Press
The Re-Mains launch their new album
INLAND SEA
The Re-mains fourth album, Inland Sea, might have taken them three years to get out, but it hasn’t been for want of action. Since Love’s Last Stand, their 2006 live album earned four stars from Rolling Stone, they’ve had a near fatal mash-up with a cow in the Northern Territory, two massive Canadian tours and enough line-up changes to put the Melbourne Hit Men Association to shame.
“We started recording early in 2007, then went on tour to the Territory and had the ‘meat tray’ incident,” says frontman/manager Mick Daley.
“Grunter Bedford and Ramshackle Dave Ramsey were horribly maimed and out of action after that. It took a while to get back into gear. Me and Tom Jones Jnr (bassplayer) were kind of freewheelin’ around with different line-ups, including Louis Tillet on piano one New Years Eve in Maitland, till Shaun (Uncle Burnin’ Love) Butcher came back from winning his bout with cancer, and took up the banjo again.”
Revitalised, the band did some more recording, at Christian Pyle’s Lot 61 Studios in Goonengerry, in the Byron Bay hinterland. Then they hightailed it to Canada in ‘08, for en epic four-month tour involving an $800 Chevy van, 16,000 kilometres, nationally broadcast breakfast TV and 65 shows from Vancouver to Toronto and back again. The rest of that year was spent back on the road in Australia, then in 2009 they did it all again, clocking up another 18,000 k’s and adding a circumnavigation of the Rockies with Canadian outlaw folkie Dr Joey Only to their carbon footprint.
Back in Australia, they finished the album, at last, and set about getting it out themselves, following the demise of their label, Croxton Records. They were rescued by Austrade, which awarded them an export development grant, in the nick of time to salvage their debts – and pay Christian Pyle.
Daley has high praise for Pyle, who had his own winning bout with the big C whilst engineering and playing on the album, twice.
“CP is a genius. He takes my rambling ballads and crafts them into … well, something else, something a lot more considered and refined. He also plays a mean guitar, invents most of his gear from scratch and laughs at conventional wisdom, about scales, recording, everything really.”
“We had a Canadian version of this album first. Then when we came back, I asked him to do it all over again, ‘cos I wanted different songs on the Australian version. It’s lucky we’re mates, I’ve seen him, er, react differently to similar requests.”
It’s more produced than previous albums, which were basically tracked live, to get the bands edgy attack authentically.
“This one has the same energy, but more overdubbing and fairy dust. It’s a big sound, a dash of 3D.
“It’s got road songs from Canada and more laments about lost love and loneliness, as well as my favourite, an epic about Pumulwuy, the great Koori warrior, and Who Shot Johnny D? a murder ballad from Nimbin.”
This winter the band is taking Inland Sea on the road south and west, way west.
“Well, Melbourne and Sydney and Darwin of course,” Daley says. “Then we’re headed out to Bourke, via Brewarrina, Cobar, Coonamble, back where it all started.”
The Re-Mains were renowned as the hardest driving independent band in the country when they first started their country rock and roll crusade in 2002. They boasted that they’d played more rodeos, outback dives and inner city hellholes than any other band in Australia. Splendour in the Grass, Six Tamworth Country Music Festivals, five East Coast Blues and Roots, three Darwin Festivals, Woodford Folk, Nymagee Outback fest, Nimbin Mardi Grass, (see sizzle sheet) and every other bush bash they could reach. Four albums, two EPs and more drummers than Spinal Tap. Banjos, pedal steel and balls to the wall country rock and roll.
They travelled where most East Coast outfits feared to tread, to the wildest outback pubs, where it was not uncommon to see heads go through plate glass windows while they played.
“There’s nothing like the sound of a banjo at full throttle to get some of those country blokes revved for a blue. And even the 3am emos at the Pony in Melbourne warm to it after a few songs.”
Their Canadian tours included shows at NXNE, NewMusic West, the Calgary Stampede and nine other national festivals, their compilation album reached Number 13 on the Alberta CBC radio charts and they appeared twice on breakfast TV. But they reserve their highest praise for Curtis, their Chevy conversion van.
‘$800 in Vancouver, we jumped in, drove him straight over the Rockies. He threw a starter motor in Calgary and lost his exhaust early, so everywhere we went we sounded like a Panzer battalion on the attack. We scared bears all over Canada. But that van kept going, two tours in Canada and we left him in Vancouver with Dr Joey Only, who killed him in a week.”
With the aid of Austrade they’re returning to Canada next year – meanwhile this year it’s all about the Inland Sea – and avoiding cows.
The Re-Mains are –
Mick Daley – management, songwriting, guitars, harmonica, singing.
Shaun Butcher – songwriting, banjo, electric guitars, singing.
Tom Jones – bass
Al Fisk – drums, singing.
And occasionally, Christian Pyle – electric guitars.
