Devo

"The big excitement is, now we're thirty-something years older, the audience gets to say, 'Will they make it through the show or not?' and who knows - one of us might not make it out of Australia. We might have to leave one of the guys buried in the middle of the country" Yes, Devo are coming back to Australia, for the first time since the '80s, and of course: yes, they've aged. Fortunately, Mark Mothersbaugh's sense of humour shows no sign of dissipating.

This tour, he says, has been "pretty easy" so far. The band has been touring one and off for the past decade, but aside from a fairly lengthy string of shows in 2005, the tour dates have been coming together in a fairly relaxed manner. "We're not doing much hard core touring," Mothersbaugh says, "because we've all got day jobs, but we did just get back last week from a festival we played in Barcelona. I think we headlined - I think Portishead and us headlined. Then we played in Paris at a festival, and had a couple of days off there. It was a couple of nice, relaxed shows."

"And now, we get to come back to one of the best experiences we had in our career: we get to come back to Australia," he adds, with what sounds very much like complete sincerity.

Though they may not have been as active as many bands over the 17 years since their last full length album, there's never been any concern from Mothersbaugh. The band is comprised of two sets of brothers - Bob and Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald and Bob Casale - something that Mothersbaugh says means they haven't ever "disappeared from each others' minds". Not to mention the fact that Mothersbaugh and "the two Bobs" have worked together as part of Mutato Musika, a film, television, advertisement and video game music production company, for a number of years now.

"It's great," he enthuses. "I've kind of pulled myself into that - I've got the films, and the TV shows and the games that I do. I only rarely do the commercials now, cause we've got three or four guys who work for us now who only do the commercials. I consult with them, and I taught them. They came into the company as techno-genius young guys working my computers and things, and the ones that showed an aptitude for writing and have stuck around have moved up."

Doesn't working with commercials raise some ideological issues, though? After all, Devo have spent over 30 years satirising the devolution of Western civilisation - the rise of dysfunction and herd mentality. "My feelings are, I was always attracted to artists who could walk the line between commercialism and fine art," muses Mothersbaugh. "People like Jeff Koons - I happen to really enjoy his art. It's people like Andy Warhol who were an early influence on my life and made me want to work in different media and not just be compliant to painting or whatever. Instead of just being a composer, it made me want to be a photographer and design for theatre and work at whatever medium seemed appropriate at the time."

Most recently, that medium has been video games. "It gives you a whole other way to think about music, you write music for a whole different application - you can't think of it like an album or a live show, and you can't think of it like a film. It's like a little bit of all of those," Motherbaugh says. "Somebody might throw something and knock something, which gives them an entrance to a new portal, or they might drive their car into a wall, or Homer Simpson might eat enough hamburgers that he might get stuck in the chimney, or whatever the subject of the game is that you're working on."

Mothersbaugh's latest score is for the Steven Spielberg designed 'Boom Blox': a Wii physics-based puzzle title. "It's kind of a cool game, actually. Among other things, it's a good opportunity for kids to understand a little about physics if they get into the game. Because you're building things that architecturally work within that world, and you can take it as far as you want - build things up and knock them down, or put bombs in them so it blows them apart. But it's also about really complicated structures. It is," he repeats, "a cool game."

Mothersbaugh's own children are still young - three and six. It's something he's glad he waited for, he notes with a laugh. "I would have been a terrible father when I was younger. I had all sorts of idealistic misconceptions about kids and about art, and about what it's like to be an artist. I was really selfish and really self-centred when I was younger."

Of course, it's not like there's not a precedent for that in the entertainment industry. Hell, it's practically a requirement, with the exceptions standing out as amazing achievements. "I was at a film festival recently," recalls Mothersbaugh, "where some girl said her dad was in Oingo Boingo, and I said, 'oh, I knew all those guys! You must have grown up in LA' and she said, 'I hated my father.' I asked why, and she said, 'he never had time for me - he only thought about the band'. I just thought, 'oh man, that's exactly what I would have been like.' I worked with Scott Caan on a film - James Caan's son - and I was saying to him that I'd done a film called 'Bottle Rocket' with his dad, and he just said, 'I hate my dad.' So now I know that I'm not going to that with my girls. "

But back to the devolution bit. It is, of course, completely illogical from a scientific standpoint, but the ideology has been around since the '20s, with an F. W. Alden penned pamphlet called 'Jocko-Homo Heavenbound' warning of the dangers of "insanity, idiocy" and "might makes right", amongst other things. It also provided the band with the first four utterances of their devolutionary oath: "wear gaudy colors or avoid display", "lay a million eggs or give birth to one", "the fittest shall survive yet the unfit may live", and "be like your ancestors or be different". "We must repeat", they added.

