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The Tucker B's.
After 11 years of having fun, the Tucker B's have released their
fourth LP, titled 'Chubby', and hitting the road to bring the
fun live to YOU.
"We're kind of touring around weekends," Andrew Houston reveals. "When we're not on tour we're earning money to go away on the weekend, I guess!"
The band just played a show in Brissie on Saturday night, then drove home to Sydney, ready for work on Monday morning. Sounds a bit serious? Well Houston, the band's bassist, lives his other life as an environmental consultant. The other guys in the band are engineers. All this, Houston reckons, is why the band is still going, despite numerous line-up changes (including a new drummer - so new it wasn't even on their website prior to the interview!), a move across the country from Perth to Sydney, and switching from uni life to the workforce.
"We really love it, so I guess it's a natural thing to kind of get away, creatively and do a lot of travelling," Houston offers. "I think if you don't focus on becoming successful and focus on just playing the music you want to play, and doing shows that you want to do, it's never gonna get really boring. Like, bands only really kinda get de-motivated and break up when they're trying to achieve something that's beyond them: then it gets pretty hard and it all falls apart."
Their anxiety-based music and off-kilter approach is definitely likely to confuse and even put some people off. Hell, the opening line of their online bio says they "diagnosed themselves with ADD at an early age"; their promo material describes the grass out of the front of the Perth-based house they recorded in as playing "a reverb soaked riff that is slow and foggy; you would hear it every time you walked up the driveway." While listening to 'Chubby' it soon dawned on me that all you really need to do is forget about analysing lyrics and looking for complexities: just look for the fun and go with the flow.
Along the way, the Tucker B's have had band members come and go, but this hasn't soured the fun for Houston. "We've been lucky enough that everyone's shared the same creative drive, same interests and the same music, so it's easy; it's fun for us to do what we do. We just wanna have a good time [so it's good] to have the Tucker B's as a vehicle to do that."
While the band's alternative rock/pop/folksy kinda sound hasn't brought them mainstream success or a major wave of airplay, the Tucker B's like the live aspect far more - even if, as Houston says, it means only about one in a hundred punters who see them stay on to become long-term devotees. "We like it to be fun, and live, it's 20 times more crazy than the record. It's totally fun for us; that's what we really focus on. We tend not to focus on too much else, which is probably why we're not a bigger band; but it's probably why we're still together," he muses.
Indeed, Houston isn't sure they'd give up paying their own way with recording and whatnot in order to give up their day jobs. "There's certain trade-offs that come with that," he points out, "that I think we wouldn't be able to cope with - we'd break up and get sick of it! But it's good. We're very happy with where we're at."
You get the feeling he means what he says, given that he and Matt Rudas, the band's vocalist and guitarist, have been best friends since their whipper-snapper days. Surely, though, being mates for so long must mean they have fights about stuff?
"We do, but just like any sort of best friends kinda do. There's that aspect to it that we like doing the band together, and it's a fun thing that we do together and the other guys in the band are into it on the same sort of level. And more so than ever, we're interested in the band," he says with honesty. "The first early years we did it more just for something to do, but in more recent years we've really focused and concentrated on the music a lot more, and we're getting heaps out of it, so it's pretty good!"
Ann Marie Sosnowski
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Further and The Tucker B's play the Rocket Bar on Sat 31 March with Straight To Video, and 'Chubby' is out now through Remote Control.
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