The Re-Mains at Australian festivals;
Splendour in the Grass (‘03), East Coast Blues and Roots, (x5) Tamworth Country Music Festival (x7), Woodford Folk Festival (‘04), Darwin Festival (x3), St Kilda Festival (‘04), Big Note Festival, Swan Hill (x2), Mullumbimby Festival (‘02) The Herb Festival, Lismore (x2), Brisbane Beer Festival (‘04), Barkly Arts Festival, NT (’05), Surfing the Coldstream, Yamba (x2), Casino Beef Week (x3), Two Rivers Festival, Gunnedah (‘05), Mt Isa Rodeo (‘04), Litchfield Rodeo (‘06), Gold Coast Rodeo (‘07), The Puppet Rodeo, Kyogle (‘06), Gove Peninsula Festival NT, (‘06), Wagga Wagga Unsound Festival (‘05), The Gumball, Hunter Valley (x2), Candelo Festival (‘07), Wallaby Creek Festival, FNQ (’05), Yagubi Festival, Hervey Bay (‘05), The Mad Hatter Regatta, Albury (‘05), Blues and Tattoos Bike Show, Maitland (‘06), Kingaroy Peanut Festival (‘06), Long Flat Bike Rally (‘05) Big Sunday, Tyalgum (‘07), Mazstock, Lismore (’07) Yackandandah Folk Festival (‘10), Cool Summer Festival, Mt Hotham (‘10).
The Re-Mains at Canadian Festivals;
North by North East, Toronto (‘08), New Music West, Vancouver (‘08), Big Valley Jamboree, Alberta (‘08), Ness Creek Festival, Saskatchewan (’08 and ‘09), North Country Fair, Alberta (‘08), Gateway Festival, Sask (‘08), Salmon Arm Roots and Blues Festival, BC (‘08), Winlaw Music Festival, BC (‘09), Kitchener Blues Festival, Ontario (‘09), Sled Island, Alberta (‘09).
Recipients of two Australia Council touring grants and an
Austrade Export Development Grant – current for seven years.
If you like the hair-rising-on-the-back-of-your-neck excitement of hearing a banjo roar into high gear, the foot-stomping sound of bush- rock and back-road ballads from everywhere in Australia, from inner-city dives to desert gold mines and remote stations, you have to see this band!
Download press photos:
L-R: Allan Fisk, Shaun Butcher, Mick Daley, Tom Jones
L-R: Shaun Butcher, Mick Daley, Allan Fisk, Tom Jones
L-R: Shaun Butcher, Allan Fisk, Mick Daley, Tom Jones
Reviews
Love’s Last Stand album reviews
Rolling Stone Magazine
Love’s Last Stand
Croxton Records / MGM
Raunchy live record from hard-working heroes.
Northern NSW Country Rock & Roll hellraisers the Re-Mains hit their boozy, bluesy, slide-and-banjo laced straps on this live album, combining a rootsy twang with inner-city smarts and genuine affection for rollicking, tumbling hillbilly sounds. Authentic enough to be endearing, they keep a respectful tongue in their cheek with songs like “You look Like Keith Richards”, and by quoting hip-hop phrases in “Folksinger Blues”. Luke Anismoff
ABC Radio: Jarod Watt
The Re-Mains – Love’s Last Stand
Talent: Leigh Ivin, Michael Ward, Mick Daley, Sam Martin, Shaun Butcher
Date of release: February 2007
Date of Review: Monday, 26 February 2007
The Re-mains – Love’s Last Stand
One of the hardest-working, longest-driving country rock and roll bands in Australia give us a live album worthy of the thousands of kilometres they’ve driven.
Imagine a 70s Holden which has been fanged, hooned, thrashed and cruised from one of the country to the other, mainly on bad roads, never breaking down but continually having parts replaced as the long distances take their toll. This, in essence, is the story of The Re-mains.
When banjo player Shaun Butcher (aka Uncle Burnin’ Love) decided to quit the band last year the decision was made to record their final show with this lineup at the Durrumbul Hall in Mullumbimby; the performance captured is one of a band who love to play, whose musicianship has been honed in front bars up and down this continent, whose rock and roll influences marry perfectly with their plaid-shirt country swagger.
Rare are the country bands who’ll drop lyrics from Grandmaster Flash, The Herd and even the old Cranky hit Australia Don’t Become America before breaking out into a thumping banjo-driven instrumental dedicated to bush turkeys, but this rollicking five piece act are anything but your standard idea of country music.
Amidst the slashing lap-slide and furious banjo playing it’s important to note that frontman Mick Daly is an excellent lyricist, ranging much further afield than your standard boy meets girl/let’s drink rum and drive utes-type Australian country songwriting. “He always wanted to be a star football player/ But the poor guy had a build like Leo Sayer” still goes down as one of my favourite licks to sing along to in the modern bushranger tale Ballad of Wrong ‘Un, while The Dirt Farmer’s Gavotte is perhaps the finest drought-inspired piece of songwriting I’ve heard, managing to avoid cliché, patronising rural stereotypes and ‘they’re doin’ it hard’ platitudes equally the thrust being it’s Mick talking with his Dad about the declining fortunes of the town and farm, including a humorous exchange on whether you make less money as a touring musician or a farmer.
The playing gets a bit looser, a bit louder towards the end of the album, and purists would argue there’s more rock than country (which is how it should be) but this is an excellent recorded souvenir of a classic lineup of a band that keeps on keeping on.
