Fifteen minutes with: Henry Wagons

yourGigs catches up with Henry Wagons to get the downlow on his band’s new album Rumble, Shake and Tumble.

Melbourne’s Wagons have been circling for over a decade and are set to release their fifth studio album Rumble, Shake and Tumble

yourGigs (YG): What is that initial time like when you first start seeing reviews and people’s impressions?

HW: It exactly like school report time, you get a bit nervous and wait for the results to come in. It is quite harrowing – it doesn’t matter what band you are in – it is always difficult to make an album and you put your heart and soul into it. Some people can be quite flippant and judgemental about the album. We’ve been lucky with the critics, we generally get favourable reports – I don’t know what we’ve done to deserve it! But I have reading bad reviews of friend’s albums because it always takes time and effort and it is always nerve wracking because of all the hard work you have done.

yG: What was your impression when you first heard the finished album? Did they match what you envisaged your original plans for it?

HW: I was so closely involved; I’m a bit of a control freak when it comes to making the album as I have been there every step of the way. My expectations changed from minute to minute. When I started I wanted to make a Travelling Wilburys style Tom Petty record – something out of the late 80s and early 90s that sort of sell out sound – that time that no one really references any more. It didn’t really come out like that it started out like that but didn’t’ stay like that. My life in the last couple of years saw me thrown from pillar to post and meeting a whole bunch of new people and absorbing a whole bunch of new musical influences – this record is a product of that. As much as I wanted it to be totally cohesive, it has come out more like a Henry Wagons jukebox, a collection of a whole bunch of a random assortment of things I have absorbed over the last couple of years.

yG: How has the time frame involved and the changes in you and the band’s lives over the past couple of years changed the album?

HW: This album is a product of all of us doing music full time for the first time ever. We have all been around years and years, but I feel like we have only been a fully-fledged entity for the last few. We have gone through a rebirth after our last album, it is the first time we have been so immersed in the music scene and it is an incredible, absolutely amazing and privileged life to be able to take your music around the world and around Australia. It is quite a strange existence to be so nomadic and transient and abnormal. The album is called Rumble, Shake & Tumble for a reason as we have been put through the best dishwasher anyone could ever have. It has just been this mixed world and the album is a product of that.

yG: Is there anything that can prepare you for that? You obviously have ambitions when you start out but does anything compare to the reality of it?

HW: It is odd, we always had abstract ambitions, and we tried to keep it relatively realistic. We were a residency band in Melbourne for a long time, we’d be able to just play, and we’d strum our last chord and be home in time to watch prime time TV. But this way of being in the band is now much more fully immersive and interesting. I couldn’t have hoped for it five years ago, it’s great to be in the midst of it.

yG: Do you think this album reflects how you as a band have grown? Do you think the things you have released have kept pace with the way the band is changing and developing?

HW: I hope so.  I think we were hinting at a few things on the last album and now we have the confidence, or the stupidity, to take these songs to full realisation of where they wanted to go. There was no holding back. If a song was heading to an evil place, we wanted to take it straight to the pits of hell, if a song was heading to the Old Opry in Nashville, we took it there. If a song started to go a bit Travelling Wilburys, we’d put on Geoff Lyn sunglasses and go the whole hog. That was our philosophy for this album and for better or worse, here it is.

yG: Once the band got into that cycle of write/record/tour was it hard for you to adjust and try and find time to write songs?

HW: I never get time to write on the road. I find myself – even though we have a tour manager and people looking after us now – I like to be across everything and make sure the band is working properly and everything is in order, I’m too attuned to the logistic of being on the road to write anything. My writing time starts when the tour is over. It is a weird way to exist, but it is good.

yG: Did you have much of a chance to shape these songs by playing them live before the recording stage?

HW: We haven’t played many of these songs at all. We have pretty much just come up with them at rehearsal and kept them under our hat. I don’t know if it’s because I like magicians a lot, but I like the romanticism of the reveal. We are keeping these new songs under our hat so people that come and see us will be seeing them for the first time. I can’t think of anything worse than people being sick of a song before it even appears on a record from having seen it.

We’re excited, the tour is about to start, we are starting in Tasmania and I think they’ll be in for some special shows as we will be playing these songs live for the first time ever. There is always a fascination about a band playing a whole bunch of songs they don’t know and having fun with it. At the opposite end of the spectrum is when we get back to Melbourne at the end of the tour, we’ll have a mastery of them and there is another different sort of pleasure in that – just having the song in your hand and totally be comfortable and you can take the performance to another place, having got the songs down. It is good, it is a weird organic process, and it’s got to be good.

