Bodyjar On Tour & Celebrating Milestones With Gyroscope

Two of Australia’s most iconic and legendary acts, Melbourne punk rock stalwarts Bodyjar and Perth rock gurus Gyroscope are on tour together in September in what will be one of THE tours of 2023. Bodyjar will be celebrating twenty five years of their classic album No Touch Red, playing the album in full, which includes the hits Remote Controller and You Say. Gyroscope will be celebrating fifteeen years of their ARIA No.1 and certified GOLD record Breed Obsession, playing the album in full, which includes the hits Snakeskin and Australia. Hi Fi Way spoke to Cam Baines about No Touch Red and the tour which starts tomorrow.

The band must be really pumped for this tour given the response so far?
Yeah, I mean we didn’t think it would sell out The Corner as quickly as it has in Melbourne and it seems like the other shows are going that way too. I can understand because Gyroscope, the band we’re playing with is my favourite Australian band definitely. We did a little run of shows with them maybe two months ago in New South Wales and it went really well. They are an amazing live band. So, I can sort of see where having them on the bill would be helping us out a little bit. They’re a really strong live band and I think they’re pretty underrated and just solid. Fingers crossed we get all these shows sold out and have a really good tour.

Gyroscope seems the perfect fit for this tour as well celebrating a milestone for Breed Obsession.
Exactly, that’s a corker of a record, it’s just weird because when we did that New South Wales tour we were just touring for the sake of it. Then we were talking about doing more because we thought this is working good and it turns out both albums were having a little birthday. So yeah, it’s cool. I think that’s what we like to do. We try to put together good lineups that a bit more attractive for people to come out and see the bands.

There is plenty of love in Adelaide for Bodyjar and Gyroscope and the show is sold out here now.
Adelaide’s like the next best one after Melbourne and it’s always been pretty good for us. Wasn’t it Fowlers or something? (Um, Lion Arts Factory now). It was always a good place to hang with a great bar out the front. I think we did a couple of Enigma Bar shows last time but it is good to place in different places, Adelaide’s always been pretty good to us.

I guess you won’t miss lugging gear up those stairs at Enigma Bar!
Oh mate! That’s why you have roadies .

Can you believe it’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of No Touch Red?
No I can’t! It’s bloody unbelievable. I was just talking to Ben about it yesterday because it doesn’t feel like that long ago that we were in Canada recording it. I did some research on the studio because we recorded at the studio called Morin-Heights, which was a really famous studio in the eighties and nineties in Canada. The Police recorded Synchronicity there and Corey Hart recorded Sunglasses At Night, the Bee Gees recorded there, it was like super famous and now it’s apparently derelict and the building is just fucked. It’s been robbed pretty much and people are just squatting there now. So yeah, bit of a change.

What do you remember from that time when the album came out?
When that album came out we just finished doing this really hard slog across Canada with this band called Ten Days Late and playing with Blink 182 across Canada as well. It was like sitting in the bottom of a van. We had a driver but there were no seats in the back so we had to just sit with all the gear, and you couldn’t see out a window or anything. Some of the drives were like seven, eight hours long so it was hardcore. I just remember finishing that tour and just going to this unreal studio, having a proper bed to sleep in and being able to concentrate on finishing the song off was just a relief. Plus, we played with Descendants on the last show of the tour before we went to record and I remember talking to Bill Stevenson from Descendants and that’s where we sort of talked him into mixing the album.

We were like, oh, we’re just about to record this album, would you be cool to mix it? He’s like, yep, no worries, it’s done. Send it over. So, we teed that up while we were on tour and and got to finish the album fairly quickly. There was a lot of weird shit that happened on that tour. I don’t know what was, I was probably smoking a lot of weed back then I think. A lot of it is a bit blurry but I just know recording it was really fun. We had accommodation across the lake in this house and you could row to the studio in the morning if you wanted to in a boat. It was pretty weird but was a really nice studio that had someone there to go and get you things if you needed anything. It was one of those real top end studios and the first time we’d sort of experienced anything like that. A good experience for a kid!

Has it been a real process to relearn some of these tracks, particularly the ones that you don’t play all that much or hardly at all?
Yeah, totally. I mean that’s what you got to do. I’ve got a little area at my house where I just go down there and relearn them all because there’s obviously songs on there that we have probably only played once or twice twenty years ago. So yeah, you got to go and relearn it all and then jam and then relearn that all, get everyone to learn it again and then work out what set to play. It’s a lot more work than just playing your normal set if you know what I mean. It takes a bit of practice, but you know, it’s all good. It’s kind of fun at the same time, you rediscover those songs again and some of them will end up being in the set from now on, you know, it’s good.

Do you start to feel a lot older now that these milestones start rolling around?
For sure, for sure. You do you feel a bit old! When we’re playing I still feel the same, but I guess, everything’s having a twentieth anniversary or fifteenth anniversary or something like that and I do feel bit older but at the same time not jaded or not over it or anything, still love it, just want to get out there and do it more often.

Are there any songs off No Touch Red that you’ve rediscovered and fallen in love with playing that particular song again?
There’s the last song on it called Let ’em Loose, which is like a super fast hardcore kind of song, and I think that’s a sick song. We should have been doing that the whole way through. Like it’s a good live song, so that’s cool. Return To Zero I thought was a really cool song, Letter Never Sent is another one that we never played live, but just relearnt that one and I’ve sort of thought that’d be cool to do live as well, so there’s a lot there.

Are there any surprise in store for this tour?
There’s a few surprises. We’ve got a couple of ex-members coming, probably to Adelaide and definitely to Melbourne and maybe to Sydney as well. We might get a few of the original guys from that lineup to get up and play a couple songs or we might just play what the crowd wants to hear. I’m guessing we’ll probably just do the songs that go down well live and we can pull out the oldies if we need to, we just want to play what people want to hear and have a bit of a party vibe.

What’s next beyond the tour?
We’ve got a few songs written and we need to get in and start demoing now. After this tour, we’ll concentrate on doing another record and eventually do a re-release of Plastic Skies as well on vinyl because it never came out with the artwork that we made for it. We had a little bit of an argument with the record company and we ended up settling for some art, the artwork on that album we never really were proud of. We found the original artwork that we wanted to use and we want to put the vinyl out on with that. So, we might do that and it’d be cool to play those songs live. That might be something to do in the future as well.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Bodyjar on tour with Gyroscope on the following dates, tickets HERE…