“The Re-mains of the day” By Nina Rousseau, Sydney Morning Herald
June 10, 2005
The Re-mains are not a cult. They’re not a religion. They are a country rock’n'roll band with the zeal of missionaries and enough band mythologies to rival Moses.
Mick Daley and Leigh Ivin formulated the concept of country rock after playing together at an old copper mine in outback Nymagee.
They never forgot the birthplace of the band – particularly after one man was pronounced dead during their gig.
“It was hot and dusty and there was this drunken crowd of shearers who’d been speeding and tripping and drinking for days,” Daley says. “We played them an Acca Dacca song and one of them dropped and had a heart attack. He was only in his mid-20s.”
From an inner-city Sydney punk venue to a hard-drinking workers’ pub in Tennant Creek, the Re-mains are used to their music provoking strong audience reactions. At one gig in Bourke, a woman got Daley in a headlock and insisted that her son sing with them.
“He’d just got out of jail and he was a big boy, so he ended up wailing into the mic for about half an hour,” he says.
The Re-mains provide a fresh take on the homogenised sound of mainstream country music, fusing rock and punk sensibilities with pedal steel guitar and banjo. Their new album, Field Conditions, coincides with a four-month Australian tour, which kicked off this week.
“We were trying to create a kind of timeless record, something classic and enduring,” says Daley, who describes their high-energy sound as “careening from banjo-delic rock onslaughts to pedal steel-drenched alt-country sagas”.
The band’s influences – Dylan, Neil Young, Blues Explosion, Floyd – are easily spotted but cleverly woven with down-home lyrics about Holdens, Kakadu, bushrangers and hitting the road. It’s the sort of driving album that will take you from Melbourne to Cape York.
Few alt-country outfits have authentic red dirt on their sneakers but taking the pioneering sound of country rock’n'roll to the “coalface” is the philosophical crux that unifies the Re-mains.
“The coalface is the cutting edge, where the hard work needs to be done,” Daley says. “We see each new town as a fresh coalface.”
If other bands banged on as much about the coalface as these guys do, you’d think they were a pack of tossers, but the Re-mains are the genuine article. So dedicated are the group to doing “outback strikes” that guitarist Ivin is even going for his light-aircraft pilot’s licence so, eventually, the band can fly between gigs.
“It’d be awesome to be able to drop into Alice Springs for the weekend,” he says.
By taking their sound to the bush, the band has uncovered a rich seam of wildly grateful audiences.
“We had this idea that we could resurrect those band circuits that were so strong in the ’70s and ’80s,” Daley says. “That we could tour hard and play hard in the country.”
Daley laughs as he recalls a gig in a rough-nut Darwin truckers’ pub.
“I thought they were going to hate us, but we had this one massive trucker in tears.”
Despite the band members being scattered from Canberra to Federal on NSW’s north coast, the Re-mains are a tight-knit group.
The distance makes rehearsing difficult but Ivin says it’s immaterial. It all fits with the band’s philosophy and ideology for things to come together when they play live.
The tracks selected for Field Conditions were chosen from a huge back catalogue.
“We’ve got at least three albums’ worth of songs,” Ivin says. “So a lot of stuff we play live is just that: live.”
About 90 per cent of the album was recorded live, the rest of it over-dubbed later.
“It’s more organic and believable,” Ivin says. “We sound like who we are on the album.”
The band have extreme faith in themselves as a group, clearly defined roles and an unshakeable belief that the music they’re making is part of a bigger cultural picture.
“It’s really tough at times,” Daley says of life in the Re-mains, “but there’s a lot of time, emotion, money and skill invested and we’re not going to let artistic or personal clashes get in the way.”
Radio airplay isn’t a priority for the band, who are uninterested in being fresh roadkill for Triple J.
“We get lots of radio airplay on the regional ABCs, which is great,” Daley says. “But it’s not a priority. We want audiences who are going to stay with us. We want to make sure this lasts.”
Newcastle Herald
THE RE-MAINS / Live Review – City Tavern, Tamworth
January, 2005
I BOUGHT a T-shirt, I never buy a T-shirt. It may have been the ridiculous heat. It may have been that I felt obliged to drink rum. It was probably that this band, a talented group of misfits committed to worshipping the country rock and roll gods, is so darn tooting worth wearing. The opening night of the Tamworth Country Music Festival is traditionally quiet, crowds build up over the week to a packed crescendo on the final weekend. Like many of the town’s pubs the city has a car park-sized marquee out the back for the festival. The crowd was neither big nor outlandish, like The Re-Mains would be accustomed to, but it was mighty appreciative. I was blown away. The banjo player seemed oblivious to his surrounds, twanging away like Keith Richards with straw in his mouth, singer-guitarist Mick Daley copped Tim Rogers comparisons and the rest of the players, pedal steel and guitar, bass and drums, not to mention guest fiddle and Hammond players, were nothing short of hot. Now I’m part of that irritating brigade that wears musical allegiances on their chest in pride.
Michael Gadd, Newcastle Herald
CONTACT:
Mick Daley
+61 2 66286039
Mob. 0428 314881
mickdaley@gmail.com
Re-mains presskit