Scottish expatriate and local tattooist Stevie Scott, guitarist and one fifth of The Gifthorse, Brisbane’s new saviours of melodic punk-rock is adamant about how his band is represented. A strong worded and strong willed individual, I first met with Stevie (on his fifth cup of coffee) for this article towards the beginning of this year. Due to various delays on this piece, we caught up again more recently so he could add to our already in depth conversation some specifics about their debut album, which is out now on Poison City records.
Moving to Australia in 2005 and taking up residence at Brisbane’s Wild At Heart Tattoo, Stevie proclaims a lifelong love of the genre that The Gifthorse happily fall into. “The first gig I ever went to was a Leatherface show, and I was 12 or something – my dad took me to see them. All my life I’ve been a huge fan of Leatherface and Frankie’s work.” Working with Wade Larkin (drummer), it wasn’t long before the two bonded musically. “Wade was the first guy I ever met in Brisbane, three days after I got here.” Stevie recounts. “I guess a year after being here I met Shane [Collins, vocals], ‘coz he came into the shop. He and Crispy [Chris Anning, guitar] were putting a band together, and we decided we were all into the same kinds of music, and we thought ‘Why not try it? Just have a go and see what comes of it.’ We didn’t expect anything from it, we just thought we’d do it for a laugh.” When bassist, Adam Brady joined the fold, the unit was complete. Stevie looks back on the band’s relatively short existence; “The type of music we’re playing isn’t revolutionary, it isn’t new ground at all. As things have progressed… it’s just gotten easier and better and we’ve become closer. I guess because it’s not popular, what we’re doing, we kind of have to stick together in a certain way.”
Despite not being ‘popular’ in the wider sense of the word, there has been a lot of underground murmurings and anticipation of The Gifthorse’s debut, not least by the band themselves. “We had a lot of fun recording this album,” says Stevie of the long, and at times arduous process of putting together their debut. “Jimmy [Balderstone (A Secret Death)], who tracked the album really encouraged us to try everything we could to get the best out of the songs, which was great. We used lots of instruments we hadn’t in the past, like slide guitar, violin, and glockenspiel.” Stevie explains how the band had a very solid idea of what they wanted the overall product to sound like. “Our friend Sam Johnson (Coué Method, Lead Sketch Union) mixed it for us. I flew down to Melbourne and started mixing with him at 11am and at 5:30am the next day it was finished! Without breaks! Sam’s a fucking machine! Seriously, he went above and beyond for us and we love what he’s done!” By the time this article goes to print (provided there aren’t any more hurdles for the album) you will be able to hear just what Stevie means. Always brutally honest, he acknowledges one of the questions musicians often ask of themselves with new releases; “I guess we could always do better. I think the minute you believe you’re ‘the shit’, you’re fucked.” It’s this type of positive spin on their experiences that continues to define The Gifthorse.
Of course, the other major defining aspect of the band is their live show, which has proven to be consistently fun and energetic, from the small local shows to big international support slots. “We have a good connection with people live because I think people can relate to five big drunk dudes spilling their guts! People trust our imperfections!” He says this with good humour. “It’s impossible to capture that kind of energy on record. In the past we have kept it simple and did exactly what we do live - mistakes and all! We realised this time we had to add more to make up for that lack of energy.” Stevie gives a little insight to what exactly people can expect on the new album, and how he feels the band has progressed from their early demos. “We have explored the types of chords we use more; one of the things that makes The Gifthorse sound a little different from other punk bands is our use of drone notes. Chris and I tend to hold on to a note and move the chords around it. As the guitars are never totally in tune, the note we are both holding pulses and becomes almost hypnotic allowing the listener to hear melody that isn’t really there! Haha, the secret’s out! That sounds a lot more pretentious than it actually is. Just as Stevie and Chris have mastered their own sound in the world of their chosen genre, so has The Gifthorse provided strong, honest and heartfelt lyrics – almost a prerequisite for this style of punk rock. Stevie offers to shed some light on what their vocalist, the infamous (or infamously good looking) Shane Collins has explored with his words on the album. “This is by no means a definitive answer but I feel he tends to point out what is wrong with the world by singing about his own shortcomings. He leaves them open enough so people can apply their own situation to the lyrics. I get the sense – from his lyrics – that life is hard but we can all do better.”
With this release, the band will finally be hitting the road on a formal tour, having up until now focused mainly on their hometown and Melbourne, flying between the two and fostering a camaraderie with many of the bands down there. “We are really excited about this tour because we are going out with our friends from Melbourne, Daysworth Fighting, who also have a new album coming out” Stevie explains. “Melbourne has been really good to us. The people there have shown us so much kindness. It feels like our second home! We were lucky enough to do a small east-coast tour with A Death in the Family, which was the drunkest – I think – any of us have ever been!” he laughs. “We kind of had to keep reminding ourselves it was really happening. They are one of our favourite bands and it was a real honour they even asked us to join them. We would come of stage feeling pretty good about how we had just played and then those guys would get up and blow our fucking minds! We would look at each other stunned and just mouth ‘fuck’. They are that good!”
