Pinky Beecroft On New Album ‘Lonesome Wolf’

It is the the year of the Pink! Pinky Beecroft is a musician, singer, writer and raconteur perhaps best known as the front-person of Machine Gun Fellatio, a band famous for wild live shows, off-stage chaos, relentless touring, show-stopping festival performances and a string of radio hits. During their brief, explosive life-span MGF dominated the airwaves on Triple J, scored multiple songs in the Hottest 100 (including three in the Top 20) and gathered a cult live following that crossed into the mainstream after their appearance at the 2002 Big Day Out.

At the height of their success Pinky abruptly quit the circus and disappeared. There were rumours: he’d gone into hiding in Norway; he’d relocated to the Arizona desert; he’d passed away. Thence followed mourning, weeping, whispers, conjecture, alleged sightings. Fast forward to now and he releases brand new solo album Lonesome Wolf today. Rob Lyon talks to Pinky Beecroft about the album and whether the door is ajar for MGF.

You’ve got to be pretty pleased with how things are shaping up. It’s been described as the year of the Pink. You’ve got to be pretty stoked with how it’s all leading up to an album release day and a tour?
I don’t know yet. It depends if anybody turns up to the shows a little bit. Guess we’ll find out once the shows start.

With it being nearly twenty years, do you get a little anxious with that side of things, putting your heart and soul into creating this album and hoping it connects with the right audience?
I don’t really get that anxious about that stuff. I worry on the part of the venues. I think the venues are going to get cranky with me if not enough tickets get sold. But it’s not something that keeps me awake at night worrying. We’ll see how it goes.

Given how much time has passed, was it the right time, or did it just feel right to put out a record under your own name?
I’d done a few records with the White Russians a while back, and then that project got canned because I got sick for a few years. After that I got side tracked by a lot of other things. Then I got asked to sing on a song by a guy called Damien Caffarella, who was making a record. He’s a producer who works a lot in country stuff. So I went to his studio to record some vocals, and he was like, why don’t you record some more? We’re here, we’ve got a recording studio, do you want to do some stuff? I went, yeah, maybe, I don’t know.

I was more interested in playing than recording. I’d done a bunch of gigs here and there on and off, but I didn’t really have a lot of interest in recording anything, because that’s when your problems start a little bit, you then got to put out the record and do all that stuff. I couldn’t see the point. I just really liked playing live. But yeah, it happened, and it was good. He was like, could you please release this record and not just sit on it? So okay. Yeah, great. We’ll go bankrupt. Sure. But I also liked it a lot, the end result. I actually feel proud of this stuff. I think I’ll put this out. So that’s kind of what happened.

Bankrupt? That’s pretty extreme!
Well, making music in 2026 that’s what’s going to get you, I think. No matter who you are, there’s a large chance you’re just going to send yourself broke. So that’s the world we live in.

It’s unfortunate for any artist to be put under those constraints, because it is a classy album, start to end.
Thanks. Thank you.

It’s really well considered. It feels like the track listing and everything follows the right path and trajectory.
Appreciate that. Agonise a lot over that stuff. People have been asking me, the question I get asked the most lately is, what’s it like? What is it? Have you done a country album? I keep hearing that. I don’t know if it’s country, I don’t know what it is, but it’s consistent across the record, which is something I’ve never really done before. The Machine Gun stuff, we would leap from hard rock to disco to country, we found it really difficult to get a consistent sound because there were a lot of people involved, a lot of ego, a lot of different points of view.

I have trouble some days trying to lock myself down to concentrating on one sort of thing, because I like a lot of different music. A lot. But when I started doing this, I said to Caf, I want to make a record that’s just the instruments we have in this room. I was giving him references and saying, I want the drums to have a particular sound, and he was coming back to me going, I think this should happen. We both worked really hard to make it a kind of consistent, this‑is‑the‑record‑we’re‑making thing. It was really fun in that way, because I just hadn’t approached stuff like that very much before. Never had the opportunity.

