“Silver Comet” from Ceduna gets visualised by the mysterious BloodMeridian67.

Sand Pebbles Monday, 05 December 2011

CHRIS HOLLOW, bass player for Melbourne’s enigmatic psych-rockers SAND PEBBLES, won’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. He chats with KRISSI WEISS.

Sand Pebbles began their musical journey when three scriptwriters from Neighbours – Chris Hollow (bass), Ben Michael (guitar) and Piet Collins (drums) – decided to join psychedelic forces. The line-up has changed a lot over the past 10 years with the band’s diversity augmented by the fact they have members born in every decade between the ’50s and ’90s. But despite Sand Pebbles’ latest release, Dark Magic, receiving rave reviews, the band are probably more known for the mythology that surrounds them. Normally musicians plead with the media to focus on the music but Hollow embraces the stories that have created this mythology. There’s their unique beginning, the infamous Meredith Music Festival ban (they allegedly stormed the stage during Rose Tattoo’s set in 2006, something that Hollow describes as “the greatest story that never happened”) and now revelations that Hollow went to school with the US government’s most wanted man, Julian Assange.

“There hasn’t been many people who have asked me about Julian Assange,” Hollow says. “I went to an alternative school down here, I had a fair bit of communication with him but it wasn’t as though we were close or anything… We were working as scriptwriters and storytellers so if the story is more intriguing than the music or it provides a way into it, then go with it.”

Sand Pebbles have managed to make quite a name for themselves over the past 10 years despite the fact they barely, if ever, play outside of Victoria. “It’s hard to talk about this without sounding egotistical,” he says. “But Melbourne is a big scene and there are so many places to play so we don’t feel like we have to push it very hard. I don’t want to sound like Melbourne is the best or anything but we are able to play here and still have people turning up that have never seen us. Also, heading to Sydney and Brisbane, well, we may as well be going to New York with the amount of organisation that is involved.”

Each time we move onto Sand Pebbles’ latest album, Hollow cuts things short, stating “I don’t want to bore your readers.” As we begin to wrap he tells me that he is much more interesting via email if I had any more questions and he once again reiterates that he doesn’t want to sound boring. We have a laugh about the notion of controversy and how people perceive that as being somehow more interesting. He decides to take a crack at controversy by discussing the latest album of 2011’s golden boy, Gotye. “Well, I lived through the ’80s and listened to Peter Gabriel and Sting so I don’t really need to hear all of that again,” he says laughing. “I am wrapped that he is doing so well though and is jammed up against Rihanna and any of those types of artists.” It seems that Hollow can’t help but be a nice guy, which some people still find interesting.

SAND PEBBLES with be at the Eight Miles High Festival at The Zoo, Saturday Dec 10, with Richard In Your Mind, Black Cab, Grand Atlantic and many more. Tickets are available through Oztix. Head to www.sandpebbles.com.au or www.thezoo.com.au for more information. DARK MAGIC is out now through Dot Dash.

[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?”

“Black Sun”, ’the anthem of a generation’ [The Times], gets visualised by the mysterious BloodMeridian67.

SAND PEBBLES