It doesn’t matter how famous or successful you are: nobody escapes the long arm of the Australian Taxation Office.
Davey Lane may have spent almost two decades as the guitarist of seminal Oz rock group You Am I, winning countless accolades and plaudits in the process, but even he has to sit down and nut through his tax returns every once in a while. “I’ve just been sorting through ’em,” Lane says. “It’s been lots of fun, sitting amongst a fuckin’ big pile of bank statements and receipts. So getting on the phone and having a chat is a welcome respite from that.”
One can imagine the mundanity of paperwork might also be playing a part in Lane’s growing sense of excitement about the massive show You Am I have lined up next month. Their appearance at A Day On The Green will see the band perform alongside such luminaries as Something For Kate and Spiderbait in the picturesque setting of Bimbadgen in the Hunter Valley.
Nonetheless, Lane admits that these days he relishes any chance to hang out with his bandmates – Tim Rogers, Andy Kent and Rusty Hopkinson – regardless of the ATO’s intervention. “We’re excited whenever any tour rolls around,” he says. “The thing about our band is, maybe going back 17 or 18 years, we were a bit busier. We’re still relatively busy, as far as touring goes. But we only get the opportunity to do a tour like this once or twice a year, so we look forward to the opportunity when it rolls around.”
Though Lane might feel only “relatively” busy these days, he and his group still spend substantially more time on the road than many of their contemporaries. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that You Am I jetted around the country on a headline tour spruiking their 2015 album Porridge & Hotsauce.
“I do miss being on the road when I’m at home,” Lane says. “After all these years we’re all good friends. We miss each other’s company. We all have a pretty similar sense of humour, so we’re always cracking jokes and having a laugh. But I guess, you know, we’re all kind of busy with other projects. We’re juggling them when we’re not touring. But it’s always best when we’re together.”
For Lane, such other projects include performing at the warmly received David Bowie tribute, Nothing Has Changed, which took place at the Sydney Opera House earlier this year, along with more left-of-centre turns like his appearance in a recent episode of Laura Imbruglia’s Amateur Hour web series, one that saw him show off his comedic chops as an embattled guitar shop customer.
But despite the evident creative strength he gains from such endeavours, for Lane nothing beats climbing into a cramped van with mates he’s known for decades. “When you’re touring in a rock’n’roll band, a lot of it is based around the absurd and the ridiculous anyway,” he says. “So the ability to kind of laugh about silly things like that keeps us from going insane. If you’ve got a pretty intense run of shows, you just sort of push through it, and then just fucking fall in a heap when it’s all said and done. It’s funny how the body works – you can get through on a wink of sleep a night, and possibly too much to drink.”
Rather than such physical and mental deprivation draining Lane, he argues that such restrictions positively improve his performance, and it’s clear You Am I do whatever they can to make their live sets fresh – even if that means running themselves ragged.
“On tour, you operate on not much sleep,” he says. “But I always find the best shows we play are the ones where we all feel shithouse, because we’re less inhibited and less aware of what’s going on around us. So we just put our heads down and concentrate on playing. “For some bizarre reason, those shows always tend to be the most enjoyable ones.”
That said, Lane evidently only feels comfortable pushing himself to the limits because he knows his bandmates always have his back. Rogers has a habit of introducing Lane onstage as “my son”, and the group has a shared sense of the familial that makes You Am I more than just your run-of-the-mill rock band.
“I think we all look out for each other,” Lane says. “We’re always communicating onstage, and we’re always looking out if someone else is feeling flat or something. We’re always communicating, and we rely on keeping things together for each other. I mean, we play structured rock’n’roll and pop songs, but we like to keep a fair amount of it spontaneous as well, ’cause that really is where the magic happens, as they say. I mean, the songs are structured up to a point, but we like to keep it free.”
Mind you, by ‘free’ Lane doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be seeing improvisational jazz freak-outs during You Am I shows any time soon. “We don’t jam,” he laughs. “And we all hate that word too, ‘jamming’. We’re not that band. But we like to leave a little bit to chance.”
Given some of the band’s best-known songs can’t pretend to be young any more – a tune like the classic ‘Berlin Chair’ is officially old enough to vote and is probably wrapping up a uni degree – any attempt to disrupt the process might seem like a concerted effort to keep things fresh onstage. But Lane argues that such artificial means of disorder aren’t really necessary, thanks in no small part to Rogers, his fearless leader and friend.
“I think it’s just testament to Tim’s songwriting that we don’t get bored of these songs. Every time we play them we play with vim and vigour, as they say. And that’s the thing as well about the sheer amount of songs Tim’s written over the years – we are able to chop and change.”
Nonetheless, You Am I’s renegade onstage approach also influences the way they write songs, as well as the decisions they make hitting the studio. “It’s funny talking to other bands,” Lane says. “We don’t seem to labour over making records as much as other bands do. I mean, just that process of recording and demoing – we just rarely, if ever, record demos as a band. We probably just send each other a rough acoustic guitar and vocal, so we get a rough idea of the chords and the structure of the song.”
He laughs. “I mean, we all have pretty short attention spans as well, so if something is not working after a little while – after we’ve tried it maybe four or five times – we would probably just err on the side of leaving it. Generally, we like to move quickly.”
Ultimately, the You Am I way doesn’t involve doing anything to death, or polishing up songs till they’re nothing but sheen. The joy of a song like ‘Heavy Heart’ is the joy you get when you see something very beautifully fall apart.
“That’s the thing about the recording process – I like going to a recording with a vague idea of what we’re doing, but it’s always the little mistakes in the recording that make the songs,” Lane says. “It’s a rarity in this day and age to hear little errors and mistakes like you do on songs in the classic era of rock. Those are always the things that excite me.”
A Day On The Green, with You Am I, Something For Kate, Spiderbait, Jebediah and The Meanies, happensSaturday November 5 atBimbadgen, Hunter Valley.Porridge & Hotsauce is out now through Inertia.
