It’s been a busy year for Gareth Liddiard. Currently gearing up for their return to the Sydney Opera House in time for Vivid LIVE, The Drones are also in the midst of recording album number seven, in addition to reissuing their entire back catalogue. It’s an impressive feat, but then The Drones are indisputably a hard-working band. Chatting with Liddiard, you come to suspect their work ethic was formed in his early years in Perth, where he worked as a roadie when festivals rolled into town. The truth is somewhat more sketchy.

“I never set out to really do anything or learn anything from that work,” Liddiard remembers, his voice exactly the kind of rumble you would expect. “But I liked it, so that’s what I gravitated towards. I did lighting, roadie work, lugging stuff around. That was ’92 to 2000, when I threw it in to move to Melbourne and try being a musician. But it did mean that I never got weirded out by stages, because I was already standing on them straight out of high school. Gigs like Big Day Out, working stages in front of these huge crowds. But I never thought anything would ever come from that, and now I just love it. Plus you got to see some awesome bands from the side of stage. Rollins Band, Beasts Of Bourbon. It was a good little period of study.”

The Drones’ career has taken on a rather idiosyncratic trajectory, one which seems marked by elements that would generally seem quite stressful: legal dramas, an impressively exhausting touring schedule, the band itself morphing through different members. It sounds energising on paper, almost frantic, but experiencing it all in the flesh was a different beast altogether.

“To a degree it’s stressful, but then there are different kinds of stress,” says Liddiard. “There’s good stress, like how you can be stuck with the band in a van for 48 hours. But then there’s other things – internal tensions, all of the grinding touring. But I don’t think we’re exceptional in that case. Like, everyone gets screwed over when you’re on the road. It’s a strange business, and there’s just no regulation. You can just totally not get paid for a gig, and nothing will ever come of it. People can get away with murder. And yeah, we’ve been treated like shit. Unless you’ve got heaps of money behind you to just ignore these other people, you just have to swallow it. It’s fucked. I mean, in that case you can always just vandalise property, get your own back.” He bursts out laughing, clearly (probably) joking.

The band is currently celebrating the tenth anniversary of its Australian Music Prize-winning sophomore record, Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By.Its harrowing opening number, ‘Shark Fin Blues’, was recognised as the greatest-ever Australian song by a panel assembled by triple j in 2009. The Drones’ history is one brimming with such industry respect and popular accolades, and while they now enjoy the freedom to pursue whatever project takes their fancy, they find themselves still having to keep on their toes.

“We have to keep working, meet your responsibilities. It’s not the worst thing in the world. We can still do what we want to, but we’re definitely not rich. There was some speculation in the past that we were rich, and that’s fucking hilarious. It started when someone saw us buying a bottle of scotch. I mean, we desperately needed scotch, we were off in the wilderness somewhere near this country town, and the last bottle of scotch they had there was Chivas Regal. So word got around somehow that that meant we were rich. Really we would have just preferred a bottle of 100 Pipers.”

With the band’s appearance at Vivid, audiences can anticipate a swathe of new material in addition to what Liddiard calls “our retrospective angle”. In light of The Drones’ decision to reissue earlier records, it’s safe to say the old songs have featured rather prominently in Liddiard’s life of late. However, he is clearly not a man to dwell overly on the past.

“When I do hear stuff [from the past], I still like it. I mean, we sound how we sound because we want to, you know? I find it odd when you see musicians listening to things they’ve done and they’re all, ‘Turn it off, turn it off!’ I mean, why the fuck would you bother making something you hate? Isn’t the point to make something that you actually like? I don’t understand. But there are always things you want to fix. There wouldn’t be any entire song I’d go back and mute. There are verses I’d rejig, fix the sound here and there.

“A few years ago I heard Lou Reed talking about, does he ever listen to Transformer or Velvet Underground? And he goes, ‘Well, I tried to once, but all I heard were the mistakes.’ I’m kind of like that, but I can’t imagine I’d ever want to go back and erase anything. The most significant thing for me is that we were lucky to have an album come along that allowed us to make a living from just being a band. I can’t imagine doing any other kind of job in that time. It’s been a good ten years.”

The Dronesappear at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House as part of Vivid LIVE 2015, onSunday May 24.

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