Having played in bands for quite a few years now, in a very different cultural environment to what we have in Australia, Stevie offers an interesting perspective on what this country’s punk scene has to offer. “I guess being in Australia... there’s just not enough places to play, or that are not viable to go to. When I played in bands in Europe, we travelled. Say you went for a week, you’d go to 7 different countries.” This, however, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and in fact is what gives our scene its unique strength. “In the UK, it’s taken more for granted” he says of the scene he grew up in. “Kids here, it seems like they want it more. There’s a real hunger for it here, because it doesn’t happen all the time. So there’s just a feeling of sheer excitement when something does happen, and it’s a joyous occasion. It just seems like more of a big deal when there’s a good show on. In the UK it happens every night, in every town, with big bands as well, so you don’t get the real want and hunger for it, that you do here.” This is especially true for Brisbane’s small scene, which, while enjoying some growth recently, often has revolved around recognisable groups of individuals who attend shows or play in bands. Stevie recognises this aspect as neither a positive nor a negative, rather, just another element of our own musical community. “Even in the eighties, in America, you’d have these scenes like Washington, Florida, LA – wherever - you’d have these scenes where there was nothing there, they couldn’t do anything else. No one else would put [their bands] on, they wouldn’t get big shows; they’d have to make something for themselves, which is where these DIY ethics come into it.” There is sense of worldly experience in his voice. “If you’re not given these things, you have to make it yourself and what you put into it is what you get out of it.”
This statement seems to represent well The Gifthorse’s work ethic – with the band working from a wealth of experience. Rather than let this experience jade their eyes or gestate into resentment towards a more youthful scene, the band, as Stevie explains, are ready to open themselves up to more possibilities or opportunities that they may have passed on in their formative years. “We didn’t set out to achieve anything, but at the same time, we want to achieve everything. If something comes our way then we won’t turn it down, we’ll just do it for the experience. There have been a lot of things we’ve done that a lot of people have questioned and a lot of people have made fun of us about, which is fair enough, I can understand that. I would have said the same things five years ago when I was an angry punk kid.” He speaks about the band with a level of confidence that speaks to the resolve the band has to be true to itself. “I think we’ve made a conscious effort to take ourselves out of our comfort zone, like playing with big bands. Most of the time we’ll look back on those shows and go ‘Why the hell did we do that?’ We don’t really gain anything from those shows, we’ve never made money from this band, we’ve never gained any extra fans or anything – it’s not like we’re that band. If anything we’ve had more bad experiences from these shows than anything else.” He explains all of this with no sense of bitterness towards what he is describing. “What we’re doing,” he continues, “isn’t popular, or it isn’t fashionable. When people start offering us these big shows or opportunities we’re going to take them to see what it’s like. We don’t really believe it can go huge or anything, but we just like to see where we can take it and the kind of situations we can put ourselves in.”
To give these allusions to experience some specificity, it’s important to note that the members of The Gifthorse have been involved in a multitude of bands that have been very significant to the Australian underground. These include Just Say Go!, Crimson Hellkite, From These Wounds, Asleep At The Scene, Razorhurst to name a few. “We know the past mistakes we’ve made with our bands” says Stevie. “I can only really speak for myself, but in Santo Caserio [Scotland], we’d turn down things and we would really be obnoxious about things and if it wasn’t suited to our politics, we wouldn’t do it. It got me nowhere. I was always playing to the same people. It was the same message every night to the same people who had already heard it a thousand times from a thousand other bands. This time I think we’re conscious of that, and we’re more open minded to try these things out. We’d never change anything about ourselves or anything about the type of music we play – we’ve still got that. That’s the best thing we could have taken from the DIY punk scene.”
With the contemporary preoccupation with aesthetic in hardcore and punk, Stevie’s comment regarding fashionableness, and conformity in its various disguises, is a significant one, especially at the grass roots level. “We’re very aware of the state of a lot of the hardcore bands here. There’s a lot of metal masquerading as hardcore. It’s like faux hardcore, that really irritates me – there seems to be a lot of that here. It’s something that I held dear for a lot of years, growing up, and to see it bastardised like that really upsets me. I guess we kind of do what we do as a response to that, by cutting the bullshit and just being regular dudes that play melodic rock music.” As a band that bases a lot of importance on honesty, and in correlation to this point of view, I asked Stevie if The Gifthorse held a conscious message. “I think our biggest message is that we don’t have a façade and there’s no bullshit with us. We don’t really want to have to try and fool anyone – we don’t want to buy into a type of fashion for kids to think we’re cool, or anything like that. I think the message is just that, really. There’s no bullshit.” Despite having the assumption that, at least immediately, the majority of kids would turn there noses up at bands holding the values that The Gifthorse does, there is a rising popularity in this style of punk rock (defined in part by bands like Leatherface and the No Idea label). Stevie weighs in on this too; “I think kids just need something to sing along to. Everything before this last couple of years has been really emphasising the screaming and the discordant music, which isn’t a bad thing. I don’t have a problem with that, I used to play in a band like that. I think kids just need something to sing along to and make them feel good about themselves sometimes.”
Throughout our conversation, Stevie has stressed the fact that the band carried no expectations in their conception, and still don’t, as well as their collective consciousness on the cultural and aesthetic obstacles their music faces. It is probably this consciousness that has made all that The Gifthorse has achieved that much sweeter, and what is communicated to those that have become their fans; the fact that, no, this isn’t what’s cool, but it is exactly what they want to do. Stevie tells me about their first show. “It was the first time I’d ever been able to have that outlet of doing something I really, really love. I’d never played in a band like this before. That goes for all of us, it was the first time we got to do that kind of band and do it live and have our friends there.” The Gifthorse manage to bring back a sense of community to the local punk scene, something that hasn’t been as present in the past couple of years. This is a testament to the power of honest music and a band refusing to operate on a different social tier to the people who come to watch them. Stevie leaves us with this simple, but often overlooked notion. “I think my favourite thing about The Gifthorse is probably how we’re kind of a unit. Like, no one would fuck with us, because there’s something else there. It’s not just a band, it’s a group of friends. I see it as not just being the five of us as well. There are so many other people that are involved in that, people who were there from the start.”
