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Les Savy Fav.
"Hello?"
Hi, this is Andrew from dB Magazine in Adelaide, South Australia.
"Oh, how are man? This is Syd."
Yeah, not so bad. And yourself?
"I'm doing OK."
And he may well be, but Les Savy Fav's bassist Syd Butler sounds a little surprised by my call. Something beeps periodically and he keeps getting distracted by inaudible questions in the background while I ask about his band's imminent Australian tour with fellow noise pop guerrillas Pretty Girls Make Graves.
"Well, we have like an east coast-west coast relationship. We're very similar in a lot of ways and we get along really well. They're one of our best band friends, if that makes any sense."
Sadly, there appears to be no rap-style east/west rivalry. "Er, no. We all support each other."
Les Savy Fav have just released 'Inches,' a collection of 18 tracks initially released as nine separate 7" singles released through nine different labels since 1999 to the present. It's a handsome concept, although I'm curious as to how well-defined it was before the band began recording: was it a deliberate choice, or just the way things turned out?
"No no, it was actually planned from the beginning, before we'd done anything... [to someone in the background] No, any of them, just grab one... yeah... Sorry, I'm checking out of a store - I was planning on being in the car and having plenty of time but everything's running late today." He sighs before giving up. "Hold on one second... hey, Tim?"
A new voice comes on the line. "Hey, how's it going?"
It transpires that I've been handed to Tim Harrington while Butler sorts out his purchases. "It's very exciting. I've just bought a bunch of socks, a thermal undershirt and a watch."
It turns out that "bought" is possibly a misleading term: Butler and Harrington are in the Nike employees store, stocking up on freebies after allowing one of their songs to be used for an internal presentation. "It wasn't like a commercial or anything, but they gave us a bunch of free clothes. And my politics don't turn down free. I'm not the bastion of morality I may seem to be," he laughs. "It's weird though: it's the employees store and there's only youth and small sizes - there's only children's sweatshirts." Sweatshirts for the sweatshops, then? "Oh, exactly!"
He's also just gotten some pyjama bottoms, which he's clearly delighted with. "They'll be good for the flight to Australia. I mean, pantsless on the plane? I don't think that's legal."
Returning to the subject of 'Inches,' Harrington confirms that it was a carefully thought out scheme. "The cover art was designed before we even recorded the first song. When naming the band one of the things we talked about a little bit was how corporations have style guides - like they'll have these really specific rules, like the logo's always this size and these colours and it'll be in the upper right-hand corner. And we thought it would amazing for the band if we could create a really, really complicated rule set - these colours, these fonts - so that when we came to design albums it will be really automatic; basically when you wanted to make something you'd run it through this little program and there's only a couple of different possible outcomes. And that extended into the idea of designing all of an album at once, then breaking it apart and releasing it a little bit at a time."
And why release on vinyl? "Well, I was really into 7" collecting and right when we were starting in the late nineties it was just after a really sweet period - like the late eighties, early nineties, so many great 7"s came from that time, and then in the mid-90s so many bands broke and got big and left a little bit of a wasteland for 7"s. So we came up with this big plan and at the time we thought it would take, like, two years," Harrington laughs. "We imagined ourselves at the end of the project basking in the acolades of our cleverness for having released this tiny little puzzle. But our cleverness wasn't realised."
I promise to do my best to emphasise the cleverness.
"Just write it in capitals, and maybe italics," Harrington suggests. "You don't have to write anything else."
Andrew P Street
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Les Savy Fav play at the SEAS Gallery on Hindley St on Sat 20 Nov, along with Pretty Girls Make Graves, Hit The Jackpot and My Sister The Cop.
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