Calling All Cars
For most, the opportunity to meet your idols is a rare circumstance. Melbourne's Calling All Cars were greeted by this prospect just one year ago, opening for arguably the best Australian export in rock n' roll history, AC/DC, on their Black Ice tour to colossal crowds. Without a doubt this is a "what dreams are made of" circumstance, but to actually undertake the challenge is something of a completely different nature. "It was insane, like everything you could imagine it would be," recalls guitarist and vocalist Haydn Ing. "The whole thing was really overwhelming. Like the first time we walked out on stage, which was at the Melbourne show, just holding my guitar it was seriously like 'holy shit!' After the first couple of shows we started to have a lot more fun with it which made it just that much more awesome. "Adelaide was actually one of the tougher ones, like so many fans lined up so early to get in, and when we came on, a lot of them really only wanted to see AC/DC." he laughs. "So we had a couple of haters at the front. It was actually quite impressive, I remember this one guy who relentlessly held up his middle finger the whole show screaming at us. Apart from that, we had heard how terrible AC/DC fans can be to support bands, but most of the time we were really well received." Don't be quick to quite close the book of the Calling All Cars fairytale quite yet. This tour was literally just the beginning of a whirlwind year the for trio. If supporting these icons was not enough, the three-piece also supported Queens Of The Stone Age, toured Australia persistently (in all probability more than any other Australian act) and to top it off they've finished recording their follow up album to 'Hold, Hold, Fire', entitled 'Dancing With A Dead Man'. "We always said we didn't want to be one of those bands with the dreaded second album syndrome, so we wanted to get back to the studio as soon as we could and bash out as many songs as we could. We went into pre-production with about 40 odd songs. Pretty much all of which came from writing on tour. We already knew our older songs more than inside out so we used our sound checks at shows to jam out new tunes. "More than half of the album was written in different parts of Australia. I guess that was pretty inspiring too, like being away from girlfriends and all that kind of stuff, it probably contributed something," Ing chuckles. "It's alright though, like we deal with it." The result is exactly what Australia has been craving, an all round fantastic rock record that is impossibly tough to fault. Look no further than their lead single Reptile, which is accompanied by a particularly individual and intriguing film clip. This is just a glimmer of the talent and maturity Calling All Cars have discovered through their fast-paced yet hard working and well-deserved career. Whilst the film clip maybe a little separate to the run-of-the-mill ordinary band-on-a-stage set-up, it heralds the fact that the sophomore slump will not harass this young trio. In complete contradiction, 'Dancing With A Dead Man' has the potential to propel Calling All Cars to newer heights. "For that film clip we went to the director with an idea that we wanted a whole bunch of crazy dudes dressed as reptiles with make-up and masks and everything and his response was 'Yeah that will probably cost like half a million dollars'. But he came back to us with the idea that obviously we ended up using so that was pretty cool. It's basically a dude transforming into a rabbit and then his attacker was turning into a snake. We are actually doing our next clip (at the time of the interview) tomorrow, I can't really tell you what song it's for yet but it's going to be another pretty fun clip." Calling All Cars will launch their new album at Fowlers Live on Sat 13 Aug. 'Dancing With A Dead Man' is out now on Shock Records.  |
Issue 525
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