“We’re getting the band back together”. It’s not exactly the plan that GERSEY guitarist MATT DAVIS expected to be hatching on his wedding night, he confides to SIMON TOPPER.

It’s a beautiful thing to hear a man describe his wedding night. “I thought ‘We’ve got something so special between us’. I remember thinking on that night ‘It would be great to have a play, to see what it feels like’. We didn’t have a play that night, I had other things to do...”

At this point Matt Davis trails off, perhaps knowing that he’s said too much. After all, making the decision on his wedding night to reunite Melbourne’s alt-pop group Gersey, as he did when he realised he and his bandmates had something so special between them, is a personal moment that sleazy street press journos with double entendres on the brain shouldn’t be privy to.

Davis was guitarist with Gersey from their 1997 inception until their split a decade later. In that time, the well regarded guitar group merged the intensity of shoegaze with breezy indie pop over three albums and a handful of EPs, but when Davis moved to Paris, the former colleagues proceeded to work on divergent musical projects. They remained tight pals though, and on his return last year, the four met up socially and, just as at his wedding, were always the last men standing. Even though the break has only been for a few years, Davis says restarting the band does in many ways feel like a capital-R Reunion.

“I didn’t think it would happen at all when I got back. Up until the third record we were a full time band really, always touring or recording or writing. It was obviously a very big part of our lives. Then when it stopped it left a very strange part of our lives. Now coming back together, it does feel a little bit like a reunion. But at the same time it does feel just like Gersey, like almost no time has passed.”

Back on tour, Gersey are currently playing a combination of headliners, and support slots for their personal heroes Pavement. The band has a long-standing relationship with Pavement guitarist Scott Kannberg, but this is the first time the two newly-reformed groups will have ever played together – a scenario about which Davis is not so secretly excited.

“There just wouldn’t be Gersey without Pavement. They were such an influence when we were starting out, making our first records. Their guitar playing, their guitar sounds, their irreverence … so many people have spoken about it with more eloquence than I can, but they’re such an important band to a whole generation of rock fans.

“But we never played with them. The closest we got was our first trip to America, and we somehow got on a show with Preston School Of Industry (featuring Kannberg), and we became friends with him.

“We’ve been really close friends with his band. He’s such a fantastic guy, part of the family really. He’s moving to Melbourne this year, getting married to an Australian girl, and he’s just a really good mate of ours. Of course there’s still some slight hero worship occasionally, but we try to keep that in check.”

GERSEY see their dream come true when they support Pavement at The Tivoli on Wednesday Mar 10. They then headline The Troubadour on Thursday Mar 11, supported by Halfway. www.thebandgersey.com

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