The atmosphere of being in a studio is quite a different feel – what works in a studio where you can hear everything in a pristine vacuum is quite different to what works live. Those little twists and turns and pauses and crescendos that evolve from live performance, haven’t come to fruition yet. We’ll just be slowly discovering them over the coming months and the next year or two that we’ll be playing these songs. They evolve in little ways that you could never expect; just little happy moments or strange leaps that you don’t expect are what get you through the night.

yG: Is live performance yourself something you put much thought to?

HW: Not much conscious preparation. Our preparation for the show is learning the songs and being able to deliver the songs. Performance is important to us, we try to put on a big show but it is not anything rehearsed. We don’t rehearse any moves or any choreography or anything in particular.  It is all of us just getting up there and playing and getting into it as much as we can. It sounds a bit contrived but all of us just get up there and have the best time as possible, none of us are too worried about whether our instrument gets a ding or two from smashing a guitar headstock against a cymbal, and my guitarist isn’t too worried about whether he is going to scuff the top of his amp when he stands on it.

It’s all fun; I think the visual element of band performance is important. So many bands just get up there and stand and deliver and forget that people have actually come to the venue to look at you as well. It’s an important thing not to neglect – to pull a rock’n’roll pose or two as well –I Love it! I couldn’t get through playing these songs over and over again without chatting to the crowd – I first started chatting between songs because I didn’t want to lose the crowd while the guitarist was tuning up – then someone made the mistake of encouraging me and now you can’t shut me up  without  drumstick to the back of the head.

yG: How did you find audiences overseas react to that?

HW: Do you know what, it is exactly the same, I thought there’d be a bit more cultural problem or people wouldn’t understand what I’m saying. But to my surprise it was exactly the same in America as the infancy of the band over here. It was just a bunch of people getting together who are enthusiastic about music and independent music and supporting the local creative culture, and if they see a band that they like they all talk to each other about it and get the ball rolling. It is just a whole lot of parallel identities the world over – the same guy with the curly hair and the beard in the corner of the room and the same strung out blond girl – living these parallel lives all around the world. There are these supportive creative communities in parallel worlds everywhere you go and I am very thankful for it.

yG: Was that heartening in terms of what you think you can achieve over there?

HW: For sure, I went to the states to play music properly for the first time last year. I was inspired to go because a few people associated with Justin Townes Earl e and Those Darlins – American bands we played with here – seemed to think we’d go down well and they set some stuff up for us, so I went solo and I came back with a booking agent and a label and a whole lot of people very enthusiastic about how well we can go over there. I just couldn’t believe it and how quickly things happened over there and there are a lot of really tangible things that are going on. Who knows as I may be in a couple of years having had a go and failed – I could end up in sh-tsville South Dakota washed up in a gutter – but at least in its infancy, what is happening there is very heartening.

America is a much bigger place, there are enough people to be in just about everything to some degree, and they are a bit more open-minded to adaptions and mutations of the country genre. So Americans are probably more accepting variations and unrespected twists to it. Australia hasn’t got that strong and rich tradition with that kind of music so are also open to f-ing with the formula a little bit as well. So Wagons in resonating well in both places! It’s keeping me busy.

yG: First time on stage?

HW: In Wagons we started off at the just been closed Arthouse hotel at an open mic night with just me on guitar and my drummer on cymbal and snare and we were doing Johnny Cash country numbers. By the end of the set all of our instruments were on the ground as we just did these punky country thing and we were asked back two week later to play our first proper gig; and it was just meant to be this fun thing. And that was a decade ago and ever since then it we could just kept on going on without much force.

yG: Worst on stage moment?

HW: Just recently I was on tour supporting the Indigo Girls playing solo support at the State Theatre in Sydney – a beautiful venue – and both of my acoustic guitars screwed up on stage. I was left just alone with a room full of feted women. I was just left. I hate to be a poor tradesmen blaming his tools, but I was just left alone, disheartened and had to go right up the front of the stage and having to play acoustically in the state theatre. But I got through it.

yG: If you could have played any gig in history what would it be?

HW:  Supporting the Highway Men - seeing the likes of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings on stage at once. Playing the support slot then due to combination of plying them with custard tarts, cigarettes and weed, they might invite me on stage to join them for a number. That would be my ideal gig.