One of the biggest bands to surface in Australia in the 1990s had to be electronic rock outfit Def FX. Fronted by Fiona Horne the band found success through albums such as Majick and became the staple of any serious music lovers collection. Since then though a lot has changed – members have gone onto other projects while Horne herself became a successful author and is now located overseas working as a pilot.
But Def FX are about to make their return. A tour around Australia that is guaranteed to have fans very excited. HEAVY Mag decided to catch up with Horne to see what exactly the band has in store for their very patient fans.
“I guess the stars just aligned,” she says with a laugh when I ask how this tour has come about. “Everything just worked out. We were supposed to do a tour in 2017 and it was all booked and then the promoter pulled out kind of shockingly. Then straight away two massive hurricanes hit here where I live in the islands so I guess that was the universe’s way of saying ‘no you are supposed to be here and helping with the recovery efforts rather than rocking out on stage, Fiona.’ So that happened and we didn’t think we would get together again, but then late last year Ant and I were talking and we were both saying how much we just wanted to rock out and get back out on the road and how we could make it all happen, so we decided to front it ourselves, do it all ourselves – approach the venues directly and just do it ourselves. We’ve approached friends directly, people that we have had long relationships with to play with us, so we will just get together with our friends and rock out.”
I ask Fiona what it is like going back and re-visiting lyrics that she wrote twenty years ago, whether it feels like going back and reading a diary and she says. “It is… that is exactly it. I was just singing ‘Kill The Real Girls’ in the car other day and I was thinking I was such an angry young woman, and there is a lot of sense in that. I totally get why I was feeling that way, but a lot of that ‘Kill The Real Girls’ energy was like the Me Too movement of recent years – that backlash to a way that is accepted to treat women, but at the same time I’m not as attached to those thoughts and sentiments any more. I just observe them with interest and I think what I enjoy now about singing the songs and practicing the songs to perform on stage again is just how they really capture a moment in time but they still have this energy that just rocks out. I think when I was in the band I didn’t let myself enjoy it as much as I could. I mean I loved being on stage and I loved performing, but off stage I was so hard on myself and I was really ostracised from the boys a lot of the time, you have that saying ‘youth is wasted on the young’ and you don’t realise that you need to lighten up and stop taking yourself so seriously… you just need to be happy. I guess I get to do that now at this point in my life – I get to go out and just go hard and have a blast. It’s not a job anymore, it’s just doing it for the joy of it.”
You can listen to our full Def FX interview on Spotify.
All the Def FX tour information can be found on this page.
