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dDub set off on their Medicine Man album release tour this month

By Jeff Harford

Kiwi roots crew dDub capped off a busy summer schedule with a stonking set in front of a 13,000-strong crowd at the Rhythm and Vines Festival 08. This month, they kick-off a New Zealand tour to promote Medicine Man, the follow-up album to 2006’s top-notch debut Awake At Dawn. Front-man Derek Browne tells Jeff Harford that the re-jigged six-piece has finally found its confidence, and its own sound…

JH: For the Medicine Man sessions, did dDub hit the studio with material that was thoroughly road-tested or were some things left to chance?
DB: There’s always room for creativity and chance, even if you think you’ve completely finished the song. Even when you’re playing it live and you’ve played the song 20 or 30 times, you’ve got to breathe new life into it and just let it be alive on its own. Sometimes, new things will come and you’ve got to welcome them.

Definitely in the studio we have road-tested our songs and got the structures down, but you’ve got a real opportunity to delve into the music a bit more and add a lot of subtle stuff and come up with new riffs that work in there, different background melodies or bv’s. Or maybe even changing the way you’re singing …

JH: What lessons did you take from the Awake at Dawn recording experience?
DB: I guess when you have an idea and it feels good and sounds good and you’ve got it down, to not be afraid of having it quite predominant in the mix. With Awake At Dawn we had a lot of cool stuff and then because we weren’t used to it we pulled it back in the mix a bit. With this one, I think we’re a lot more confident. Me, Stu [Newman – engineer] and Matt [Shanks - bass] are a really good unit in the studio — reasonably open and candid and pretty free-flowing with our energy. Ideas and sounds flowed a lot more, and we weren’t afraid of grabbing them and going ‘Yeah, whack that in.’

JH: Any key differences in the way this album sounds?
DB: Yeah, actually. We do write stuff that sometimes doesn’t get played live because it doesn’t fit in with the set. So there’s a really quiet acoustic song on the album, which is a bit of a step away from the norm for us. But with this album we just decided we don’t want to create an album of just one sound. It was all about the songs and whether the songs were going to stand the test of time. So it’s a collection of songs, rather than a collection of sounds … a bit of an expansion, I guess. With this album, we’ve really collated and embraced our own sound. I guess it’s taken four or five years to create it, but we definitely have our own sound and this album really reflects that. That’s really exciting.

JH: The release of a second album is a critical event in the life of any band. What will be your measure of its success?
DB: Yeah, that’s interesting. I’ve put so much time and effort into it I’m only just starting to be able to listen to it objectively now. And the main level of success I think is if the people that were involved with it like it, and are really buzzing on it — which we are. Another part of it is, of course, feedback from other people. It’s important to take that on. I think it’s a natural thing — if people like it, you’re happy.

JH: In the live setting, how important is striking a balance between making music that punters can dance to and encouraging them to tune into what you have to say?
DB: I guess the most important thing for me is to just be present when we’re playing — as a front-man and an individual, being right there in the moment as much as possible, with all the other stuff that goes on in your head or onstage, being present and connected with the audience and letting them experience whatever they want to experience out of it. A lot of people really do just love the songs and come along to have a great time; other people do comment on the lyrical content and the messages. I don’t get too caught up in any of it, so long as there’s a connection there.

JH: What were the highlights of the summer, in terms of performances?
DB: Rhythm and Vines was pretty high up there. We played from 10.30 up till midnight — it was pretty awesome. We had a really cool summer because we’ve taken another band member on — another guitarist — and we’ve had a bit of a shuffle around with the horn players. We’ve just really tightened up our sound a lot and worked on improving. It’s always good to keep improving, both sonically and stage-presence wise. You’ve got to keep moving and looking at ways of challenging yourselves.

I think over summer we really focused on doing that. At most of the gigs we were trying new things and changing things around a bit and breathing some new energy back into the band. The new guitarist really expanded the sound and we’re getting people in the band singing a bit more. I guess it made every gig a bit more exciting, always trying to make the next one better.

So we were touring as a seven-piece but we’ve decided to knock the horn section back to a two-piece, largely because one of the members couldn’t keep up with the pretty hectic touring schedule. We are a pretty busy touring band — people can either hack it or they can’t.

JH: And was last year particularly busy? With tours of New Zealand and Australia, you had to find time to record an album …
DB: It was busy, but fantastic. We did three tours to Aussie. That in itself was a huge undertaking, getting eight people over to Australia and touring the country, making all the contacts and finding out how it all works over there. We spent a lot of energy doing that.

JH: It can be pretty taxing being on the road. Does dDub travel well as a unit?
DB: So long as you get good rest, reasonable accommodation and you’re not out partying every night you can make it fun. We have a reasonably strong ethos of the music is the most important thing, so everything needs to revolve around that, even when we’re offstage. You can’t go out boozing, get home at five in the morning and play a shit gig because you’re hung-over. It’s about the music and the people that are coming to hear it. You’ve got to be on form and give them the best that you can give. It makes touring a lot more streamlined and fluid. It’s taken us five years to get to that point …

When we first started out, yes, we were kind of driving around in broken-down vans and ambulances, with a whole lot of booze, and staying up all night. But it just doesn’t work. I know that kind of lifestyle is the ultimate dream of a lot of younger musicians, but it doesn’t actually work. If you really want to create longevity with your music and put the best energy into the sound and the stage, it doesn’t work. Discipline is a big part of being a musician and I’m not into fucking around with people that are undisciplined with their approach.

JH: What plans for taking your music to the rest of the world?
DB: We’re still deciding what to do. I think it’s much more important to have a strong presence in your home country before even thinking of going over to Australia or elsewhere. There are up-and-coming bands that tell me they’re going to go to Australia and I say, ‘Can you go to Christchurch and play to a bunch of fans down there, or would you play to 10 or 12 people?’ What’s the point in going to Australia when you can’t go to Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin or Queenstown and pull a really good crowd?

I still see us as an up-and-coming band. We don’t get played on commercial radio and a lot of people haven’t actually seen us live because of that. We really want to expand into creating a bigger following and getting in front of more people, and then having the financial backing and resource to look at Australia in a sensible way.

We were lucky. We’ve been to Australia lots and had good audience numbers, but the press over there, the radio stations, they don’t really know us and aren’t really grabbing onto us because we don’t have a little machine working over there like we do in New Zealand. Our office here in New Zealand is just buzzing away all the time and doing stuff, and you need that. In Australia, you have to pay someone to do all that and we figure there’s still work to be done at home.

-Jeff Harford is a Dunedin-based freelance writer myspace.com/jeffharford

dDub NZ Tour:
Friday, May 2 – Revolver, Queenstown
Saturday, May 3 – Backstage, Dunedin
Saturday, May 10 – Al’s Bar, Christchurch
Friday, June 13 – San Francisco Bath House, Wellington
Saturday, June 14 – Galatos, Auckland