The Tea Party

They were one of those “Dude, have you heard…” bands, passed around by word of mouth and muffled, hastily dubbed cassettes. Then the talk changed to: “Dude, have you seen The Tea Party? I saw them play at a tiny club.”

By the end of the Canadians’ initial run they were playing theatres throughout the country. And that’s where they are again now they’ve reunited. Key to this progression was the 1995 album The Edges Of Twilight. The Tea Party’s second studio record became their first top ten album in Australia thanks to the support of music-lovers and triple j, with fan favourites such as ‘Sister Awake’, ‘The Bazaar’, ‘Fire In The Head’ and ‘Correspondences’. To commemorate the anniversary and re-release of the album, The Tea Party are performing the iconic record in its entirety around Australia in November (with a second set made up of other classics), during their 15th tour of the country.

When it came time to write The Edges Of Twilight all those years ago, the band had a clear agenda. “We had just come off Splendor Solis, our first record, and we were trying to broach the subject of world music and rock’n’roll, utilising our instruments in unique tunings,” bassist Stuart Chatwood explains. “For example, we couldn’t afford a sitar at the time, so we’d tune a 12-string guitar like a sitar to get some ringing sympathetic notes happening and that sort of thing. But for The Edges Of Twilight we got a record advance and we went through this mail order musical instrument catalogue and every single day a UPS truck would arrive with a different instrument!

“We’d go to the world music stores to buy CDs … and this was prior to the internet, so you had to buy CDs and do research. We had The Harvard Dictionary Of Music. We’d go to see world music concerts. Anything we could pick up. The idea was not to be masters of world music instruments, because each one of those instruments would take you 20 years to pick up; the idea was to bring new sounds into the process, expose people to different colours and aspects into that music and open peoples’ eyes.”

Along the way there were detractors; critics who felt that three guys from North America raised on Led Zeppelin had no business dabbling in the traditional musical forms of distant cultures.

“We were living in a safe world where we were disruptors saying, ‘You can’t just play guitar, drums and bass anymore,’” says Chatwood. “And that scared a lot of people. A lot of people accused us of co-opting the culture.”

But a story recently shared on the Tea Party tour bus put it all into perspective. “Our Australian guitar tech was in Instanbul touring with Nick Cave or someone and he was in the Grand Bazaar looking at jewellery or something, and the stall owner comes up and says, ‘Are you a rock star?’ He says, ‘No, but I work with rock musicians.’ The guy says, ‘What kind of music?’ and our tech says, ‘I work for a band that blends world music and Led Zeppelin.’ And the guy says ‘Oh, like The Tea Party?’ and started singing ‘The Bazaar’!”

Although the band is often compared to Zeppelin, Chatwood says the world music influences came via a slightly earlier source: “I guess it goes back to The Beatles, George Harrison. There’s the regular Beatles from The Cavern Club but then there was this whole other side to them. And then, yeah, Led Zeppelin and Robert Plant and Jimmy Page’s trips to Morocco. We just thought, ‘Nobody has really dived deeper into that stuff.’ Then Sepultura worked with tribes in the Brazilian rainforest. But nobody had been mixing it with the rock genre. And once the record came out, we started touring even more so and getting these excellent support slots like Page and Plant. Prior to that we’d get feedback from fans – and from the critics, who hated it! But then we’d hear from Trent Reznor, Lou Reed, Robert Plant, David Bowie, who heard our record and told us they liked it.

“Our goal was always to write timeless music,” Chatwood adds. “And we’re excited about going in next year and writing new stuff. I think streaming is going to be good for a band like ourselves because we just don’t do well trying to cater to anyone else, whether it’s trying to get on Triple M, triple j, Triple R. We’re much better if we just sit down and try to write our favourite songs. If there’s a hook in there it’s for us to enjoy, not for radio play. And if you do have success and people come to you, then hopefully people will be discovering albums like Edges Of Twilight for 20, 30 years to come.

“If you listen to some of the albums from the ’90s or especially the ’80s, some of the production is shocking now, almost kitschy. And some of the stuff from the ’90s with the ‘Aww-haww, yeah-heah’ singing that everybody copied, we never got into that. We just want to be true to ourselves.”