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The Open Season.
 "You caught us mid-song," laughs Steve McGrath when I ring, just in case I had any doubts as to The Open Season's commitment to rock. The band are diligently rehearsing in preparation for the launch of their AWSAM chart-topping debut CD, 'Chase'. Not bad beginnings for such a young band. "Our first show was in, what, August or September last year," McGrath muses. "and we'd only started jamming a couple of months before that."
I was surprised at their youth, given their accomplished and solid sound. I'd assumed they'd have been older, or at least had some sort of serious Adelaide band credentials. "Well, nothing really that established,' McGrath shrugs when I ask whether they'd been in previous groups. "We're only, like, 21, but me and Damo [Slattery], the bass player, we had been in a pop-punk band called Too Many Malcolms. Then we started a band called Open Season, but that fell through and we just recycled the name. And Travis [Wright, drums] and Jeremy [Gryst, guitar] had been in a few things, but I don't know if they'd actually played shows. We just started out a three-piece - I'd met Trav probably a year before we started jamming properly - and we tried to get a few songs together and then decided we should get a second guitar player, so Jez came in."
Despite their impressively focussed sound, McGrath denies that there was any great thought put into their approach. "Ahhh, no," he assures me. "It's probably only really been earlier this year that we've been thinking that maybe this could be more serious and making plans and stuff."
They've certainly been following through: in a scant 14 months they've played over fifty gigs and are preparing to launch 'Chase' interstate. "We've booked some shows in Melbourne and Sydney following [the Adelaide launch], and I guess the plan for next year is to tour as much as we can and get the name out there, just play shows and build up our abilities as a band."
That said, they're not about to follow the likes of Day Of Contempt and relocate overseas any time soon. "Whaddya think about overseas?" McGrath asks the rest of the room to low mutters. "We'd love to, but you'd want to get really well established in Australia first. I mean, we wouldn't want to pack up and go somewhere else until it was viable to do so."
Well, they could see how things work out for Newtonheath and then stay at their place in Canada, of course. "Hey, that's true!" he laughs.
The disc was produced by Darren Thompson at Soundhouse Studios, but McGrath is momentarily stumped when I ask what attracted the band to him. "Aww..." he exhales heavily, before putting the question to the rest of the band. "I'll ask the boys again: hey, why did we go with Darren?" There's an animated discussion in the background before McGrath gets back on the line: "Because Jezza is a Thinktank [Thompson's former band] fan," he explains, "and because we'd heard his other recordings like Mere Theory and Blueline Medic, he's worked with a lot of Adelaide bands, and we'd heard good things about Soundhouse and we thought we'd like to get a bit out of those punk sort of sounds and that Darren might have a bit more insight into that. We went in for ten days and stretched it out for fifteen, so it cost a bit more," he laughs.
The band are clearly looking forward to the launch and have assembled a fine lineup of punk talent. "We've got Forgetting Yesterday, who are from the Central Coast: they're a great band, we've played with them before and they're coming with us to Melbourne and Mount Gambier for the couple of nights after [the launch], and we've got In Fiction, who used to be Short Term Gain, and also a young band called Her Latest Flame: they're all sixteen, seventeen or something and have been playing around a fair bit - I think this'll be their first Enigma show, so I hope they step up and have a good time."
Andrew P Street
 | The Open Season launch 'Chase' at the Enigma Bar on Fri 2 Dec with Forgetting Yesterday, In Fiction and Her Latest Flame. |
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