Interview by Ali Williams
Calling a band TEENS does leave you open to a few fairly obvious questions, particularly when nobody involved can reasonably blame puberty for their decision-making anymore. Thankfully, Tasmania’s TEENS are well aware of this.
The name has survived longer than originally anticipated, having been hacked down from the considerably more cumbersome Teens of Thailand lifted from a Desert Sessions song. Shawn Arnold admits the original was “really cringe”, while the eventual decision to stick with TEENS appears to have been made with considerably less ceremony. “All band names are a bit shit,” he reasons, “so we’ll just stick with it.” Fair enough. Problem solved.
Behind the compact name is a Hobart-based band that has quietly spent the past few years tightening its current line-up, building a catalogue and developing a live reputation strong enough to earn a place among this year’s BIGSOUND artists. For a Tasmanian band, that opportunity carries a little extra weight. The mainland isn’t simply an afternoon drive away, and touring regularly involves handing an alarming portion of the budget to whoever happens to own an aircraft.
TEENS generally make it across a couple of times each year, but Alex is quick to point out that last-minute flights out of Tasmania are brutal on a band budget. The ferry doesn’t exactly arrive as the benevolent financial saviour either. Despite the geographic inconvenience, TEENS have hardly been sitting around waiting for somebody to build them a bridge. Their selection for BIGSOUND gives Shawn, Alex and Jono an opportunity to put the Tasmanian scene in front of a much larger crowd, something Alex doesn’t take lightly. “We’re super pleased to head up and represent Tassie,” he says. “We’re super privileged to be chosen.”
There’s also good reason for the confidence. Their current line-up has been settled for several years and the band has reached a point where its live identity no longer requires much explanation from within. Audiences back home have been responding, largely because TEENS aren’t interested in delivering their songs with one eye on the clock and another on the exit. “We’re throwing ourselves into it,” Alex says.
That commitment is going to be useful at BIGSOUND, where half the fun involves abandoning whatever careful schedule you made that morning and discovering a band you weren’t planning to see. TEENS will join that sprawling collection of artists across Fortitude Valley, playing showcases including Tomcat Bar. Trying to neatly categorise the band, however, presents another problem.
Jono reluctantly offers noise rock after conceding that broader post-punk terminology can sometimes feel like a convenient escape hatch. Alex goes with “a noisy post-punk band”, while also acknowledging the increasingly useless task of forcing musicians into rigid genre boxes. That description is probably enough direction for anyone who requires one before pressing play. TEENS aren’t especially interested in spending the afternoon engineering a marketable subgenre with fourteen hyphens in it.
Their music comes from a broader pool of influences, including the sounds Jono grew up listening to as a teenager, which at least gives the band name an accidental layer of credibility it probably wasn’t expecting. The appeal sits in allowing those influences to coexist rather than polishing everything until it belongs comfortably on one particular shelf.“I feel like post-punk is a bit of a cop-out answer sometimes,” Jono says, before settling on noise rock.
Alex is equally pragmatic.“Genres are tricky”. Correct. We could spend another paragraph solving that particular crisis or simply listen to the band.
TEENS are also entering BIGSOUND at an interesting point creatively. Their second album arrived in September last year and remains very much alive in the set, but another body of material is already nearing completion. The band has been working through studio sessions, finishing new songs and beginning to introduce some of them live rather than keeping everything locked away until release day. “We’ve also got a bunch of new material that’s sort of finishing up,” Alex explains. “So we’re starting to test the waters there with that.”
Finishing music, of course, comes with the eternal problem of deciding when finished actually means finished. Alex admits there comes a point where you simply have to put a cap on proceedings. Shawn calls the alternative “overcooking” a song, which is painfully accurate for anyone who has opened version 47 of the same recording at an unreasonable hour and somehow convinced themselves the tambourine needs another afternoon. TEENS appear conscious of that trap. The new sessions are getting close to completion, and while the band clearly cares about the details, there’s an understanding that endless interference doesn’t automatically improve a song.
Sometimes the smartest creative decision available is to stop touching the bloody thing. BIGSOUND might be the immediate focus, but it isn’t the only substantial date sitting on the TEENS calendar.Following Brisbane, the band is preparing for a sizeable run beginning in Hobart on October 24 before heading through Geelong, Melbourne, Bendigo and Sydney, then continuing with further shows through Sydney and Brisbane. Alex estimates the run at around 12 to 14 dates.
Buried rather casually inside that itinerary is one considerably less casual detail. TEENS are supporting Foo Fighters in Sydney. There are plenty of ways for a young Australian band to secure a major support slot. Elaborate industry networking probably ranks highly in everybody’s imagination. Shawn recalls receiving the note from Gerard at Frontier Touring after he had bought a couple of copies of the band’s first record. Gerard liked it enough to send one to Foo Fighters. They liked it too.
Then came the message. That is the entire magnificent chain of events. “We were invited,” Alex says, while Shawn still sounds slightly stunned by the result. “It’s weird, but it’s great.” Gerard had bought the record, listened to it, sent it onwards and suddenly a Tasmanian noise-rock/post-punk band had a Foo Fighters support sitting on the calendar. Somebody heard the music and thought it deserved another set of ears. Those ears belonged to Foo Fighters. Job done.
For TEENS, the significance is obvious without turning it into a motivational seminar. A support of that magnitude puts the band in front of an enormous audience, but it also provides something far more useful than a shiny line on the biography. It confirms that the work travelling out of Tasmania has been reaching people well beyond Tasmania. That doesn’t suddenly make flights cheaper, studio sessions shorter or the administrative side of maintaining an independent band any less ridiculous. TEENS still have to write, record, rehearse, promote, travel and work out how to pay for everything while doing it.
But there is movement. BIGSOUND arrives while the second album still has plenty of life, new material is nearing completion, a substantial interstate run is taking shape and one of the biggest rock bands on earth has already given TEENS a fairly emphatic nod of approval. Not bad for a band whose naming philosophy essentially boiled down to, “That’ll do.”
And despite the accumulating opportunities, there’s nothing particularly inflated about Shawn, Alex or Jono when discussing any of it. They’re excited, occasionally bemused and clearly keen to get amongst the chaos in Brisbane. They want to see other bands, play their own shows, represent Tasmania properly and take whatever comes from being placed in front of an entirely new collection of people. Which is really where BIGSOUND earns its keep.
TEENS don’t need to arrive pretending they’ve solved the music industry. They just need to arrive as the band that got them there in the first place. The noisy one from Tasmania. The one with new music coming. The one somebody from Frontier discovered. And, very shortly, the one that gets to say they supported Foo Fighters. Growing up can wait.
For more information about BIGSOUND and tickets head to wwwbigsound.org.au
