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The Go Set.
When I first put on 'Sing A Song Of Revolution', the debut album
for Melbourne quintet The Go Set, I was expecting a rollicking
good time. After all, their bio makes much of their adoration
of Weddings Parties Anything and their line up includes a mandolin
player and a bagpiper; hence when the speakers filled with 1788
and the brash Aussie punk voice of Justin Keenan, topped with
a chorus H-Block 101 wouldn't have blinked at, I thought that
I might have gotten the wrong end of the stick.
Not really, Keenan assures me. "The thing is that punk's kinda a dirty word; you label anything a punk rock record and the people who are into hardcore say 'that's not punk, punk is Black Flag,' or something, but if you call it a folk record then folkies go 'no, that's definitely punk,'" he chuckles. "It's really hard to label music that crosses genres like we do."
It's a fair call: the songs are rooted heavily in folk's storytelling tradition (think WPA and The Pogues), but the arrangements are a good deal heavier. When I ask Keenan how the mix developed, he's more than eager to explain The Go Set's story.
"To be honest with you, all the guys in this band used to play in other bands, and I just found with my old band, which was called Eddie Would Go..."
As in Natalie's Friend?
"Yeah!" he says, surprised. "All the guys [in The Go Set] are from bands sort of similar to Eddie Would Go: bands who had achieved a small level of success, but not much. And in writing songs in that band it got to the point where the motivation behind the songs was wrong. What I mean by that is we would get to picking songs for an album and we'd say 'we should pick that one because Triple J are likely to play it.' And the other thing is that I believe that in all bands the key to being really innovative is to distinguish yourself from your influences, and in my old band we really sounded like our influences, playing what we thought would be cool rather than the songs we really wanted to play.
"I can say about The Go Set it's the first time for me, and I think I can say the same for the other guys, where if it folded tomorrow we'd have been 100% honest to what we wanted to do: they lyrics have a social and somewhat political tendency, and the music is kinda punk rock music with a folk influence. I'd repressed the desire to play that because I thought that no-one would like it, which is really dumb but it takes you a while to realise that. And when we started this band we were like 'well, no-one's really going to like us', but at the end of the day hopefully we can look back and have affected people with their honesty."
One such honest moment is Raymond O'Byrne, with its blunt story of a returned serviceman hanging himself after finding it impossible to live with his experiences. "That's a family story," Keenan says quietly. "It's all true."
When I press him further, he sighs. "That particular song is trying to explain that a war lasts for four years or whatever but for the young people sent over to fight, even if they'd never have dreamed of ever partaking in that sort of violence, it affects families for generations after. After a war we have decades of people who are unable to resume a normal life, let alone assume the role of an elder in our society."
That's a lot to pack into one three minute song, but Keenen's not that fussed if punters don't pick up all the nuances during their energetic live shows. "It's interesting, you can actually pick the people in the audience who are going to walk away singing a line, and there are others who are going to walk out and haven't actually picked up any sort of message but just had a good night," he shrugs. "And at the end of the day, if you feel like you've helped change someone's mind or how they vote or think about the future of this country, then that's great; but you if you can bring some people some joy, that's one of the aims too."
Andrew P Street
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The Go Set play at the Crown & Anchor on Sat 18 June with The Unspoken Things and The Trafalgars.
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