Album Number Three. Who’da thunk it? OK, Joeys Coop have been chugging along for 14 years and maybe should have a few more under our belt but it’s not like there is massive demand for shows or recorded output from a bunch of 50 - 60-year-olds that aren’t a heritage act but do have a bit of history.
Recorded at the wonderful Golden Retriever Studios (in Sydney's Marrickville) owned by the eccentric, talented and delightful Simon Berckelman. Simon is the brains behind Philadelphia Grand Jury and his dad, Richard, was the drummer in Kiss My Poodles Donkey and he built the studio. There is a lot of great gear there and the big room is the space you can hear around the drums.
Our pre-production on this was typical of how we work. Given funds are always tight, we work as hard as we can in rehearsal to nail arrangements, parts etc. Because of that, and because the boys also practice all their parts at home, we tend to be a one or two take band. I track vocals when we do the bed tracks.
First time we recorded there I mentioned I wanted to do this in the room with the boys, so Simon made a temporary vocal booth out of sound screens and old carpets. Album Number Two there and bugger me if he hasn’t built a proper vocal booth in the corner of the big room. As a result, most of my vocals are live tracked with a few drop ins here and there. Where I wanted to change my approach entirely, usually on the newer material I’ve had less time with, I redid the vocals. I did that on maybe two songs.
Tracking beds is of course all about the drums and the feel overall. The other reason we are so fast is that Lloyd is a fucking machine and doesn’t like wasting time. He does all the hard yards outside the studio. Similarly, Marc typically nails his parts first go and apart from a change in one bass line we wanted after tracking, it’s all from the bed tracks. His combination of being in the groove and playing beautiful melody is always so good.
Brett is another story and ain’t that the way with guitar players. He recorded all his overdubs in the studio, and they were great as always, but the sneaky bugger would take the stems home and come back the next day with most guitar parts redone. Not because his playing wasn’t good but because he had more control over the sound at home using amp simulators on Abelton. Next time we record we can cancel the days for guitar parts and save a bit more money. ;)
I’ve told this story a few times at gigs, but a few years ago my wife asked me why I bother with the band given we play to about 15 blokes of a certain age in a shitty bar somewhere. To be fair it is now about 30 – 40 blokes and sheilas of a certain age in a shitty bar somewhere. Our 14 years of relentless slog is paying off on that front.
But my answer to her is simple: It beats the fuck out of playing golf and besides I get to hang out and play with three super ace fellas who also happen to be exceptionally talented musicians who love what they do and do it so well – all without drama and big egos. I said to her that it’s a bit like a men’s shed but we don’t really talk about men’s stuff we just talk shit and music and get lost in creating something we think is beautiful.
The other upside of the numbers that come to see us is that I know most of you personally now and when we play it is always like having a party with dear friends. This is why we do what we do. Enjoy.
Making their mark: Mark Roxburgh and Marc Lynch.
In The Pines
This is a true story. MoshPit Bar in Sydney and bump into John Kennedy. Labelmates back in the day but never met. We hit it off, make up for lost time. I walk back to the Bin Chicken Hotel under the flight path, on the highway in St Peters, sandwiched between Maccas and KFC. Too many reds under the belt I make it to Sydney Park and opt for a bench under moaning she-oaks. Better than the beds at the Bin Chicken. I wasn’t worried about getting rolled. My great grandfather was a Newtown boy and ran the brick pits that used to be there so figured he’d keep an eye on me.
Love playing this song and gets a great response. When workshopping it in rehearsal I kept fucking up the timing of the intro line so Brett sang it a couple of times to get me sorted and I said "let’s just do this as a call and response number – we don’t have one of those". I also doubled the vocal tempo time in the breakdown to give it more punch. The standard delivery dragged the whole song down. The tribal drums, the swampy guitar and grooving bass just get me all riled up and I think the call and response works so well with them.
Henry Collins
This song has had many lives, and we played it live once pre-covid. We saw something in it, but it never gelled. We dropped it from the set. Over the next few years, we changed the pace; tried it with a roots vibe; changed the length (originally a Dylanesque five or 6 verses). Eventually we were happy with the length, tempo and rootsy feel so we recorded it. Brett, left with the recorded stems for a few days, came back with all the rootsy guitar dropped and the rockier stuff added. Yep, that’ll do it.
