Killjoys were Here

A CROSS-POLLINATION between Martha and the Muffins and Pippi Longstocking. A union of rhyme and reason, what Bertrand Russell and The Go Gos would have produced had they managed to cross paths some time this century . . .

The Killjoys echoed and buzzed across the length and breadth of the country a few weeks ago and left a rake of hummable tunes in their wake. Sounding like they’d just stepped off some whirligig of a Fairground Attraction they appeared out of nowhere, dangled their melodies right under our noses and then crept back into their chairaplanes – until next time.

Melbourne is a strange place. A hive of musical creativity, it churns up fresh faces and voices to order. Just as the muddied Yarra courses through the veins of the city and ferries its jaded silt south to the Bass Strait, it rejuvenates itself with new blood, new life, new sounds.

Things Of Stone And Wood. Underground Lovers. The Killjoys. From Essendon to Ascot Vale, the garages are humming and shuddering to a cacophony of novel musical ideas that have little trouble in being heard. And now it’s our turn to put the glass to the wall.

Anna Burley and Craig Pilkington, as chief cooks and bottlewashers are living proof that melody and mania make cosy roommates even in the schizophrenic environs of Melbourne, where predictability is a no-no, prophesy a cuss word and probability a concept confined strictly to the inside of a statistics tutorial.

They say things like “Rock gaaden” and “I giss” and what sounds like “amnesic” for “our music” – and I’m theirs. They open their mouths to sing and I’m a pitiful heap on the floor after one song, eyes agape and teeth grinding. These people have a hideous effect on my decorum. What will the barman think of me?

Are the debutantes happy with A Million Suns, having hitched all the way to Chipping Norton in England to record it with Craig Leon, erstwhile producer of everyone from The Pogues to The Levellers and The Ramones?

Anna Burley tries hard (and fails miserably) to disguise her enthusiasm for their offspring. “We fell in love with Craig Leon,” is all she manages before drifting off into a reverie with a smile as wide as Greenham Common plastered across her face. Mention of helmsman Leon has a similar effect on Craig . . .

“Usually by now you listen to a recording and you wish you could change this or that, and you cringe at some bits but we still really like the record.”

Did the band have any reservations that they might lose their own identity when cast against Leon’s landscape in the heart of olde England? After all, the strings, cellos and whistles we hear on the likes of ‘Shadoo Shadoo’ and ‘Five Minute Waltz’ are hardly the stuff of a budding Antipodean 5-piece, or are they?

Anna had few worries, armed as they were with a plethora of their own specifications and ideas before they even contemplated a gander northwards.

“We spent quite a bit of time talking to Craig before we agreed to the whole thing. And right from the word go he seemed to have the same vision for the music as we did. And Craig did classical trumpet at university so we always had friends who played for us so we just had to ring them up if we wanted strings or whatever. We didn’t have to pay them or anything!”

A Million Suns is The Killjoys first official studio outing, though they had already wet their recording feet with distinction with Ruby, an album they managed to put out on their own Audrey label which bagged a sales-enhancing ARIA award for Best Independent Album – sales of which were further enhanced by the unplanned crash landing of the award in the middle of Sydney Harbour amid some serious socialising shortly after getting it. Did the award have an impact on the band, or was it purely a photo opportunity gone wonderfully awry?

Craig regards the attention stoically. “It had an impact on how we were perceived,” he reckons. “It seemed to give us, as far as the industry goes, some level of credibility, and even though we’d been playing around the country a lot, suddenly record companies started coming to us. So it did also give us more avenues for publicity as well.”

Cutting an appreciable niche for themselves in the classic pop stakes, The Killjoys have somehow managed to interfuse the catchiness of The Go-Betweens with the wry and canny observations of Elvis Costello (the younger), with all ten feet planted firmly on the ground. Titles like ‘A Pop Song’ and ‘Trains and Rocks and Riverbeds’ go a long way towards illustrating their style of song – sharp, spiny slices of life intercut with billowing melodies with tambourines and trumpets lending a refreshing air to the entire affair.

