“I’ll just go grab him,” says the gentle voice on the other end of the landline – yep, a landline.
“He’s just out in the shed.” The unidentified voice is summoning the great Ross Knight – founder and sole original member of the unstoppable pub rock force that is the Cosmic Psychos, as well as a keen weightlifter, father and incredibly busy farmer. As he pulls up a chair to speak with the BRAG, he’s coming to the end of a long, hard day out on his farm in regional Victoria.
“I’m bulldozing at the moment,” he says in that instantly recognisable drawl. “I got a bit of work done on the farm over the winter, but I couldn’t go out and earn a buck. With the rains, everything was just too wet to touch. Now that there’s a bit of sunshine, I’ve just been going flat macka. It’s just me out there, too – I could do with a bloody army of blokes out there right now, I tell ya.”
For all the hard yards the Psychos have been putting in over the last few years – extensive touring, releasing a brand new studio album in 2015’s Cum The Raw Prawn and even making a couple of music videos along the way – it says a lot that Knight is still as dedicated to his farm now as he was back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when the band was releasing such classics as Go The Hack and Blokes You Can Trust. As far as he’s concerned, however, it’s simply a matter of working both harder and smarter.
“We time the trips away when there’s not much going on around here,” Knight explains. “When we did that Europe tour, it was really wet here. I would have just been farting around the shed if I’d stuck around. Being away for four weeks didn’t make much of a dent at all – and plus, I got to be on the other side of the world, enjoying the sun and the fun. We try and get back over there every 18 months or so, and we try and get as much in as we can. On that run, we did 18 shows in 18 days. We got to go up to the Arctic Circle and play with Iggy Pop, and we ended the tour with a gig in Italy.”
After casually rifling through what could only be described as a dream experience for any touring band, Knight pauses. “Yeah, it was good,” he sums up in a quintessentially understated manner.
New material has come a little slower than usual for the Psychos lately – Raw Prawn, for instance, arrived four years after Glorius Barsteds, itself five years removed from Dung Australia in 2007. Still, Knight and the rest of the band – guitarist John McKeering and drummer Dean Muller – are hoping to strike while the iron is relatively hot and see if they can’t squeeze out album number ten in the next year or so.
“We’ve already started on it,” says Knight. “We’re more prepared now than we were for the last album. Raw Prawn, for us, was an experimentation in laziness. We didn’t actually write anything until we’d rocked up in the studio, basically. We were going in on a wing and a prayer. I think it was because we’d received advice to prepare more and swear less – so we went in completely unprepared and swore as much as we possibly could.”
After some Christmas downtime, the Psychos will be back in action this January when they headline the first-ever Thrashville festival, taking place in Belford in the Hunter Valley. Among the bands joining the action are the legendary Hard-Ons, who recently welcomed back their original lead singer Keish De Silva.
“We go way, way back with those guys – I think we must have played with them for the first time back in the ’80s,” says Knight. “Any excuse to catch up with those guys, honestly. It’s always a ripper of a time when we get together. We’ve been mates for a long time, but we’re also all genuinely big fans of theirs. I’ve always said this – they were years ahead of their bloody time.”
Also on the bill are Melbourne band Clowns, who recently dropped a new single and will be debuting their five-piece lineup at the festival. “We were lucky enough to play a show with them in Melbourne a few years ago,” says Knight of the hardcore punk outfit. “I think that was the night before we went off to Europe. We’ve probably done a couple more shows with them since then, but that one sticks out for me. They’re a really good bunch of blokes – I reckon they’re a great band.”
Throw in the likes of Mischling, Glitoris and The Neptune Power Federation and you’re in for one wild day in the Valley – an area of the country the Psychos don’t normally find themselves. “We tend to really hug the coast when we’re touring up that way,” says Knight. “I didn’t even know where it was – we just got told it was near Newcastle. I hope it’s still there by the time we rock up – they’ve been copping some pretty brutal bushfires lately.”
Cosmic Psychos play Thrashville 2017, with Hard-Ons, Clowns, Mischling, The Neptune Power Federation and more, at Dashville, Belford, on Saturday January 21.