"I think it's more relevant than ever, unfortunately," sighs Mothersbaugh. "If anything, we only underestimated the speed of the downward spiral. We thought it would never get this far out of control. We never thought George Bush could happen. I wish there were other people that were talking about a message. Most pop music is stupider and more vacuous than when we were young. It's just about 'I'm gonna get rich' or 'I'm gonna get high'. It's all so stupid and meaningless now. It seems like nobody's supplying kids with things that have vitamins and minerals these days."

Mothersbaugh has worked to be part of projects that do attempt to add a little intelligence to children's entertainment, though. Projects like Nick Jr.'s fantastic 'Yo Gabba Gabba!', for which he hosts the occasional Mark's Magic Pictures segment. "Yeah, I think 'Yo Gabba Gabba!' is a pretty good show," he says. "When they first sent me a pilot of it to look at, my wife said, 'Oh, that show's really irritating', and I said, 'Yeah, you're right, it is really irritating.' Then I showed it to my girls, and they were singing and dancing, and repeating the line from the show, and a few weeks later they were still repeating lines from the show. So when they called me up and asked me if I wanted to be involved, I said yes."

Mind you, there was also Devo 2.0, a Disney produced teenage cover group authorized by the band which didn't go quite the way they had expected it to. Oddly, the more the project went sour, the more it took on a farcical, almost subversive air. "Devo 2.0 was Disney, you know?" chuckles Mothersbaugh. "We knew we were getting into something that was not satisfying for us ultimately, in the end. But it got to a point where they were changing words and phrases from songs - just ridiculous things, like Uncontrollable Urge, which they decided was about sex."

"The funniest thing about it is that in all the years I've sung it, I've never thought that I was about sex," he smiles. "I wrote it during the time period not long after I was at Kent State [University], and I was waiting for the kids to get out of school because I'd have the whole art department to do what I wanted to do there. They changed lyrics, the lawyers at Disney, to a song about a snack attack. All of a sudden it was worse! But I said, you know what, kids watch it. I think that kids might hopefully hear that, and then go and listen to a Devo record, and questions why they changed the lyrics."

But will they question it? It seems like hopeful thinking, especially given Motherbaugh's own experience with his children. "I think my kids think that my band is a cover band for Devo 2.0.," Mothersbaugh laughs uproariously. "They saw Devo 2.0 and paid a lot of attention to it. My youngest daughter she'd been to some Devo concerts when she was two and she toddled out on stage, but she didn't really know what was going on. When my oldest daughter first went to a Devo concert she was like, 'I really don't know what's going on. Why is my dad up there in an orange suit singing songs I know from Devo 2.0?'"

There's always hope, though. The band have been writing on and off for the past few years, with all signs pointing to a new album sooner rather than later. "We've written a dozen or more songs," Mothersbaugh reveals. "None of them are in a final form - they're all sketches. We thought that before we came to Australia we might have the songs pretty much hammered out, but it's sort of my fault. I had four movies that I had to do in the last six months, so that's kept me away from the Devo songs. Now that there's no record company, it's time to celebrate by putting a record out."

And why wouldn't they celebrate? The band's last few - rather poorly received - albums were the result of record company pressure, says Mothersbaugh. "The situation is so different now that it's almost incomparable. We had a record company back in those days that would say, 'Do anything that you want to do, just make sure you do another Whip It.' It was a lot of outside pressure."

"Now," he continues happily, "we'll put out something purely for the joy of it, and because we like the songs. If the songs aren't good enough to fit in with what we're doing in the live shows, then we can just put those songs in a box and put them in the dumpster, and we don't have to inflict them on anyone."

Alistair Wallis

Devo play at Thebarton Theatre on Monday 4 August