The lyrics allude to a retired tent boxer reflecting on his life. The Dylanesque version lyrics were more detailed with clearer references to the life those boxers led. In cutting it down to its current length it made sense to evoke the experience rather than describe it. It’s all fiction. Not often I write fiction.
I Met My Love
I fell in love with this first time I heard it. So much atmosphere and quite different from our other stuff, although part of a broader trajectory of our work. We’ve only started playing it live this year. It took about sixmonths to get right with a series of minor changes to parts that evolved organically through conversations and suggestions each time we played it. The hard part of bringing a song to life but the most fun and rewarding, especially when you are working with excellent musicians with a few clicks on the odometer and sensible egos.
Lyrically this one is mainly Brett, and I riffed on the very beautiful poetic imagery for the missing bits. It’s basically a song about love and betrayal and the lyrics and soundscape evoke something from the Middle Ages. Another fictional number.
Brett and Mark.
The Bottle or the Bag
I had a few key lines for this sitting in my notes from about 30 years ago when I used to catch the train to Penrith for work and a few other lines from more recent visits to way too many suburban shopping malls. I’ve had the line “food hall Chinese” for years as I am partial to shopping mall food hall Baine Marie Chinese. I’ve always been a keen observer of human behaviour as I find people endlessly fascinating and I’ve always made notes on what I observe. The scenes recounted in this song are things I have witnessed and their incongruity with their settings fitted the laid-back psych vibe of the tune. I was David Attenborough narrating a nature doco on drug use when I sang. That helped me write the chorus, which I only sorted in the days leading up to recording.
I Wanna Live
Another cracking number. Kind of shoegaze like. Fitting given Brett’s pedal board and occasional loops. Another song that makes us all smile when we play it and goes down well live. It has such a great energy. Speaking of loops, we laugh every time we hear the synth sample he triggers in this – the one that sounds like a spaceship taking off. If I had hair I’d be banging my head to this one. I also imagine myself in a cage go-go dancing to it wearing Kylie Minogue’s gold shorts. Go figure.
When we first started playing this in rehearsal Brett said to Lloyd: "Think Souxie and the Banshees tribal drumming" and he nailed it first time. I love the complexity of the rhythms. Lyrically pretty simple, although maybe a bit obtuse. Essentially about how precious and good life is despite setbacks. Fuck me I’m getting reflective in me dotage.
Old Mate Johnny
Another true story. With Brett’s hillbilly guitarwork on this I knew the story I would tell straight up. I live in a hidden valley behind Mullumbimby full of cookers, red necks, growers, tradies, hippies, trustafarians, old farmers, and retirees. All wanting a bit of distance from the outside world.
My neighbour ticks a couple of the above boxes. He is an ace bloke but a bit of a loose cannon – he tangled his ute in our back fence taking it for a test drive after working on it with beers at the ready. But that’s another song somewhere in the future. Long story short, he got beaten to within an inch of his life by an ice head with an axe handle who then torched all the vehicles on his property. I went up when I saw the flames and the ice head came crashing through the scrub in his 4WD so I jumped in my ute and followed him into the moonlit night for 45 minutes while I was narrating the chase to the cops on 000, waiting for them to get there. Along the way he rammed my car, and I eventually lost him in the mist and dark and rain of another valley full of even bigger nutters. Such is country life these days.
Hold On
This one has been kicking around as a riff for almost as long as Marc has been with us. I walked into rehearsal one day and Brett had come in early to try stuff out and he was playing this riff. I’d had a bit of the lyric for a while and had been working on the melody. I set a mic up and said play it again I think I have something. I just launched straight in and tweaked my melody to knit with the chord progression as we went. Marc and Lloyd walked in and went “sounds great”.
Originally the main guitar part had a massive amount of tremolo on it like “The One” (off “Service Station Flowers”) and it is a bugger for everyone to keep time to. Because of that we only played “Hold On” live a couple of times and it was a mess. Recording it was going to be easier as we could use a click track, as we did with “The One”.
