The Datsuns Gear Up For A Long‑Awaited Australian Return, Older, Wiser And Ready To Rip

One of New Zealand’s fiercest rock exports, The Datsuns, will bring their all thrills and no frills brand of sleazy garage rock to their Australian fans later this month. The Datsuns blazed into global consciousness with their 2002 self-titled debut, a record that topped the NZ charts and hurled them onto stages with Metallica, The White Stripes, and Queens of the Stone Age. Over the past two decades, they’ve released seven albums, worked with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, and remain an absolutely potent live act. Their Aussie run promises to be filled with savage hooks, honed to perfection, delivering Stoogeoid evil, powerpop crunch and the classic proto rawk assault & battery they are world renowned for. Christian Livingstone talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

It seems like it’s been a long time between tours for The Datsuns?
For that end of the world, yes, it’s been a very long time, for sure. Last time in Australia was, I think, eleven years ago.

So what’s been happening in the world of The Datsuns between the last Australian tour and now?
Good question. I think the last album we toured there was 2014’s Deep Sleep. In the 2000s, we spent a decade on tour all the time, constantly. Which was fabulous, but we also lost our minds a bit, and then got a bit older, and people got married and had kids and stuff. So about that time, after the last Australian tour, is when I think everybody just needed a little bit of a break for a while. Other aspects of life that had been suppressed kind of crept in. Everyone got a little bit older and stuff, so we had a break for a while, and then we recorded another record. But that took ages to finish, and then COVID delayed that, so the time kept stretching out further. Then we started touring Europe again, but we just haven’t been able to get down to this end of the world. Part of that was also my fault, because I had some medical issues a few years ago. We actually had a tour booked for two years ago, and I forced the cancellation of that. But we’ve finally managed to get it together, and we’re going to be back now.

With this tour, are you focusing on anything particular, or is it pretty much the entire back catalogue? We’ve almost finished our eighth record, so there’s plenty of material to pull from. Technically, it’s a tour for the last album, but that came out five years ago, so I don’t think it’s really a tour for anything in particular. It should have a wide, diverse range of stuff from everything we’ve done over the years.

Do you think you’ll road‑test any new songs on this tour?
Oh, for sure, for sure. We’re really bad at sticking to deadlines, but we’re hoping to have a single out the week before the tour starts. So we’ll definitely be playing that, and probably maybe two or three other songs from the forthcoming album. Which date, I won’t say, because we’re useless at sticking to a date, so if I told you one, it’ll probably turn up four months after the date I told you. So sometime this year, hopefully!

What can you say about the album? Is it the Datsuns we know, or have you pushed it in a different direction?
I think it’s really hard to say as somebody on the inside. That’s the kind of question people who are not in the band are better at answering than me, because whatever we do just seems natural to us, because that’s what we do. If anything, it’s along the lines of the last record, Eye to Eye. I’d say it’s in a similar sort of feel and genre to that, which kind of sounds like us. So if you like that record, I think you’ll probably like this one.

Was anything in particular influencing the new album, or is it just the natural evolution of the band? Yeah, I think it’s just a natural thing. The album was pretty much written during COVID. All the songs were written five or six years ago, so if anything subconsciously influenced it, it was probably being in lockdown during COVID for a couple of years, going out of our minds.

How is the studio experience these days? Is that where the band thrives, or is it still a grind?
It’s kind of a weird situation these days, because we all live in different parts of the world. Dolf lives in Sweden, Phil lives in New Zealand, I live in Japan, so getting together in a studio is actually quite difficult, so it doesn’t happen very often. On this record, and to a lesser extent the last record, there’s been a lot of remote working—recording something here, sending it to Dolf, he records something there. We’re not always in the studio at the same time anymore, which is the complete opposite of what it used to be like in the early days.

Does working remotely create challenges, or is it more efficient?
It’s got a lot of really good points, and a lot of really bad points, but it’s the only way we can do it, so we make it work. Everyone’s got so much going on now that even if we were in the same country, getting us all in the studio at the same time would be difficult. The advantage of doing it remotely is everyone can do their thing when they have the time, then connect and swap ideas. And it’s definitely got easier thanks to technology. Even a few years ago, you’d have to upload and download files, but now you can stream something live, have a listening session from the studio. It almost feels like we’re in the same room.