Were you surprised with how it all worked out? You’ve said you love the album and it’s the album you wanted to make, but in practice and reality, were you surprised with how it actually turned out?
Yeah, I didn’t know it would turn out that well. A lot of it’s down to Damian Caffarella. He can play every instrument there is, beautiful guitarist, great bass player, really nice drummer. It really helps things because you’re limited when you’re recording in terms of what you’ve got available to you, and I had a pretty good band in one person sitting there. He had some very nice old keyboards I was keen to have a look at, and a really nice piano. It was like, okay, we’ve got everything here, let’s just use what we’ve got and play things kind of live. Keep it as simple as possible, don’t crowd it with shit and it worked. About halfway through I thought, oh, I think I’ve got something good going on here. It’s just a great feeling.

Did the songs come really easily? Nothing seems forced.
To be honest, I had a few of them up my sleeve already, because I hadn’t stopped writing, I just hadn’t stopped writing, I hadn’t stopped playing. Still was tooling around at the piano of an evening. I was doing it totally for myself, and that’s why I didn’t release anything for a long time because I just like playing in my lounge room. So I had some of the songs because the record I made previous to that, particularly with the White Russians, was like, okay, you’ve got two weeks in the studio and you better write some songs in a hurry. It was a bit of that. With this one, it was more like, well, I’ve had this thing kicking around for a while and I really like it and I’ve never really recorded it, do you want to have a go? Sometimes it was just a matter of sitting around playing things that we liked, and instruments and things. It was kind of fun. No pressure either. There was no pressure at all.

How was it reinterpreting Unsent Letter?
I kind of tortured Caffarella with it. I wanted to do it because of all the MGF stuff, of all the songs I’ve written, that one’s one of my favourites. I never get sick of it, I never get sick of playing it live. People seem to just love it. First time I ever played it to someone, it didn’t go over very well, and I spent a few years trying to hock it around hoping other people would record it, and nobody was that interested. It ended up being a Machine Gun track, and I loved that version, but I’ve been playing it live for twenty‑something years. You change over those years. You evolve, you do other things, you get a different… sometimes you play it acoustically. I just wanted to do a new version. Then Caff kept throwing ideas at me, and I kept going, and then he started playing that guitar that is now on the record, you’ve heard it, and I was like, yeah, that! That! Keep doing that! That’s beautiful! And so it was really exciting then. Really good. I thought, okay.

Now that you’ve had time to sit with the album, now that it’s finished, how do you feel about it now, especially when you play it start to end yourself?
It’s funny, because I took a long break from it. It’s been a frustrating period, because I finished recording it a while back, and then the mastering took a long time for reasons I won’t go into here and because I’m old and I don’t know stuff, I was like, right, I’m going to release this record tomorrow, and everybody’s like, no, no, you have to put out six singles and then you drop the album at the end of next year. I was like, what? Are you kidding me? I didn’t want to do that, and then I kind of did a compromise thing where, okay, I will put out three singles, but geez, it’s frustrating waiting.

A lot of people I trust were like, no, you got to be patient, wait, wait, wait, drop it later in the year. Okay. But then there’s mates going, where is this record? I thought you made a record. So I didn’t really listen to it a lot this year, and then just the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to get a live tour together, so I started trying to play some of the songs from it and that’s been kind of fun going, how do you play this? Playing it live is a whole other story. There’s banjos, baritone guitars, strange percussion‑y instruments, all sorts of weird organic‑y stuff. My usual band is a bunch of Melbourne rock pigs. So I was a little trepidatious giving them the record and going we’re going to play some of this stuff. But they’ve been amazing. They’ve been like, oh, okay, alright. So that’s lucky.

The tour is exciting, have you missed it? Compared to the MGF days, it must be good to be able to do it in a more sustainable way this time around?
Hope it’s sustainable? The live industry, which I’m learning the hard way at the moment, is really tough. People aren’t going to gigs, and it’s a real battle. I’ve been talking to a lot of people who are trying to tour at the moment, and everybody’s struggling to sell, to get people excited enough to come out on a Thursday or a Friday or a Saturday night. You’re fighting against the internet, you’re fighting against everything. I sound like a whinger now, I didn’t mean to whinge. It’s just a bit of a reality check. On the other hand, I’m much more excited by smaller shows than big giant things, because there’s no real connection between you and the audience at a giant show. When I first left MGF and formed the White Russians, it was really so I could play little pubs and rock out for an hour or two, and have that intense, sweaty, up‑close‑and‑personal experience that I had grown up on. I loved that stuff. They were my favourite shows, those early White Russians shows. So I’m hoping there’s a bit of that.

