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Dunedin’s The Tweeks, heading for the UK

By Jeff Harford

With a self-titled sophomore album tucked under their wing, Dunedin guitar-pop quartet The Tweeks are preparing to fly the coop. Come October, the band that once changed their name from The Gladeyes to avoid a clash with a similarly-named Auckland outfit plans to take themselves off to merry old London. But there’s work to be done at home before they up sticks. Singer/bassist Anthony Lander talks to Jeff Harford about hard yakka, perfect pop and nifty marketing tools…

JH: The Tweeks must have averaged three national tours a year for the past six years, and you’re rarely out of the weekly gig listings in Dunners. You’re not shy of playing, are you?
AL: Yeah, we just keep doing it, eh. We book the shows three months in advance and then straight after a tour we start booking the next tour. It’s not like they’re huge tours — we try to go to Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, and anywhere else we can fit in along the way. In-between those main tours we do shows in Christchurch and Queenstown, and lots in Dunedin. We played about 50 shows last year, which is quite a lot for us. We were like, ‘Oh man, we’ve got to try and get 100 shows in this year.’ In the end, when we got to 50 it seemed impossible to do that many. People would just be sick of us, I think. That’s kind of part of the reason we’ve decided to move to London in October.

JH: So how much groundwork has been done in the UK?
AL: Well, before October we’re going to tour twice — this month and probably in August. We’ll probably get on to doing some groundwork in the next couple of months, but lately we’ve been pretty busy with getting this album out. Doing one thing at a time is a little easier but there are so many things to do with getting an album out and also with touring, we really have to stretch ourselves over both things.

JH: Is your decision to leave New Zealand through a struggle for survival or has it always been part of the band’s vision?
AL: Well, we’ve always wanted to go overseas, ever since we started. And we’ve always talked about Japan and maybe the USA. But the most realistic one for us and for our sound is Europe and London. I think our music will go down the best there. It’ll have the biggest shot out of anywhere, I think. It would just be nice to earn a bit more money for the band at this stage, but we can’t tour often enough to make that money for the band to do more. All the money we’ve ever earned has gone back into the band. To do the projects we want to do, we just need a bit more cash. And we’re only going to get that by playing more shows, with more people to play to …

JH: At home, do you feel you’ve been getting enough back from all that hard work to make it worthwhile?
AL: It’s just been getting better and better, really. I mean, we’ve gotten to a point where we can afford to tour — it wasn’t like that at the start and money comes out of your own pocket. Through constantly doing it, you build up your contacts, and if you’re living in Dunedin you’re miles away from where the contacts actually are, so it’s a bit harder. I imagine we would be in a different boat had we started out in Auckland — but who knows what kind of boat it would be. Definitely, we’d be closer to the industry, anyway.

JH: So what are the good things about being based in Dunedin?
AL: Well, I guess access to resources. The Albany St recording studio that we use, we get through the university. We had to pay for it for the last recording but the times before that, because we were all students of the [contemporary rock music] course we were able to go in there and record here and there. And it’s a lot cheaper to live in Dunedin, full stop. For a while it was OK to just have a part-time job for 20 hours and spend 20 hours doing band stuff.

JH: Tell me about the approach to the November recording sessions for the new album, The Tweeks. How did it compare to getting your first album off the ground?
AL: It was quite a dramatic difference, actually. In the past, we’d been popping into the studio whenever it was free to record You Can Listen Too. We recorded it over the space of about a year, and we were learning a lot as we were doing it because we were doing it all ourselves. Each time, we’d spend a lot of time setting up and getting the sounds right. All the songs ended up sounding like they’d been recorded quite differently, because they had. For this one, because we were paying for it, we decided we’d be in there for a solid 10 days. So the first day was spent setting up and we didn’t have to do that again. The sound is a bit more consistent and the songs are definitely better because our song-writing has improved. We had so much feedback from the first album – it helped us write better, I think.

