Hawker is a small one-pub outback town located in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. It can get dry and hot. It’s always unspectacular. I imagine the pub is a highlight.Adelaide-via-Melbourne band Old Mate recorded most of their second album on an old sheep station twenty-minutes outside Hawker. The property, owned by frontman Pat Telfer’s grandparents, is named Maraby and now so too is Old Mate’s new record.Maraby is rowdier and rockier than 2014’s It Is What It Is, but with Telfer’s astute observations of life made from the inner city, country and suburban fringes, it's an album that has everything from dark punk ("Police In the Valley") to light country jams ("Gold Mine").Have a listen below and read a quick chat we had with Pat.Noisey: Is Maraby in any relationship with the Maraby Creek?
Pat Telfer: Yep, the house sits on the creek. We're planning to build a recording studio out there out of hay bales, as well as a major scale goat farming operation.Your label describes you as the quintessential basement band with equal parts booze, punk, sweat and swagger.
Basements do seem to work well. When we're playing together we're big, we play the same thing and it gets pretty loud. I just watched some footage of myself sweating profusely on stage, so its probably pretty close I reckon.You have had various line-ups and styles over time. What was the basic lineup and approach for the songs on Maraby?
We tried to do a lot of it together as opposed to the old method of really building it up through recording and mixing. We built it up quite a bit after anyway though. The line up was the full range of Old Mates, about eight of us with Pat Lockwood on the panels.Were the songs written with an album in mind or were they a collection of songs from different recordings?
Mostly they were written for the album. We had the date for the recording and we had to know how to play them so a good chunk was written with that in mind. A couple were accumulated in James Mannix's home studio in Melbourne, they came as beds mainly from testing out microphones and flanger pedals.“Police in the Valley” “Forty on Tick” and “Shit Liver Kid” are all interesting song titles. Who had the shit liver?
It was a dude I went to school with. I didn't know him very well but he was yellow, I always thought of the term yellow belly. It was quite a serious condition, I hope he turned out ok, but for a time at least he had a really shit liver. The main thing is that I like the sound of those words together over the sleazy track though.What about “Police in the Valley”?
In Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley the police just stand around looking at the dirty smokers and waiting for one to drop a cigarette on the ground so they can hand them a $400 piece of paper. I didn't get the piece of paper, but at least two of the other guys in the band did and it sure razzed me up.
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Pat Telfer: Yep, the house sits on the creek. We're planning to build a recording studio out there out of hay bales, as well as a major scale goat farming operation.Your label describes you as the quintessential basement band with equal parts booze, punk, sweat and swagger.
Basements do seem to work well. When we're playing together we're big, we play the same thing and it gets pretty loud. I just watched some footage of myself sweating profusely on stage, so its probably pretty close I reckon.You have had various line-ups and styles over time. What was the basic lineup and approach for the songs on Maraby?
We tried to do a lot of it together as opposed to the old method of really building it up through recording and mixing. We built it up quite a bit after anyway though. The line up was the full range of Old Mates, about eight of us with Pat Lockwood on the panels.Were the songs written with an album in mind or were they a collection of songs from different recordings?
Mostly they were written for the album. We had the date for the recording and we had to know how to play them so a good chunk was written with that in mind. A couple were accumulated in James Mannix's home studio in Melbourne, they came as beds mainly from testing out microphones and flanger pedals.“Police in the Valley” “Forty on Tick” and “Shit Liver Kid” are all interesting song titles. Who had the shit liver?
It was a dude I went to school with. I didn't know him very well but he was yellow, I always thought of the term yellow belly. It was quite a serious condition, I hope he turned out ok, but for a time at least he had a really shit liver. The main thing is that I like the sound of those words together over the sleazy track though.What about “Police in the Valley”?
In Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley the police just stand around looking at the dirty smokers and waiting for one to drop a cigarette on the ground so they can hand them a $400 piece of paper. I didn't get the piece of paper, but at least two of the other guys in the band did and it sure razzed me up.
'Maraby' is availble through Format Records from Sept 11.