Are people continually expecting an MGF reunion or for you to start doing that again, even though everyone’s clearly moved on?
Yeah, I mean, we did it. We did the reunion tour, and that wasn’t as terrible as I thought it was going to be, and then that felt like enough, really. It was kind of good in the end. I was really dreading it, and it was kind of okay. It was nice in some ways. I didn’t think we had an audience anymore, and it turned out we did, and a lot of people said a lot of really lovely things. So it was strangely okay, that tour.

Are you comfortable that there’s a full stop there, that it reached its natural endpoint? Or is the door slightly ajar?
Gee, I don’t know. It depends a lot on things that don’t have much to do with me. I really like several of the people in that band, and we’ve stayed friends for twenty five years. It would depend on what the offer was and what the circumstances were. For example, that one happened a bit because it was TISM, and because we were supporting. That helped me go, yeah, cool, because we didn’t have so much pressure on us. It felt like a fun way to go do a few shows and not have the burden of carrying this giant thing. But the longer you leave it, the weirder it gets, and the harder it is to go, yeah, alright. The thought of just supporting a band like TISM was like, yeah, great. Can be home in bed by 9 o’clock. Fantastic. Bearing all the responsibility is a hard one, and the logistics are a bit difficult with that band because there’s a lot of people in it. So… I won’t say absolutely never again, but who knows? Don’t know. I’m kind of busy doing other things, and I know a few of the others are too.

Beyond the tour, what’s the plan for yourself? Will you go more regional, or is there more music in the works, or other projects?
I’ve started making a new album to follow this one. Because I had a few songs that didn’t make it onto the record. It was weird, because for the first time forever, first time since I started, I had to think about vinyl again, you can only fit so much on a vinyl record. So I ended up cutting a few of the songs we recorded just because they didn’t make it onto vinyl and I thought, well, they shouldn’t make it onto anything then. So that was odd. We’ve got a few tracks sitting there. I went down to Caf’s studio a couple of weeks ago and started again.

That’s exciting, another record this quickly?
I have a bit of a desire to make three records really quickly, which I can’t totally explain, but I’m probably gonna be dead in ten years, so it’s like, well, you better get some things done that you want to do, and that’s one of them. I don’t know why, I’ve gone one hundred and eighty degrees from “I don’t want to record anything ever again” to “shit, I really want to record every other week now.” I want to get this stuff out of my system. It’s just trying to find a way to make it financially… like, genuinely, to make it not send me broke. I haven’t totally figured that angle out yet.

And live shows, what’s the plan there?
I want to do a whole lot more live shows, but in a different way. Maybe a duo or trio tour around weirder places and do much smaller… I want to go smaller which is odd, but I’ve got a real craving to do one‑man or two‑man shows in tiny rooms. I think because they’re the best shows I’ve seen in the last few years. All of the best shows I’ve seen have involved one or two people in a small room. I sit there as a punter going, I love this! This is great and so I think, well, you should do something like this because it’s more fun for the punter, it’s way more fun to watch somebody up close with nowhere to hide. I saw Ben Salter doing one of those gigs with Jethro Pickett, and it was mind‑blowing. Just mind‑blowing. I went, yeah… this is the most fun you can have as a music fan.

Pumped for Adelaide?
That could be a really interesting show, because I’m bringing a kind of different line-up and it’s The Jade, where they don’t seem to have any rules. They’re like, whatever you want to do is cool. So I’m thinking I might do a really loose, improvised, who knows what, maybe‑by‑request show there. That could be real fun. I’m hoping that’s a real different show to everywhere else. Half the band’s coming, and I think it might be really fun, weird … you know what I mean?

Interview By Rob Lyon

Lonesome Wolf is out now, BUY/STREAM HERE

Catch Pinky Beecroft on the following dates, tickets HERE…