[MUSIC: Interview]

Sand Pebbles Blood On The Floor

By Rick Warner

“I’m not a fucking suit!” exclaims Andrew Tanner, Patriarch (he specifically requested I use that term) and singer/guitarist for Melbourne psychedelic five-piece, The Sand Pebbles.

Luckily, he’s quoting Billy Walsh from Entourage and not yelling down the phone at me, as he gives me a rundown of his day-to-day away from the rehearsal room. “I’m a creative, so I get to wear a beret and stroke a cat and say things like, ‘Make it more fluffy’ and ‘Put a bit of salmon over that mix’ … and people actually take you seriously, which is always good fun.”

When not dealing with clients and putting together sizzle reels (teaser videos released by movie studios – I had to look that up), 50-year-old Tanner is usually holed up with the rest of his band in a recording studio somewhere. “We don’t ever just rehearse. Mostly we go to a room with recording gear set up and play, and everything gets recorded.”

It’s this obsession with aural record keeping that saw the band record four albums in the span of six years from 2002 to 2008 – but it’s taken three long years for their most recent album, 2011’s Dark Magic, to come to fruition. Tanner blames the delay on changing up the process.

“We kind of made the fatal mistake of trying to do something different, and it all unravelled from there,” he muses. “They were scrappy little beasts [the songs], and we didn’t quite know which way they wanted to go. At one stage we thought we were going to do a folk album. Everyone got all beardy and folky and we thought, ‘No, that’s a stupid idea.’ Then we went to a kind of rock thing and thought, ‘No, that’s kind of boring.’ It kind of ended up this mutant thing.”

And a strange mix it is. Dark Magic sways from leafy, forest canopy folk to snapping, taut post-punk to fog-laden psychedelic rock, but with each band member’s birth date falling in a different decade from the 1950s to the 1990s, it kind of makes sense. According to Tanner, the multiple songwriters all have a hand in the procedure.

“It’s collaborative whether you want it to be or not, really, in this band. You can come with a fully-formed, beautifully constructed piece of work and they’ll rip it apart with their teeth and throw it around like a carcass, and it gets put back together in some strange form. It’s very much an organic process – and there’s always blood on the floor at the end of it, I can tell you.”

“There have been acts of near copulation on the dancefloor and we’ve seen some incredible dancing, I’ve got to say. You want to see some good dancing? You ought to go to some kind of psych show. I don’t know where those moves come from, but they’re unbelievable to watch.” But as a rocker in his fifties, will he still enjoy the rock ‘n’ roll tour life? “Ask me at the end of December,” he laughs. “After consecutive weekends in a bus, it could kill us. This may be the last interview. I’m tipping it will be fun; everyone’s mindset is to take the party on the road. What could possibly go wrong?”