Hockey Dad are an Australian surf rock two piece made up of Zach Stephenson and Billy Flemming, who might I add, are two of the nicest and coolest dudes i've had the pleasure of meeting!
I caught up with Hockey Dad when they toured the UK earlier in the year, now the printed issue is out which includes the interview, thought I'd put it on the blog for those who haven't bought a copy!
How are you finding
the UK so far?
Billy: Yeah good! We’ve only been here for 2 days so far.
I’m still trying to get through jet lag I think, I keep hitting waves… it takes
me so long, hopefully after tonight I’ll be a little bit better
My first question is
more of a personal curiosity one, I saw Bleeding Knee’s Club’s Alex Wall
posting about an anti shoey policy at their gigs. But what’s shoey-ing? I’m
guessing it’s an Australian thing?
Zach: I’m all for the anti shoey policy
But what’s a shoey I have no clue!
Billy: A shoey is when you drink a beer out of a shoe
Zach: Yeah you take your shoe off and poor your beer into
your shoe, or whatever you’re drinking, it’s a horrible idea
Do people do that
often?
Zach: People do that a lot
Billy: A lot!
Zach: In Australia it happens a fair bit, we’re against it
now, it hurt us one too many times
Billy: Well that’s on behalf of Zach, he ropes me into doing
it. You did a Champaign shoey once which was pretty sick
Zach: Classy
Billy: But yeah so anti-shoey is just having a stand against
doing it and just having a beer out of a can instead of a shoe
Do you have a
favourite song off the album?
Zach: Ahhh, what’s on the album again?
Billy: I’m just trying to think! … I feel like Homely
Feeling, only because we wrote that in not even a day, well the foundation of
it
Zach: I would say my favourite is Danny maybe
Billy: Yeah Danny’s cool
Zach: But I don’t know, any of them
Billy: It’s like having twenty kids, you don’t want to
single out one
Zach: We love them all equally
What about to play
live?
Zach: I like playing Danny live, because it’s slower
Billy: And we do a bit of a beef up towards the end as well
Zach: Yeah! That’s a fun one to play live, probably that one
Billy: Yeah that’s good. Or I like the roll in Join The
Club, playing drums
Zach: Yeah that’s been fun to play. I like playing My Stride
as well, different tuning, that’s fun
I read that you wrote
a lot of the album on the road, do you think that had a big impact on the
album?
Zach: We didn’t write most of it on the road
Did you not? I’ve
read false facts
Zach: Yeah false facts! I think maybe two songs? I wrote one
of them in London, two years ago
Billy: Yeah that was Disappointing Me
Zach: I don’t think I wrote any others on the road
I’m reading false
interviews
Billy: Unless you were pissed! “I write them on the road” …
you might get like a spurring idea though, when you’re away. And then take that
home
Zach: Yeah we finish it at home, it’s much easier
Following on from what I read, I read that you wrote a lot
of this album separately and then brought it together afterwards, is that true?
Billy: Yeah yeah! I think Zach’s recently got a mini,
somewhat studio, in his room now so whenever he gets an idea he starts brewing
up that idea and
Zach: I’ll put fake drums and everything on it, just so we
have a whole song, and then I’ll send it to Billy, like this is an idea for a
song and then we’ll come together and do it properly
Billy: But if we start playing it and it just didn’t feel
right or whatever
Zach: Yeah then we’ll change it up or whatever! But a lot of
our songs still come together from just playing them
Where did you draw a
lot of the lyrical inspiration from for this album?
Zach: Mostly just from experiences from the past two or
three years…a lot of it is just made up shit. But yeah a lot of it was just
stuff I was thinking about on the road or at home…whatever was happening in our
lives is pretty much what we wrote about
Billy: I think it’s just being away for nine months of the
year pretty much, I think it was just brewed up from that essentially, but
yeah…still living it now. I mean we’ve been home for like a couple of weeks
this year, it’s pretty crazy
You’ve got the US
after the UK and Europe, is there anywhere in particular you’re excited to play
there?
Billy: I’m kind of excited to… Texas is always fun
Zach: Yeah I like Texas
Billy: Pretty funny… I think there’s a couple of places we
haven’t hit before, so those ones!
Zach: Yeah, a new venue or a cool place
Billy: Salt Lake City is pretty sick though
Zach: Yeah Salt City is always fun to play in
Billy: There’s this one crazy little venue, it’s like as big
as this room, not even, it’s insane
Do you still like
playing the smaller venues as well as the massive ones you’d play back home?