Is it just as satisfying seeing the album come together in pieces?
Yeah, it is. It just takes longer. There’s not the immediate gratification of doing something together in the same room, but the end result still turns out as good. Sometimes it works better because you have more time to pay attention to detail, which might get lost when you’re all in the studio banging away loudly.

Do you still get the same level of disagreements or challenges when working remotely?
Yeah, for sure. Passive‑aggressive text messages or whatever. But we’re a little bit older and wiser these days. Everyone appreciates what each other does, so we still disagree, but maybe not as intensely as in the old days.

What are your thoughts on AI, does it start coming into the mix with what you’re doing, or is that something you’re very anti?
To be honest, I don’t even think about it. I don’t see the point in using it, because I’m in a band because I like to create music, so using something else to do that takes away the whole point of why I like to do it. So, we don’t use it. I’m not anti it, because I’m hoping it could be a good thing in lots of facets of society, but for music, I just don’t see the point, because why would I press a button to do something that I want to do myself?

Even now, when you look at where The Datsuns are at, everyone has things going on outside the band, family and all that, does the focus feel different now compared to when the debut album came out and the band was massive?
I mean, it’s probably very different from an outsider’s point of view, but when you’re in the room with the same guys you’ve known for thirty years, it really kind of feels the same. If anything, I think these days we have a bit more of an appreciation for what we’ve done and the fact that we’re still here doing it. It’s been a real rollercoaster over the years, from having so much exposure and intensity at one point, and then inevitably that goes away, and then you keep making music and people keep coming to the shows. We don’t really think about it, but when I think about it in a question form, I just appreciate that we’ve managed to survive this long and keep doing it, and people keep coming and wanting to see us.

Are there any moments from those early stages in your career that still stand out and that you think about now and again?
Oh, I mean, for sure. When you’re four chumps from Cambridge, New Zealand, which is a small town in the middle of nowhere, and you start a band just for fun, and then you get this huge exposure and you’re on television and going all around the world, been to like thirty different countries or whatever, and all that stuff happens that you never thought would happen. It’s pretty wild, and some pretty crazy things happened over the years, and sometimes you think about those things and have a bit of a laugh. Especially because it’s something we never thought would happen. It’s a rare event, and we’re kind of thankful that we managed to survive it all in a good way.

Is there anything about touring now, being a little older, that isn’t quite as easy to do? A:
Jumping off the speaker stacks!

I still remember that back in the old Heaven Club in Adelaide, that was a pretty high speaker stack that Phil jumped off in massive heels.
Yeah. We don’t do that anymore, that’s for sure. We’ve all had a few physical injuries and ailments over the years, so there is no leaping off a high speaker stacks. Phil, the other guitar player, was recently on crutches from a squash injury, so he definitely won’t be jumping off anything too high. I think the show is still an energetic, exciting show, it’s just that there’s a little more sense of personal safety that we perhaps didn’t have in the earlier days. There’s probably less alcohol‑fuelled madness than there used to be. Everyone’s a little more like, got to pace ourselves now. I’m in my fifties, so sometimes I’m thinking more about getting a good night’s sleep than getting twenty drinks in the space of an evening.

Is the tour buzz still as exciting for you now as it was in the beginning?
I think about comfort more than anything else, so it’s less about exciting. It’s like: whatever’s the most comfortable way to get from point A to point B that we can afford on our budget, and then I can get the maximum amount of sleep and still put on a good show. That’s how I think about whatever vehicle or form of transportation we’re taking. Where’s the best spot to sleep in this thing!

Beyond the Australian dates, what’s next for The Datsuns?
Well, first we go to New Zealand, then we do Australia, and then we’re doing another European tour later this year. We’ve done three in the last three years. After we took a break, we started touring Europe again because that’s where our biggest market is. We’re hoping to get the record out sometime in the middle of this year, though I don’t know the date because we’re impossible with deadlines. The record should come out, then we tour Europe, and beyond that I’m not really sure. Hopefully Japan again, and then maybe next year, end of next year, Australia and New Zealand again. We don’t really know past Europe; we haven’t thought that far ahead yet.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch The Datsuns on the following dates, tickets from Hardline Media…