 THE FAUVES have a new album and tour on the road. “We don’t have any champagne on ice or anything. We’re waiting for that great crushing vacuum of indifference,” frontman ANDREW COX tells SIMON TOPPER, in the first of a hundred snappy self-abusing quotes.
ATTN: Readers aged 18 and younger. The band you see pictured here is The Fauves. They formed in Melbourne at or before the time you were brought into this society, from the considerably smaller, stickier society you previously lived in. They have had many songs played on the radio, been nominated for an ARIA Award, and in 1998 came very close to opening the official soundtrack to the Marcus Graham detective action-comedy Good Guys Bad Guys when their song Surf City Limits was the CD’s track #2. They’re touring Brisbane this week to expose you to their newest and eighth-est album Nervous Flashlights. But singer, guitarist and fatalist Andrew Cox admits he expects you not to have a clue who The Fauves are.
“There’s no point in trying to kid ourselves that the kids of Australia are waiting with bated breaths. We’ve kind of outlasted a whole generation of music fans. The sort of people who are coming through and going to gigs now have no idea who we are. God knows what they must see when we walk on the stage. A bunch of middle-aged blokes.” Cox nonetheless seems upbeat about his band’s slim chances of attracting young crowds. “We had our heyday of Triple J airplay, and that’s really dropped off now. We’re kinda left with just the rump now, just a hardcore bunch of fans who are gonna be into whatever we do, so I don’t really look out the crowd and see a lot of young faces, I must say. Unless they’re gonna do some serious digging, they’re not really gonna get exposed to us.”
The Fauves’ resigned attitude to their longterm status as Australian rock’s battlers and forgotten geniuses does make it easier for the rest of us to enjoy a bit of old fashioned schadenfraude at their expense. It’s been seven years since the release of the Fifteen Minutes To Rock documentary detailing their unsuccessful struggles to make an impact, ironically screened during their peak period of popularity. Their reputation, and many street press articles, since then have focused on The Fauves’ success at having none, although Cox insists that playing up to the underdog image has “always created a bit of confusion with people thinking we’re a bit more of a pisstaking band than we actually are. We certainly take the piss out of the idea of being in a band, but as far as what we do, we take it quite seriously.”
Taking your band seriously doesn’t always necessarily mean working harder though, as laid out in their latest album’s ode to fulltime dole earning, I’ll Work When I’m Dead. “I got the idea from a lot of the stories I read these days, a lot of bands saying ‘Oh we just came off a six month tour, and now we’re off on another one’, and there’s this idea that they’ve worked so hard that they deserve something. To me it just sounds like a John Howard manifesto. I thought being in a rock band was supposed to be sitting around on your arse, smoking drugs, meeting groupies. That’s a slight exaggeration, but when I first got in the band, secondary to the fact that I was really into music, was that I didn’t want to get a normal job. Sure, working non-stop you might put on a tight live show, but if your material’s shit, it’s always gonna be shit.”
You can discover The Fauves’ remarkably not shit material when they play The Troubadour on Friday August 25, and The Chophouse, Surfers Paradise on Saturday August 26. Nervous Flashlights is out now through Shock.
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