Our meeting place, coupled with The Red Paintings’ former pre-occupation with visual representations of the Virgin Mary, begs the opening gambit – Is Trash McSweeney a man of faith?

“Am I religious? I was brought up in a religious environment, but I rejected that at the age of 11. I guess I believe a lot of things. It’s hard to know what to believe until you pass over to the next life. I do have a lot of time for Buddhism though, that respect for all forms of life.”

Hmm. Not what I was expecting. I decide to cut to the chase, asking if the religious upbringing McSweeney alluded to was Catholic, and it’s here that my planned line of questioning is utterly, irrevocably derailed.  

“Oh, the Virgin Mary thing,” laughs McSweeney, “What you have to understand with The Red Paintings is that there’s always an image that goes with and is a metaphor for the music. I became obsessed with the Virgin Mary due to the fact that I’ve tried to chase purity in my music, instrumentally and lyrically. I just connected with the image.”

It is this nexus between sound and image that defines McSweeney’s artistic endeavour and connects the dots between The Red Paintings various projects, such as last year’s shows honouring American visual artist Mark Ryden and the Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas event they staged, appropriately, at Christmas.

Taking the band’s propensity for visual metaphor to the next level, the lead-up to the release of their latest EP Destroy The Robots saw The Red Paintings staging a series of gatherings in Australian capital cities. Dressed in giant robot costumes, and without the benefit of trifles like planning permission from the city council, The Red Paintings marched through landmarks like Brisbane’s Queen Street Mall, picking up followers as they went and, at the end of their planned route, breaking out of the costumes.

It’s important to McSweeney that we understand that these happenings operate on a number of levels and are not just whimsical promotional tools – first and foremost, the robots represent the increasing mechanisation of society, the way “religion, television and record labels are all trying to turn us into robots, telling kids what to wear to be part of the in crowd, telling us all to be the same. There’s so much fucking brainwashing in the world - they’re trying to turn us into robots, and we don’t want to be robots.”  

So far so good, but to McSweeney there’s another more personal layer of metaphor to the whole thing. In putting on the robot costume and acting out his critique of modernity, Trash realised he was still slave to the same fears that make people want to conform to the machine, to be the robot.

“It’s like this,” he says, “I was really scared at first, ‘cause we’re rocking up to these malls in the full robot costumes, and we hadn’t sought permission to do it, so I was afraid the council was going to come along and kick us out, and I hated that I had that fear.  But by the end of the first march the cops hadn’t showed up and we had about 500 people singing, laughing, jumping up and down, and I thought, ‘I’ve really broken through something in myself here.’”

Obviously, Trash McSweeney is a man for whom symbols hold a great deal of importance – by breaking through the physical bonds of the robot, he finally destroyed his personal link to the meaning he had imposed on it. McSweeney speaks about his music in revolutionary terms, and like all revolutionaries he implicitly understands that destroying a symbol destroys its power.

The amateur psychologist’s explanation for McSweeney’s powerful aesthetic instinct is this; since his early 20s, he has had a condition called synesthesia, a kind of cross wiring of the ways the brain interprets sensory input. What this means, in short, is that Trash McSweeney can see sounds and, more to the point, hear colours. Many a musician has shorted a synapse or two trying to achieve the same effect with massive doses of LSD or psilocybin, so it’s fair to say McSweeney has something of a head start.  But like many musicians, it was the torment of an early relationship that provided the catalyst for his creative urge. He explains thus:

“Growing up in Coff’s Harbour my mum had tried to get me into music, to get me to do something with my life. She had actually saved up my Austudy to buy me guitar, which I ended up selling to this mate of mine for about 50 bucks so I could buy a Nintendo!  She eventually bought me another one, and around that time I met this girl and just fell in love with her but I still wasn’t feeling the music. My whole existence was focused on this one human being. Eventually the relationship turned really bad and I didn’t know what to do, man, my heart was smashed. So I went into my room and picked up the guitar and I wrote a song and went, ‘This is what I need to be doing with my life.’”

Moving to the Gold Coast, McSweeney formed a band with a now erstwhile friend, but still felt something was missing.  He knew music was his calling, but until the second of two serious brain seizures put him in hospital he didn’t yet feel truly connected to it.  The first seizure nearly killed him, but it was the second that set him on the path he has trod ever since.

“I was in the supermarket looking at the minced meat, and it started to go all weird and wobbly. The next thing, my eyes turned backwards in my head and I went down. All I remembered seeing was the colour red. I woke up from that seizure and I had no idea who I was, I’d completely lost my identity. But after that, whenever I heard music I saw colour, and I started to realize that the two weren’t separate things, and that’s how The Red Paintings came about.”

And so in the fires of heartache and head injury was forged the vision that McSweeney has followed ever since – a swathe of brilliant red, and the urge to capture that visual purity in sound.

After years toiling in relative obscurity with a constantly shifting line-up, McSweeney is feeling positive about his current cohorts and the direction in which they are headed.  They’ve scored the support slot on Scottish post-rock gurus Mogwai’s upcoming Splendour In The Grass sideshows and are supporting New York cabaret-art-rock two-piece Dresden Dolls on their national tour. Both are bands McSweeney feels a kinship with because “when I hear their music, I see colour, and there are a lot of bands who just don’t do that for me. I hear their music and it’s just…blank.”  

Are we beginning to see a pattern emerge?

All this will take place before the band embark on their own national headline tour to promote Destroy The Robots. It’s going to be a crucial six months for the band, and what they’ve achieved thus far is made all the more impressive by McSweeney’s virulent antipathy towards the traditional record company structure and refusal to sign a contract in blood or compromise his vision.

Those new to The Red Paintings’ live experience should expect a freewheeling psychedelic extravaganza with the band wearing full Kabuki-style make-up and audience members urged to use the blank canvases provided to paint what the music makes them feel. For McSweeney, this sense of communality is the essence of his performance. Like the barrier between music and visual art, performance and life, for Trash McSweeney the traditional divide between performer and paying customer is just another construct waiting to be smashed.


The Red Paintings play support for post-rock Scots Mogwai this Friday July 21 at The Zoo. The Destroy The Robots national tour kicks off Saturday July 28 with an all-ages show at QUT Gardens Point Guild Bar, and then the band return only to leave again for the national tour with The Dresden Dolls in September. Destroy The Robots is out August 5 thru MRA.

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