At the last minute, Brett changed the tremolo to a chorus which (a) meant that it didn’t repeat what we’d done on “The One” and (b) would be a whole lot easier to play live all while keeping the sense of the movement of time the guitar evokes. We had Scott Saunders from DIG in to do piano on “I Saw the Light” and after he recorded his part for that track Brett said “wanna do another one?” Scott had one listen, got told the chord progression and he went in and knocked it over in a couple of takes.
The song is a vague critique of the vacuous nature of much of the social media attention economy where people will say and do anything on it for attention. I kinda had the orange hued king with the comb over crown in mind when I wrote it. That might be a line for a future song so hands off.
I Saw the Light
We had two versions of this kicking around. The version recorded here and a more acoustic rootsy version. We played both live and the faster version with the rocking drums and slide guitar won hands down. Brett usually has a pencilled in title for tunes. Once upon a time it would be something “Mark 36” or “pedal test” or “shoe gaze thing”. Eventually he started to give them proper names and although he says “change it if you want” I like to use the title, or anything he mumbles on the demo, to prompt a lyrical response and take it from there. After all there is no such thing a blank slate in creativity – despite the myth.
This came along titled “I Saw the Light” and I heard it as a kind of punk gospel number. Normally gospel music is about God and Jesus and I’m an atheist so that wasn’t going to work. I’m not really a Buddhist either but with the shit that goes on in my head I’ve found yoga and a bit of meditation helps quieten the noise down a bit. Well, that and self-medication of the non-prescription variety.
Anyway, I like the Buddhist approach of being mindful and kind to yourself and others … in my words: not being an dick and doing good shit. I like to call this a Buddhist mantra in the form of a reflective smack in the chops. As always Lloyd and Marc hold this all together and drive it along while Brett and I do the easy stuff on top. Piano is again by Scott Saunders. He was great to work with. He came in and said: “I have a dial on my back so turn it up or down as you need in terms of business of playin”’. He went all Jerry Lee Lewis at the outset, which was fucking amazing, but Brett turned the dial on his back way down and the beautiful, understated playing is a great contrast to the frenetic nature of everything else and underpins the lyrical thematics. The calm in the storm.
The best thing about recording this was watching Scott and Brett talk through the approach after listening back to a couple of takes. No egos, all ideas and all about the song.
Sweet
Almost got dropped from the album but I argued for it to stay. I love the contrast of the pretty guitar in the first part with the “rawk” strut of the second part. If I had hair I’d go full Plant Rock God Mode at one stage but I don’t so can’t.
I love the space and groove Marc and Lloyd lay down for this and Brett’s guitar work sends shivers down my spine. I pretty much wrote the lyrics for this on the fly as we rehearsed it – something I quite often do. I am not overly nostalgic, although I can be sentimental, but for some reason the music evoked the feeling I had as an adolescent, listening to records in my family home and the sense of a bigger world out there. The lyrical content is a memoir of sorts of how I came to music and gravitated to inner Sydney circa 1978-79. I suspect I’m not alone in having such an experience.
Old Store
As a rule, I don’t write love songs. While I don’t think there is enough love in the world I think there are too many love songs. I get it. It is a fundamental human emotion and is how we connect but I think writing them endlessly is a creative cop out. Here I make something of an exception. The Stones-y floating feel of this reminded me of the first time I met my partner of the past 20 years. The lyrics are vague and dreamy and evoke the things that we did during our courtship rather them chronicle them. It’s all about the vibe, Your Honour. If only we had Jean Luc Goddard in the studio filming when we recorded this. It would have resulted in a much shorter film than the one the Stones did with him. ;) Haven’t played it live yet but hoping to soon.
Credits
Lloyd Gyi - drums, percussion, bg vox
Marc Lynch - bass
Brett Myers - guitars, loops, bg vox
Mark Roxburgh – vox, plaid
Scott Saunders – piano on Hold On and I Saw The Light
Recorded at Golden Retriever Studios 2025
Engineer - Antonia Gaucci
Assistant Engineer - Beau Langdon
Mixed - Simon Berckelman
Mastered - William Bowden
Cover photos – Brett & Marc by Geoff Hutton. Lloyd & Mark by Tony McNamara.
