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 CLOUD CONTROL drummer ULRICH LENFER talks to JODY MACGREGOR about their song Gold Canary.
The video for Cloud Control’s Gold Canary is agreeably weird in a Countdown sort of way. The band perform in front of a screen while every single cheesy 1980s video effect you can think of happens around them. Psychedelic blurs, falling blue triangles, horizontal mirroring, waving motion lines, doublings and triplings and quadruplings follow the band as they wave their arms and wear fruit hats and Brazilian girls dance. “We were happy with it. It was a bit of fun. We’re sick of indie bands who take themselves seriously and we just wanted to dance really,” says Lenfer. “We just wanted to dance and Al [Wright, front man] and I wanted to have babes in the video clip so that was added to the brief and the director really liked the idea. Then we went tribal and crazy. Then the final piece of the cake – piece of the puzzle, sorry – was finding an ’80s analogue effects machine. There’s only a few in Australia.”
Since Wright writes the songs Lenfer can’t shed light on exactly what Gold Canary is about. “I’ve got no idea. I assume it’s about some sort of a female. Most of the songs are, I think. That’s the impression I get.” It began as one of Wright’s demos, which he puts down on tape with minimal instrumentation before bringing to the rest of the band to flesh out. “In the demo he just had a tom. In the demo it was quite a solid, steady rhythm and then the beat, once we added guitar and backup vocals and everything, it had the tribal sound right from the start.”
As their posters promise, Gold Canary will feature in their gigs for the ‘East Coast Smackdown Tour’. Lenfer says that the name is a bit of a misnomer, and not just because they’re peaceable indie kids who won’t be providing smackdowns of any sort. “It is a tour, we play shows, but it’s only weekends so it’s basically like five little holidays – five little extended long weekends over a period of a month and then we go home to our day jobs during the week.”
For this tour that’s not really a tour Cloud Control are bringing Adelaide’s Leader Cheetah with them, “because they’re one of Australia’s greatest bands. I’ve been following them on MySpace since they released the demo of Bloodlines, I dunno, few years ago, and then just got talking to them and talking to their manager. We’ve been trying to organise some sort of tour for ages now and it seemed like a good opportunity.”
They’ll also be using the opportunity to try out several of the songs from their forthcoming album, a follow-up to their self-titled EP that they’ve been recording in the living rooms of their parents with help from Liam Judson of Belles Will Ring. “The EP, we were really young and naïve and happy to just go in there and smash it out. ‘Sweet, we’re recording. Awesome!’ You don’t really question anything and whatever the producer says goes and you just feel like you can’t state your opinion as readily. Now with the album we’ve all got ideas. it’s a bit more focussed this time around.”
CLOUD CONTROL play with Leader Cheetah at The Troubadour on Thursday Dec 3 and Friday Dec 4. Single GOLD CANARY is available now through Ivy League.
   
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