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This Is Your Captain Speaking.
"For some reason, we decided to do a gig for the Fringe festival
in Melbourne, which is happening in about three weeks' time.
We're going to do versions of some Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream
songs. We've got two friends playing synthesisers, and we're
just the backing band."
This Is Your Captain Speaking's David Evans, although often quiet and fairly introspective, is of the nicest people it has been my pleasure to speak with. He's also unsurprisingly an interesting chat - as well as his drumkit duties, he is also the band's resident typewriterist. TIYCS, as they will be henceforth called, are an ambient, moody instrumental band with a minimalism and succinctness that makes them both affecting and utterly spellbinding. "I don't know, I don't really think about what we do in terms of it being avant-garde or weird, and other music being poppy. To me, music can take a lot of forms, shapes and sounds. There's one really long song on our album, the opening track is about eighteen minutes long."
How on earth do three people get together and write such a properly structured opus of a song? "God, I don't know. We're just used to it. It's a bitch to rehearse those songs," he laughs. "It's kinda weird sometimes when we're playing live to people who've never seen us before, and people will come up to us afterward and assume that we were improvising the whole time. But what we do is fairly structured, there's a space within what we're doing to put your own energy into it but it's all figured out. So we can play our songs, and we can just play them, and it's okay, but when we have a good gig it's a case of everyone just getting totally lost in what they're doing..."
If you think you recognise TIYCS, you might have, like myself, been at the Jade Monkey last year when they played their first ever Adelaide show. I'm surprised to learn that it was actually only their third show. Ever. "I'm not sure why we did it, in retrospect. I think we just thought, you know, we should play a show somewhere else where nobody knows us. So we went all the way over to Adelaide. We went to Sydney a few weeks later, but for some reason we thought, 'Well, let's go to Adelaide.' And that's really because we'd made a bit of contact with the guys out of [Adelaide/Melbourne indie band] Brer Mouse, so we sort of teed up a show with them. I would say to anyone from Adelaide who saw us that night, that was an introduction to what we do, and..." He trails off, leaving us to imagine the prospect of a fitter, better TIYCS at this next show.
The short-term future sees TIYCS attempting to organise an overseas jaunt. "We've had quite a few people from Europe and America making contact with us," explains Evans. "We've had a few little labels from overseas making contact with us. It's sort of weird sometimes how people find out about you, but we did a live performance in 'The Age' studio..." The Age? Studio? "You know, 'The Age', the biggest newspaper in Melbourne, the Fairfax paper? It's usually really mainstream stuff, the week before we went in it was Nick Cave, and the week after, it was - what's his name from the Smashing Pumpkins? - and we've had quite a few people contact us and say that they saw that. I don't know what they're doing looking at 'The Age'... I think actually what happens is, we had quite a few people contact us from Australian Music Online, we had a song put up there for a while (and when I say quite a few I mean five or six people). But there's a guy in Poland and a guy in Spain who have radio programs who play our stuff all the time. And they're really into Australian indie music. They send you their playlist and it's all Sydney and Melbourne bands, and I think that's kind of due to Nick Cave and people like that..."
Ben Revi
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This Is Your Captain Speaking play at the Jade Monkey on Sat 13 Aug with The Silvermine Tapes and Aviator Lane.
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The latest issue
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