Lyric and melody aren’t enough on their own though. They don’t always manage to wend their way to the eardrums they aim for, and Pilkington, Burley and Co. aren’t foolish enough to sit back and expect that. The long slog starts here.

Craig Pilkington is under no illusions about what’s called for. “It took for us all to come to Europe to get the record released over here. We decided that if we stayed in Australia, nothing was going to happen. You have to pack up, leave and go somewhere to create some sort of notice. So we’re going to try to do that in as many places as we can!”

The imposing presence of Anna Burley on lead vocals and guitar (as well as the imprint of her pen on the lyric sheet) sets The Killjoys apart from many of their contemporaries. Was this a grand marketing ploy to coincide with the rash of female lead vocalists like P.J. Harvey and Juliana Hatfield?

Craig rubbishes the notion, marvelling at the attention they’ve got about what for them is an unremarkable line-up (at least as far as gender balance goes).

“It’s strange,” he says, scratching his head, “it doesn’t seem as natural here but so many of the bands in Melbourne have half boys and half girls so it’s no great surprise for us to have 2 girls and 3 boys in our band. Just because there’s a girl in the band who doesn’t just sing but plays all the instruments as well doesn’t mean that we are at all unusual – at home anyway.”

Anna Burley is equally nonplussed. “It really isn’t a novelty because there are loads of really talented female musicians playing all sorts of instruments, so it’s no longer: ‘Oh look, there’s a girl’. It’s just a case of ‘Look, there’s somebody playing something’. I think that’s great because it’s edging out the sexism of it.”

Burley’s writing encompasses a whole gamut of style and stories from the regret-tinged ‘5 Minute Waltz’ to the quintessential clean-as-a-whistle breeziness of ‘Yes Yes Yes’ and ‘A Pop Song’. Has she developed a method to her madness, or is the muse a tyrant that drags her to her refill pad at ungodly hours?

“I’m always looking for new ideas for songs,” she admits, “but sometimes I just try to let it happen. Late at night is the best time, to wait for the creative flow but I always have to do the morning check to make sure there’s no naff words that I’ve overlooked in the enthusiasm of the moment. To me I haven’t created the perfect song yet but I hope there’s a few in there! Like The Cure’s ‘Inbetween Days’ is a perfect pop song.”

Was she concerned that The Killjoys’ songs might not travel well in the Northern hemisphere?

“Yeah, sometimes,” she acknowledges, “but I’ve never really written a super-personal lyric like Sinéad O’Connor would write, looking in her diary or something. Sometimes I find that a bit affronting. Generally people’s experiences are similar in ways so I try to make a broader sense of things in the songs.”

And would A Million Suns have sounded a lot different if it had been recorded in Australia?

Burley smiles and nods. “I think so, yeah. Probably a lot duller! In Australia they’re notorious for making what Craig Leon calls ‘flat’ records. There are so many bands there who are so talented, are great live and then they record and all the atmosphere of the band is gone. It’s hard to know what happened to them in the studio but it’s like they recorded in a box or something.”

Budgetary constraints certainly precluded psychotic break-outs in the midst of the recording sessions over in that den of iniquity that is Chipping Norton, but The Killjoys figure the isolation and single-mindedness it infused was worth the abstinence.

“We were all so excited about the record we just wanted to get on with it,” Craig says. “We were locked in there for six weeks; we were looked after, fed, and so on. In Australia each session would have a different atmosphere which depended on what happened between sessions. In England we walked from our bedrooms across the courtyard into the studio and we’d just start again. I think that really helped.”

And now what? After a whistlestop tour of the country that catapulted them from Dublin to Leap and beyond, do the band have designs on returning soon?

Craig laughs at their open itinerary. “We want to come back here in December and play some more gigs but basically we’ll go anywhere that likes us!”