Image Courtesy of The Mouldy Lovers

2012 was a big year for Brisbane eight-piece folk/funk/gypsy band The Mouldy Lovers. And as the new year starts they’re about to launch their debut album, Yonder Ruckus, with a lightning tour up and down the east coast. Bill Quinn (Overheard Productions) spoke with founding member Louis Whelan as he was recovering from Woodford and getting ready for the launch tour.

Bill Quinn: Louis, I don’t usually ask this question because it’s such a cliché, but where does the band’s name come from?

Louis Whelan: I don’t know; it’s a bit of mystery to us, really. It was a bit of a joke when we were first starting out, and I guess it just grew on us. And we ended up keeping it.

BQ: Fair enough! You’ve been going for just a little under three years, haven’t you?

LW: Yeah, it started with me and Jade Channels – who’s no longer in the band – straight out of high school, and we started a little folk duo. And we started getting more and more members, and within six months we had eight members!

And then we had a change from the folk stuff to more gypsy music over time, and got a lot more influence from ska music and a lot of other music genres as well.

We’ve had some member changes and all that, but just pretty much built up over time.

BQ: I saw you guys play at the Snowy Mountains of Music, but I was trying to remember exactly what genre you play. So I started looking around and found: folk, funk, gypsy, roots, dance, ska, punk, dub.

You’ve got a lot of bases covered there, haven’t you?!

LW: Yeah, I guess we do mix it up quite a bit. We have lots of different influences from different band members. We just try to combine as much as we can.

BQ: You’re based in Brisbane; does having that diversity work well for getting different gigs?

LW: There’s not a whole bunch of gypsy bands, per se, in Brisbane. But there’s certainly a lot of roots, folk and funk and brass bands.

In our first year and a half we played around Brisbane quite a bit, but we’ve kind of exhausted the venues a bit. We’ve probably played at every venue, apart from the really large ones like the Convention Centre.

I guess it’s more small events and festivals and community events that we find for gigs. There’s always festivals popping up around the place. Every year we find there’s a bunch of different festivals for us to play at and they normally have good crowds.

We’re trying to really establish ourselves as a festival band, rather than a venue band. That’s where we’re heading at the moment.

BQ: Sure, because it’s an energetic music you put out there, isn’t it?

LW: Yeah … well … we like to think we have a lot more energy than talent!

Most of us aren’t classically trained, so we have to rely a lot on being really energetic, to feed off the crowd and get them all dancing and really enjoy the music.

One or two of the members are classically trained, but for myself – I play accordion – I’ve never had a single music lesson in my life.

BQ: Awesome! Just going back to festivals, you’ve just come back from Woodford; how did it go?

LW: It was amazing. Definitely my favourite Woodford Folk Festival ever. We weren’t on the program as The Mouldy Lovers, but we were performing with a group called Gremlins – they were doing roving street performances. We joined them to do some backing music. So a bit of street stuff, a bit of stage stuff, and a few other things around Woodford.

They’re a really good crew so it was really nice working with them.

But we ended up playing something like six gigs ourselves, even though we weren’t on the program, just from different venues that let us play.

And Woodford used a few of the songs off our upcoming album for their official videos which is really cool.

BQ: You’ve got the new album (Yonder Ruckus) just out.

JW: It’s just about to come out. We release it digitally on 10th January 2013, which is the start of our tour.

We have the CDs but we’ll start selling them next week. (We gave one copy to one of the Woodford people and that’s why it ended up being used in the videos, but we haven’t sold them yet.)

BQ: So what was the process of putting the album together like?

LW: It was a lot larger than any of our other recordings. We’ve smashed out releases in something like a week. But this time we’d been working on the music for easily a year and a half. Once we actually started recording there was something like five recording days, a bunch of mixing days and mastering days.

So there was a lot of effort from all of the band, and our engineer Benjamin McLure – he was really good.

It was totally new and we all loved it. We managed to get out of town and to have a few nights in Samford, which was where we recorded. So we got to relax and hang out. Whatever we needed we got in and got it done. And in total the recording process probably took about a month.

BQ: You’re on Triple J’s Unearthed; have you had any interest or airplay from them?

JW: Yep, we have “Wake in Fright” which is a single from the album which we released a few months ago and that got airplay a once or twice on Triple J Unearthed.

And apparently, according to one of the people I was camping with at Woodford, she swears that on her drive to Woodford, she heard another song we released from the album, a B-side to the other single called “But But But”.

So it looks like we’ve got two songs played on Triple J now.

BQ: You’ve got the tour dates coming up. What are the logistics like, and the costs like, when you’re touring with eight people?

LW: We have a van which belongs to one of the band members. It has eight seats and there’s eight band members, so that works out quite well. Although we do have lots and lots and lots of gear which ends up piled up on our laps and under our feet and it’s just in every nook and cranny of the van. It’s a bit cramped.

We normally manage to support ourselves between the busking and the shows. We rely a lot on busking when we’re on tour to get our food. Normally when we get into a town, we’ll busk until we have enough money for food that day, play the gig and head to the next town.

So it’s kind of nice; we just do whatever we need to keep the tour going.

And then the day after the tour finishes, half the band (including me) are heading off to Laos and Cambodia.

BQ: You’re playing gigs over there?

LW: No, we’re just having a holiday!

BQ: OK! Other plans for 2013?

LW: We hope to really keep hitting up the festival scene. Now that we have an album to back ourselves, we’re hoping the ball will keep rolling with the festivals, and we’ll be able to start touring more and going to more states.

And we’ve got some music videos in the works at the moment off the album which will be out in the next few months.

And that’s about it. We’re just going to keep on playing; we don’t have too much in particular. We just want to get past the album and we’ll see what happens from there.

Full list of dates for The Mouldy Lovers album launch:

Thursday 10th January – La Paz, Newcastle, NSW
Friday 11th January – Notes Live, Sydney, NSW
Saturday 12th January – Phoenix Bar, Canberra, ACT
Sunday 13th January – The Wesley Anne, Melbourne, VIC
Thursday 17th January – Bon Amici’s, Toowoomba, QLD
Friday 18th January – The Zoo, Brisbane, QLD
Saturday 19th Januray – The Rails, Byron Bay, NSW