lot of Australian bands, as anyone who's seen their energetic (and, for a three-piece, quite astonishingly loud) live performance can testify. "It's kinda odd," Trewin responds. "I remember doing a gig with a band called The Casinos, who we're pretty good mates with, a couple of years ago in Melbourne and a couple of the guys from Jet came, and basically they then poached [drummer] Mark Wilson from The Casinos - so it's been bizarre for us, because we knew Mark and now he's a mega-dude or whatever," he laughs. "But it's weird in that we've been doing what we did for ages - and it's not like we think anyone's ripped us off, because we weren't exactly reinventing anything - but in retrospect you just think 'well, we were doing those things...'and then you see them becoming this gargantuan thing.
"I definitely have a sense that a band like Jet becoming huge has spawned imitators - almost imitators of imitators - with some of these bands who are coming through. Too many bands just sound like everybody else; we want to do something that at least feels creative."
Andrew P Street
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Peabody play at Jive on Fri 12 Nov with Booster and The Trafalgars.
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