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Sixfthick.
The first thing I asked Geoffro Corbett from Sixfthick was whether
he still lived out in the country. After all, their new album
'Canetrash' just screams "I'm from the country" straight away,
from the name to the cover art depicting someone cutting sugar
cane. However, Corbett informs me in a very slow, deliberate
drawl that he now spends most of his time "smack bang in the
middle of Fortitude Valley in Brisbane." Consider my illusions
shattered. But I knew he grew up in the country, so where did
the rock'n'roll come from?
"Rock'n'roll? There was no rock'n'roll. I ended up going to art school in a hick town west of Brisbane. I got stuck out there for five years doing that because I got more interested in playing rock'n'roll that than going to university. You know how it happens."
Sixfthick grew of a show called Country Style Livers, which sounds as though it wouldn't be out of place at the Fringe Festival. "Yeah that was a stage show that Ben [Corbett] and I wrote. I was kind of involved in the theatre, performance, art sort of scene. We got given a chunk of money to write a play under the umbrella of a death country musical and we did that. We were both in bands at the time and we put together a house band for the show, and that was the original Sixfthick. We all got together and wrote a bunch of songs and we all thought it was kind of cool and wanted to keep it going."
My aural introduction to Sixfthick (for the last five years at least) was about an hour before the interview. It was hard not to notice how raw and live the album sounded.
"'Canetrash' was pretty much recorded live in the studio," Corbett confirms. "There were a few guitar overdubs and the vocals were done separately, but other than that it was all live. With a lot of the songs we'd play one song and then go straight into another one. When you kind of get a bit of a momentum up, what you do is you tend to keep it snowballing from one song to the next."
Because Sixfthick grew out of a stage show, multitudes of questions started popping into my mind about the authenticity of the band and whether it was all still an act. "We stopped all of that. We could have gone down the road where we create this big bullshit legend about the band but at the end of the day the band is who we are. Although yes, Ben and I did grow up on a chicken farm on the north coast.
"The other guys in the band have their influences but they don't really wear them on their sleeves, I mean you can't really pick any particular bands. We consciously went out to do that because there's too many bands out there now that you can pigeonhole them to the extent that you're not only talking about the genre they play but also the exact band they're trying to rip off. If that's their thing then that's their thing, but after ten years of doing it we've come up with a sound that's pretty much our own."
It's been a bloody long time since Sixfthick have been in our neck of the woods. "We've had some cracker shows in Adelaide at places like the Crown & Anchor." Corbett reminisces, "but we haven't been to either Adelaide or Perth for a fair while, and there's a lot of folks who are keen to have us come back. It's nice to be wanted."
Speaking of going different places I had read that the band had toured Japan a couple of years ago. Japan... Sixfthick ... how did that work?
"They fucking loved it. We did get told before we went over there to be prepared for the Japanese audiences just to stand there and politely clap in between songs, but Nagoya was as violent and as rough as any show we've ever done in Australia, no shit. It's a bit of a working class factory rock and roll town. The kids dug it. We were just thinking to ourselves 'how can these people be digging it so much when they can't understand a word we're saying?'. I guess it just goes to show that the language of rock'n'roll knows no boundaries."
Sam Vinall
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'Canetrash' is out now through Spooky Records and Sixfthick play at the Crown & Anchor on Fri 24 March and Sat 25 March.
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