*Japanese Fallout
It’s August 2003 and, in response to the deafening silence from months of unanswered phone calls to Japan, a relatively unknown Australian power-pop band licks its wounds and surveys the damage: “That’ll be a few thousand down per-man then, including the return airfares to Tokyo and the inordinately large credit card debts run up in various Shinjuku gin joints.”
There is a possibility that Major’s weeklong promo tour of Japan netted them a couple of thousand sales of their debut album The Bliss Domestic. They certainly seemed to sell a few hundred of them at the five or six shows they performed and received substantial national radio play whilst in Tokyo. It does, however, seem impossible to form a clear picture of events when you forget to sign a contract, spend every night out drinking until four in the morning and finish the tour with a band argument of such Gallagher-sized proportions that you manage to wake up an entire hotel.
Back in Sydney there is a rather nagging feeling that a phone is ringing in an empty Tokyo office space and that somewhere in the world a fat, sexually emasculated Canadian is dyeing his hair, shaving off his beard and contemplating a name change. In some ways it’s an honour to be part of such a traditional music industry tale. It mostly just sucks though. At least a local Sydney indie label has agreed to put out the album and option a second one. There’s still life in this wee pop nugget yet.
Fast-forward to December 2004. The band have managed to struggle free from the aforementioned indie contract figuring that if pressing up over a thousand copies of an album and then releasing it without any promotion whatsoever constitutes good business practice then this business may not be for them after all. Despite great reviews across the board and some decent JJJ play for a few songs The Bliss Domestic is deemed to be sunken treasure. Major play what is possibly their final live show in a concrete corner of the Bondi Hotel. Slightly belligerent, slightly drunk and the drummer wants the outros to go on forever. They get through it though, eventually giving up the stage for what appear to be haircuts stuck on top of black drainpipes. It turns out to be a band called Evermore.
*Marshal The Troops
Rain stops play, drinks are taken, Christmas is had and that would appear to be that. You’d bank on it being the end of the band wouldn’t you? It seems, however, that new songs are being demoed at home: meetings are happening and rehearsals are booked. The lead singer, Jarrod, in particular seems to be going through a very fertile period. As well as pumping out new material for Major he’s creating electro style pop on his computer at home whilst getting into animation and writing a musical at the same time. The rest of the band feel as though he should calm down as he’s making them all look bad but slowly everyone else starts to bring in new material too.
In the rehearsal studio a spikier, New Wave ’79 influence seems to be presenting itself and as 2005 progresses it kicks up a big bit of turf revealing Danny to be a dab hand at this style of guitar playing. His call-to-arms, buccaneering fretwork on the “Best things in life are free” section of I Know A Place lifts the song to a whole different level giving it exactly the revolving urgency it needs. It’s the first but definitely not the last bit of great guitar playing on the album.
Bass player, Simon brings in a new tune that starts off like a campfire acoustic number, which then swells into a gospel-tinged, Weller-style freak out. Better Days will go onto be one of the sonic highlights of the album. It seems there’s a new air of beautifully naïve and blind optimism about. So why all this new creativity within the ranks? Hadn't it all been beginning to resemble a bit of a dead horse?
Drummer, Miles, explains: “We just decided to relax and stop worrying about it all. No one gives a damn about Major anyway. We don’t even exist as far as anyone outside our immediate circle of friends and family are concerned. If there’s no record deal or gigs then why on earth would we bother to even hang out together anymore? Well, maybe because when we do we have a lot of fun and get some bloody good ideas going. Personally speaking I just wanted to make one album with this line-up that I could be really proud of. That I could look back on in 20 years time and say we did that, what a good piece of work. Luckily that’s how everyone else felt too: let’s make a full-on piece of art without any nods to fashions or trends. No time constraints, no budget, no bullshit.”
Several songs have already been demoed at Goose Studios in Leichhardt. DOOK dates back to 2000 and has been in the live set for a while. So Ordinary and She’s Not The One are leading the ‘1979 brigade’ whilst the demo for What’s The Attraction? is thought to be almost releasable as it is. In the meantime, Danny decides he wants to completely ‘acoustify’ his ode to the aussie carnival Making Tracks To The Fete so the band reconvene at Miles’ place where he has been slowly turning a second bedroom into a recording space. The bass and drums are kept from the original Goose recordings but all the guitars now become acoustic with Dan adding some nifty banjo parts and Simon getting in touch with his inner harp player. Jarrod produces (seemingly from nowhere) a completely reworked version of an old song called Revelation that sounds immediately great in the rehearsal room and gets everyone excited. It sounds like a cross between Doves and The Drifters.
So the album is taking shape (albeit a very eclectic bulbous one). The only pressing problem is how to record it. With no record company to advance them money for studio time and their respective careers barely keeping personal debt at bay, Major ask a trusted confidante for help. Nigel O’Connell produced and co-financed The Bliss Domestic as well as being involved in the production of all of Major’s demos and film clips. (He wisely bowed out of trying to manage the band to concentrate on starting up his own, now very successful, event graphics business) Nigel agrees to at least get the ball rolling by recording guide tracks with Jarrod on his laptop. Everyone agrees that it would be best to record the drums in a proper studio so Miles buckles down for four weeks solid to get into shape and rehearse his parts and Goose is booked once again for a two day drum marathon.
Go To Part Two