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 GEARED has a laugh-filled convo over beers with one-third of Brisbane’s favourite pirate-folk-rock collective THE GOOD SHIP – singers/guitarists JOHN MEYER and DAZ GRAY and mandola/lagerphone player GEOFF WILSON.
GEARED: What’s currently the most exciting thing on the cards for The Good Ship?
DAZ GRAY: We’re doing a double A-side tour – The Good Ship/bad ship shows. We’re releasing a song called Bury Me – which is the good side of The Good Ship – and we’re releasing another single called I Can Make Her Laugh, which demonstrates the bad side [laughs]. We have film clips for both songs and we’re doing a quite extensive tour; mainly the east coast but doing Adelaide as well...
GEOFF WILSON: And Tassie.
DG: There are also about 14–15 dates coming up in March, April and May, so that’s probably the most exciting thing on the cards.
JOHN MEYER: It’s the biggest tour we’ve done so far.
DG: It’s probably the biggest tour I’ve done so far!
JM: Possibly the biggest tour we’ll ever do [laughs]!
DG: Yeah, depends if we like each other after these 15 dates.
GW: We’ve done really well so far.
DG: Especially considering there’s nine of us in the band at the moment and our accordion player is coming back from Canada for half the tour, so there’ll be 10 of us. We’ll see how that goes.
JM: Brett, the accordion player, actually wrote Bury Me, so he’s coming back to play on that one.
G: I’ve also heard you have some pretty exciting new musical equipment in the band.
JM: Geoff can talk about his lagerphone – Mk. II, ‘cos he smashed the other one.
DG: We played the Woodford Folk Festival and I assumed Geoff’s lagerphone was just a standard lagerphone, because every other lagerphone we saw was crap – it’s the Rolls-Royce of lagerphones [laughs]; it’s pretty awesome.
GW: It’s a perpetual work-in-progress. By its very nature, it’s the instrument you belt the crap out of, and every time you belt the crap out of it, bits of it fall off and eventually, you belt it to the stage where it breaks in half and you’ve got to take off the old bits from the broken piece and put them on a new piece. It just gets bigger and bigger! The old lagerphone just died a natural death...
DG: Onstage as well!
GW: You hit it at the same point every time, so it’s like chopping a log [laughs] – eventually, you cut through it. I managed to cut through it with the last belt – the last note of the last song we played at a gig at Lock & Load at the end of last year. Much more visually spectacular than smashing a guitar, I thought.
DG: Very folk & roll.
GW: Vol. 2 is currently in use and I’m investigating wood supplies for model 3.0 – I need to get a stronger, harder piece of wood.
DG: You don’t want it to be too thick because it’s too heavy to lift up and down, and it can’t be too thin because you’ll cut it in half really quickly. It’s a delicate balance – and a scientific process.
GW: I think it’s Tasmanian alder wood, 45mm diameter, 1.8m long. It’s got approximately 240 beer bottle lids nailed to it...
JM: ...All of which come from The Good Ship’s rehearsals.
GW: Any lid that’s on the lagerphone has to be from the beer consumed by a member of the band during a performance or a rehearsal. It sounds better – there’s something about the sound.
DG: It’s got the rubber from a cricket bat grip for holding – otherwise you get splinters.
JM: It’s hit with an axe ... tomahawk handle.
GW: Which does its own splintering.
DG: There’s a whole lot of wood chips going on – I think it adds to the sound as well. As a potential hazard issue, we should require the audience to wear safety goggles – the front rows [laughs].
GW. Over to you, Daz.
DG: When I was in the States last year, I bought a new guitar – a Gretsch 5120, which you can get here but it’s cheaper over there – and it’s orange, which is the sexiest of colours. That’s a really nice addition to the band; John also bought a new guitar at the end of last year – a Telecaster.
JM: It’s a Tele Thinline with two single-coils, so it’s super-bright.
DG: Cuts you in half!
JM: I put light strings on it for maximum shred value.
DG: ‘Cos we do lots of shredding in The Good Ship.
JM: Yeah, exactly.
DG: We kind of stopped John’s shredding for a bit.
JM: Nah, it’s a beautiful thing.
Geared walks to the bar to get himself another beer. To be continued...
THE GOOD SHIP play the Queen St Mall on Sunday Feb 27 and Friends Of Folk Festival at the Old Museum on Sunday Mar 6. For more info check out www.myspace.com/thegoodshipisaverybadship
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