JH: You laid down most of the music as a live band. That says a lot about the confidence of the unit — the trust that each player will do his bit …
AL: That was another big change. This time it was, like, let’s get in there and play as a band. I think we’ve got better and maybe we weren’t even able to do it that way with the first album. We were a lot more prepared, as well. We could practise and practise right up until we got into the studio and we could play those songs without messing up.

JH: In your press release you talk about a more pronounced tendency to experiment with structure. Tell me more about that.
AL: I guess we write pop music, basically. We’re always conscious of that. But we’re also wanting to push the limits of pop music within our way of thinking — coming up with ideas to make it a little more exciting than just the standard verse/chorus, verse/chorus kind of thing. This time we’ve written some songs that are ridiculously short. Three of the tracks are under two minutes, which is quite weird for us. For the last album, most of the songs came in at about three and a half minutes because we’ve always loved that thing about pop music. It’s fun to work to that. This time, we were a bit more experimental in song structures and not necessarily going with the tried and true.

JH: You’ve always seemed to be quite happy for the word ‘pop’ to be at least one of the descriptors for your music. What does the word mean to you?
AL: There’s obviously good pop and bad pop, for me anyway. The majority of what’s played on most commercial stations is really bad pop but there is definitely real gold coming out all the time. They’re the songs that go down in history because they’re the ones that were actually good. For example, the Britney Spears song Toxic was a really good song. Pop’s quite a light genre — it’s not supposed to be heavy. It’s supposed to be quite superficial but really cool. I don’t know what it is. Catchy, maybe? But not always, because a lot of catchy songs are just terrible.

Something that I quite admire about a lot of pop music is that it’s written to be played often, and some people who don’t listen to a lot of music just listen to pop. It’s quite a touchy subject because you can really get the wrong idea about what I might mean by this, but it’s more about a lot of people having a good time and liking a song and doing that through pop devices, bending rules subtly and slightly. With pop music, you can’t go too far out but you can bend the rules slightly, and if you succeed you’ve done something quite amazing. That’s the kind of innovation I admire.

JH: The Tweeks is being released on USB drive, as well as CD. What sparked the idea?
AL: Just because it’s easier for people to carry it around with them really. I mean, CDs are quite wasteful. You buy a CD, burn it onto your computer, and then what do you do with it? You’ve got this thing that you’re not actually going to use again. I don’t really like the idea of producing stuff that’s not going to be used. Just having something to be sentimental about is not necessarily a good reason to produce something. So the thing about the USB drive it that once you’ve put it onto your computer you can either choose to keep it and do what you want with it or maybe pass it on to someone else. Or keep it on your key ring and put it onto your friend’s computer…

JH: And you’re quite happy about that?
AL: Yeah, because a) there’s nothing you can do about it and b) if you can’t do anything about it then there’s no point in getting pissed off. It’s happening to everybody and you might as well just try to think of a way that you can use it to your advantage. This is the way we’ve tried to think of something new. I just think it’s just the type of idea we’d like to try.

JH: Any hidden files or videos included?
AL: Yeah, there actually will be but we haven’t quite worked out what they’re going to be yet. But we’ve got a lot of good ideas, so there will be a few hidden files, which will be real fun, I think.

JH: What plans for further promotion?
AL: We’ll be filming a video this month for one of the tracks off the album. It’s sounding pretty whack, actually. It’ll definitely be the weirdest video we’ve ever done. We’re working with Lucinda McConnon, who’s an awesome up-and-coming designer and animator. She’s filming it and partially animating some parts and doing all sorts of wicked things. I don’t know what else I can say without spoiling the surprise.

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

The Tweeks NZ tour:
Friday, May 9 – Backstage, Dunedin with Tono and the Finance Company, Fea Street Hustle
Saturday, May 10 – Dux de Lux, Queenstown
Saturday, May 17 – Level One, Christchurch with Cowboy Machine, Jimmy Zoom & The Beytown Grifters, Green Eyed Owl

Links:
myspace.com/thetweeks

Video: The Tweeks – “London Street”, from 2007 debut album You Can Listen Too