Billy: Oh yeah!
Zach: It’s a whole different type of show
Billy: It’s back to the roots of like, how we started, just
playing in sheds. Cramming as many people into one spot, it’s good
How much influence
would you say you take from the music you listen to?
Zach: I guess all of it
Billy: I guess over the years we’ve listened to so much, so
we pick bits, our highlights, of every genre we like and we just somehow morph
that into what we’re into so… yeah I guess we owe it to pretty much every
musician we listen to
Who are you listening
to at the moment?
Billy: We’ve been listening to Johnny Paycheck haha, erm who
else?
Zach: Hank Williams
Billy: Zach’s been on a big crazy country stick, oh yeah
White Reaper
Zach: Vundabar, saw them last night
Billy: Twin Peaks, we listen to heaps… Yeah I don’t know.
But then we’ll listen to Patsy Cline as well, and then Parkway and Architects
They were the first
bands I ever saw live Parkway Drive and Architects
Billy: Yeah, that was my first gig as well! Crazy! But yeah
we listen to so much so I guess it helps us pick it apart, yeah it’s good!
You guys are really
into Twin Peaks aren’t you, what’s your favourite record?
Billy: Phoar! That’s tough. I’ve been loving the singles
that they did last year, just that whole sweet 17 singles
Zach: Yeah they were good
Billy: But yeah as a record… I guess…
Zach: This is a really hard question
I can never decide so
I thought I’d ask your opinion
Zach: It’s between Wild Onion and Down In Heaven. They’re
both great in different ways so let’s just call it a tie
Billy: Tough question, real tough. Those singles though were
sick, a little bit softer but so fucking good
The first full song I
learnt on guitar was a Twin Peaks track
Zach: Which one?
Wanted You!
Billy: Oh yeah, fucking hell that’s sick
Zach: That’s one of my favourite Twin Peaks songs!
What are you planning
for after tour?
Zach: Probably another tour.
Billy: When we get back from the states we’ve got a festival
back come Splender In The Park, so that’ll be at the end of July, but we get
back early July… so I might go up for a surf trip. I was gonna just pack the
car and go
Zach: I don’t know what I’m going to do, probably play Xbox
and do nothing
Billy: Yeah we generally just stay at home and sleep, but if
there’s waves I might go somewhere, because the festival is up the coast 10
hours so we might just crawl our way up, we’ll see how we go
So you guys have
known each other from a really young age right?
Billy: Far too long haha
When you first
decided to learn instruments did you do that together or did one of you decide
to play first?
Zach: I started playing guitar and then about a year, maybe less
than a year, later, you (Billy) started playing guitar as well. We both played
guitar for a little bit and then we started a band, playing around at my house
with another friend of ours, he played guitar as well but was like ‘well I’ll
just play bass’ and then Billy got stuck on drums and he’d never really played
that much. And we started playing together more.
Billy: Yeah I got stitched up
Zach: The music wasn’t really together but the learning of
how to be in a band was definitely good
Billy: Technically the learning of drums was together, I had
to learn drums by playing in the band, I didn’t learn drums any other way, so
yeah. Me and Zach have been playing like eight years together? But that’s
in-between every other band we’ve done, a couple of funny ones, heaps of dumb
bands… this is a dumb band that’s somehow worked
So you recorded this
album in Seattle, what was it like recorded in the same studio Nirvana had
recorded their final album in?
Billy: Pretty overwhelming! We didn’t really know the studio
prior, all we knew is was that it was haunted so we went in there thinking
‘fuck its gonna be pretty scary’ or whatever. But once we figured out who
Robert Lang was and the whole legacy of the place we were like tripping. And
then we watched the fooey’s doco and it was pretty funny
Zach: That sonic highway, that was awesome, so after that we
were super excited
Billy: It was already pretty cool, weird and scary but then
we were like ‘shit it’s actually a legit place’ it was sick
What made you decide
to record in the states rather than back home?
Zach: I don’t know, we’d done the EP and the first record at
home and we were super happy with both of those but we wanted to try something
else. And our manager Dan found this guy and he’d done some stuff that we liked
before so we were like alright lets do it. And he was like ‘come over here to
record’ and that was more…
Billy: Incentive! Because we were going to be in the states
anyway on tour so it kind of made sense, rather than flying him somewhere or
whatever, so it worked out well. And he lives in Seattle so we luckily ended up
there
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