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Red Paintings.
 "I was screaming to everyone 'The revolution's never coming!' and everyone was like 'Yes! Finally! Someone shouting it!'" Red Paintings' frontman Trash McSweeny enthusiastically tells me. "The Big Day Out was fucking unbelievable, we were the only independent band on a major stage."
Starting out as a band consisting of Trash, his violin teacher, and a few odds and ends in Geelong, two years later the now Brisbane-resident act are erecting Walls which debuted at number two on the Triple J Net 50, three weeks before its release.
They are best known for their amazing live act, as Trash goes on to explain. "We have amazing back drops: I've got alien abductions, autopsies that are crazy. I got people walking out of the shows because they can't handle it. I've been collecting Geisha dolls ever since I can remember and just before the Livid festival I said to the band that I would feel more comfortable if my bedroom was up there on stage and at that time we met a costume artist who was willing to make up the costumes and kimonos for free so we did it, we turned the string section into Geisha dolls."
He pauses for breath and I ask how audiences respond to these antics. "I like to judge a crowd by the sorts of paintings they do, because every time we do a show now we put up canvases. You find that at shows we do on the Gold Coast and Surfers Paradise we get really anal paintings, like a penis with a face drawn on it, or they write 'fuck you'. No-one has any emotional creativity that's leaning towards something positive. But then you go to Byron Bay and we get these amazing strange artworks that are really creative."
The year has been non-stop so far for the Red Paintings: the Big Day Out, then a tour of China, and now they've just finished filming their film clip to Walls.
"For the film clip we got a German artist called [Gottfried] Helnmen. He did a lot of Marilyn Manson and Rammstein's artwork. We also just had an Andy Warhol party at the Zoo last Friday. What we did was re-enact Andy Warhol's life on stage over an hour and a half. We did the 15 minutes of fame by getting people from the audience to sit in booths and be filmed in 15 minute blocks and they were then projected onto the backdrop whilst we played. The audience was like 'Oh my god! There's my head!' and their mates were paying them out," he chuckles. "And I was out the front dressed as Andy Warhol, egging everyone on."
I cautiously ask why The Red Paintings are as much of a visual performance as they are a band. Almost knocking me off my chair with his enthusiasm, he exclaims "Everyone says that it's a gimmick and that it's going to take away from the music, but I believe that it's more like you're living on an island called Australia where there's just so much repetitive music and so many monotonous chords, it gets really hard to stand out. I think the Red Paintings would have eventually made it just musically but I wanted to do it now. So I put on stage what I am, who I am and what I'm projecting is me and this is my personality. So all these things have been dressed up but this really is Trash McSweeny's personality and it's really become the Red Paintings' sound, a visual sound. I always see art and music as one, I always have. Even the name 'The Red Paintings' came from when I was first realising that I was hearing songs in colour on my forehead. I was writing down colours and forming and composing songs that way and then I came up with the name."
Suddenly his demeanor changes. "I hate myself, I think I'm the biggest loser in the world but for some reason I get to write music and then get to show it to Australia - I don't find myself any better because I play a piece of wood because that's basically all it is. Just because I pick up one piece of wood and put on a stage show doesn't make me special. I don't want people to go 'oh he's a pretentious wanker' because I'm not cool. I'm a dickhead. It just happens that my art is my music."
Jess Law
 | The Red Paintings play at Jive on Sat 11 June. |
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