Crash Barrier.

I thought this song would make us famous. The song formed over a couple of months. I remember the middle 8 being one of the most amazing band musical experiences. I had just learnt a d7 chord and as soon as Jason strummed it for the middle eight. It signalled something in everyone, the bass, the melody, it all happened so quickly and the song just fell into a place. About two days later Jason came up with the guitar solo and I was ready to quit my day job. I also remember mixing it with Rob Grant. Rob liked analogue equipment and he liked to get started at 1am in the morning. He also had a $30,000 pair of speakers that could make anything sound incredible...

Hole around my heart

Hole around my heart. I don’t remember us writing it but I remember scouring old demo tapes and hearing Jasmine’s amazing melody unfold through the scratchy recording. The song never received airplay from JJJ but it won WA Song of the Year. This was a song where everyone found something amazing to add, Jeff pushed for the bass line timing and Jason pulled the aggressive double time guitars out for the ending. And Shaun O’Callaghan gave it a beautiful, haunting Cure emptiness in the mix.

Ice. This was before the crystal meth stuff, when ice was just boring old frozen water. Jason’s raging riff, awesome melody from Jas, cool mix too.

On a Bridge

On a Bridge. We had another instrumental version of this song, but Jasmine’s eerie verse wouldn’t leave our heads. I remember nagging Jas to work on songs one day before rehearsal and we had a big row, but we did come up with the chorus. We tried it the next day in rehearsal and we were all pretty excited with the result!

Save the Ones You Love album. There’s so many special songs through this time. Jasmine and I always had a lot of songs and a lot of the bones of this album were songs that we’d worked on before with a different lineup, also two guitars brought a lot of songs together that otherwise weren’t possible. Also Chris and Ben were fantastic musicians. Chris could play a couple of notes, drench it in effects, and it had a way of tieing a song together.

Building on the edge of the sky

This album was Jasmine’s idea, she wanted to have other people work on the songs. Sometimes the band process could be gruelling and there were a lot of amazing electronic songs coming out at the time that worked because of the production. Also we’d realised after two big lineup changes that songs that previously had no spark were often bought to life with a new dynamic (different musicians) Rather than stress another lineup. We felt we had a lot of songs that could work they just needed a different focus. Unfortunately it made our live shows disorientating because we couldn’t play many of these newer songs. An electronic album seemed a way to spread lots of songs with lots of other imaginations.

Baby’s Eyes (ep)

Neon Light. Probably my favourite of all our songs!
Sometimes I would like to be in a band just to play this song again.

Sirens (Album)

Sirens was a hard album to make, after Chris left, we struggled to have the same musical chemistry, the songs took longer and I remember we had almost a year where nothing really sounded that good. In retrospect I think I was better as a bass player than a guitarist and the songs in retrospect sound busy. Just as we were about to finish off the album we wrote two of the albums best songs Tonight and I’m Still Waiting. Tonight was a complicated song, but had some of Trent’s most beautiful guitar parts.

SheSelexx (unreleased)

I was fed up with being in a band, it was hard!

We decided to go back to the electronic route, write songs, hand them to others, and let them (the producer) pull their own hair out! We had never worked with Trilby Temperley, who was a friend. He preferred all the songs stay with one producer, but this became challenging when we just couldn’t find a way to finalise the songs to everyone’s taste or expectation. Good when the songs were good, Coo Coo Coo, I’m Gonna Get and You Can Run. But a struggle when they weren’t and after three years of mixing, we’d had enough!