It’s a busy year for Melbourne punk rockers My Echo.
They’re back with a new single ‘Old & Grey’, an album entitled Brothers due out in early 2017, plus a string of tour dates including a show in Sydney this month.
“It’s been quite a long time between drinks,” explains lead singer Brenton Perry. He’s speaking to the BRAG from the car park of a Hungry Jack’s restaurant, hanging out “like a teenager”, he jokes. “We took so much time off to write and everything, [so] we’d only been really focused on playing locally with the occasional interstate show.”
Changes in the band’s lineup have inspired the latest material, and brought some welcome new energy to boot. “I’m the oldest one in the band,” says Perry. “Sometime before I started writing the album I thought that it was sort of the end for My Echo – not that I wanted to break up, I just wasn’t feeling it anymore, and a couple of my best friends had left the band and gone on to do other things, and we were wondering if we should pack it up.”
‘Old & Grey’ was actually written as an ode to their former bassist. Fittingly, the song tells a tale as old as time, paying tribute to those moments when you’re sitting at home thinking about old pals you haven’t seen in a while, but who are still very much on your mind. While My Echo themselves have a long history, they haven’t forgotten where they started: as a band full of mates who slept in bunk beds in a shared bedroom as they recorded for days at a time. In other words, they’ve always been a tight outfit. They’ve often chosen to drive instead of fly to gigs around the country, simply because they “really like hanging out with each other”.
“I think we play music to tour,” says Perry. “To play live shows. We’ve never been a really big studio band … I got really sick when we were recording the album, and I was worried about not being able to nail the vocal tracks – that side of recording really pisses you off, ’cause you’ve got the pressure of trying to record, but we sort of enjoy the pressure of having to get it right on the night with live shows. Once that 45 minutes is up, it’s all forgotten about anyway.”
As can be expected when everyone is squished on top of one another in a Winnebago, My Echo’s time on the road includes plenty of shenanigans. Perry tells a story of being on tour in Western Australia supporting Kingswood and Tired Lion, when the band slept in the van out the back of the venues. After the tour wrapped in Fremantle, an impromptu game of cricket began. “Some bastard lost the ball,” Perry explains, so he went back to the rolling mansion and crashed.
In the meantime, “the lads and some guys from the other crews went out to a tiny restaurant – the only place still open with a licence to serve alcohol. I couldn’t sleep, so I ended up tracking them down at this place. They’d taken over the music in this little sit-down tapas joint and everyone was moshing from wall to wall. I had a hard time getting inside it was so rammed. God, it was a pisser!”
Heaven knows what My Echo’s next set of tour dates has in store, but one thing is clear: Australia had better be prepared.
My Echo play at the Botany View Hotel on Saturday August 13.
