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Change Of Face.
 I was already aware that WA's punk rock band Change Of Face had some brothers in there lineup before I interviewed them, and I knew their surname was Robinson, but I'm stumped when the person on the other end of the line introduces himself as 'Robbo'.
As it turned out I was speaking to their vocalist Rowan on the eve of Change Of Face's first national tour and I asked Robinson what the current situation was. "Well, we played a couple of Perth shows over the weekend, then got into Sydney this morning and now we're in Newcastle. We've got a show in Newcastle tonight and then we do the rest of Australia," he said excitedly.
"The Perth shows were good, but we've got some better ones at the end of the tour. The first ones we really just wanted to get the cobwebs out, we hadn't played in a month, so we didn't want to come over here and be really shit. We just played a couple of smaller shows to get into it."
I couldn't remember seeing Change Of Face touring Adelaide in the past so I enquire as to just how much touring they had done.
"We do quite a bit of regional stuff in WA, but out of WA we've really only been to Melbourne before, so this is our first time in New South Wales and it will be our first time in Adelaide as well. In fact none of us have ever been to Adelaide before. We've heard a lot about it though."
We then get into a conversation about the venues and the lineups they will be playing with when they hit Adelaide. "Is the scene in Adelaide a bit funny with the whole hardcore thing?" Robinson asks carefully. "Am I right in saying that bands like I Killed the Prom Queen pull huge crowds and nobody else really gets a look in?"
I reassure him that Adelaide is pretty chilled out and that you never can tell who's going to appear on a bill together from one day to the next.
"We've always steered clear of Adelaide," Robinson admits. "It's not because we haven't wanted to, it's just because we've never really fit in with those type of bands."
Speaking of scenes, Perth has long appeared to have a thriving live scene and I wondered whether that was actually the case for somebody who was living there.
"Well it seems to be that at all levels with all different styles of music there seems to be a bit of a buzz," Robinson confirms, before moving back to the topic of hardcore vs everything else.
"It's been said all over Australia that hardcore over here has been huge and the punk thing sort of dropped off, in terms of the buzz about it. I think it's a funny time for the [punk] scene Australia-wide. I think there's going to be a revolution in terms of what's popular. I don't think the fashion metal thing is going to last much longer. I think we're going to look back on this and go 'what's with all the fashion?' There are a lot of bands that are really good at it but there's a lot of shit out there too. We've seen kids in Perth who are eighteen who have got XXX tattooed on their neck; surely at that age they're not really ready to make that decision?"
I agree before moving the conversation onto their new single Bite Your Lip that has already had some airplay on Triple J. When I heard it I noticed that it was a lot rockier than their previous material. Robinson explains to me how this shift came about.
"We used to be a band that wanted to be doing more than we were doing, like we should be recording an album or touring more. As a result I think we started putting that into the songs, like the songs have to sound like this or the songs have to sound like that," Robinson explains.
"We ended up taking a six month break and came back and looked back to what we were doing and thought, 'that's bullshit, we can do whatever we want!' As a result the new album came out like that and it is a lot more like what we listen to personally."
Sam Vinall
 | Change Of Face play an all-ages show at the Crown & Anchor on Sun 19 June with STR, Stolen Youth and The Open Season. |
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