Andrew Stockdale

I listened to a lot of like…I was a kid in the 80’s, so I listened to Michael Jackson, Cheap Trick, Van Halen, Jump, Prince

Andrew

Oh, they were in there. The Doors and that kind of stuff. Listened to a lot of the Beatles, Matthew road

Andrew

Yeah, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis. I also played a lot Flamenco music when I was a kid.

Andrew

Yeah, coz its like, they are the fore-fathers of rock and everything that they do influenced modern music as we know it, so you can't help but tilt your hat in honor to the previous people who excelled in rock and roll before you. If you don’t…. you know, I mean it has single handedly redefined  music in what you are doing now, then you are probably delusional.

Andrew

When we started playing, we definitely made a conscious effort to simplify our sound because we all had a lot of keyboards with a lot of effects at our disposal and we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. So we thought, "lets just play  bass, guitar and drums with one big muff pedal and that’s it. Lets see what we do from there." Then we just kind of brought in, you know the keyboard in as well and after that just a delay pedal and trying to create a bit of an abstract sound and that’s it, that’s how we kept it. Just kept it straight forward.

Andrew

Yeah, nice and clean and just concentrate on the songs, you know. The synergy of the band is more important than all the toys.

Andrew

It wasn’t difficult for Dave (Sardy) because hes made a lot of records and he had ways of encouraging the recording of the guitars he’d done before so  he just kind of, you know, tapped into his catalog within his mind of how to go about things and went straight for it.

Andrew

At the moment I am listening to Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s collaboration on the soundtrack of a film that came out a while ago, its called the Proposition. And also listening to the Mahavishna band and the other thing I’ve got is T. Rex’s, “Born to Boogie”.

Andrew

Yeah, I’ve been getting into the T. Rex which is a bit of fun.

Andrew

Oh, its exciting. Its so big. Sort of thing you can tell your grandkids about it. It’s a huge exposure we are having at the moment. I mean I know the band will get exposure on its own, but its such a huge thing, so yeah

Andrew

Oh, it’s a huge step. I am curios to see what happens from it.

Andrew

We all met through mutual friends and we all had a common interest in music and we just sort of hung out and jammed. And the jamming you know, after a while we kind of realized that maybe that we wanted to take it further than just as a hobby. We wanted to see if we could play a show, record things and really give it a shot.

So, what happened was, I went off and made an acoustic album. Wrote some songs at home on the computer, just with one mic straight into the computer. Just did the guitars. Layered the vocals twice and then I kind  of realized that layering the vocals creates this great sound and it sounded kind of polished and a friend offered me a  show, performing in Sydney. So I rang up Chris and Myles and I just said  “look, do you guys want to do a show? Do you want to form a band? And practice songs and play in front of people for half an hour?” And they were up for it.

And after that first show we all just loved the experience and met new people and we had free bears and paid sixty bucks for the show and it was one of the most exciting thing we’ve ever done and we just wanted to keep doing it from that point.

Andrew

Well, I guess yeah. Within the group, we did have to overcome a few, sort of, little hurdles. People did have reservations, you know, if they were embarrassing themselves or embarrassing each other or whatever. But I think once they got down with it, you develop a trust in the band and we could all play and record and enjoy it. But yeah, there was a bit of hesitation within the group before we did start.

Andrew

One bit of advice I would say is put everything you can into the show… into the live show. Live the music, put everything you can creatively and from the other side of things, don’t let your ego runaway with itself, remain humble and try to stay in touch with who you are and the people you are in the band with and try to be patient with the process.

Andrew

Yeah, I was excited. I thought it really worked well on the radio because it was so different and just seemed to come to life and it sounded exciting and that’s kind of a really neat thing to be able to be on the radio.

Andrew

Yeah, I think I was at home in my flat and I had this radio that was like a Viagra. My girlfriend was working at this multimedia company and they did a website for Viagra. And Viagra gave them a radio and it had like an on and off switch and it was this rising, vertical, rectangular switch. And I was listening through a little Viagra radio.

Andrew

Haha, and it was like, distorted and it was this tiny little radio, but I heard “woman” on like a community radio station and was just like, “that’s the bomb man, that sounds great” and I think we rang each other up and said “its on the radio, turn on the radio, listen to the station” and tripping out.

Andrew

Haha, yeah definitely.

Andrew

I think I’ve already broken through that point, maybe that was around the point when we were mixing the record and I heard the songs like sixteen times a day. I reached a point where I couldn’t hear the songs anymore. It was just noise. I couldn’t decipher what it had actually sounded like, because I become de-synthesized to it. So yeah, its not natural to listen to a song that many times.

Andrew

Yeah, I think Kokos in London was like that. Four story high, old theater and that just an incredible vibe and everyone went nuts and it was kind of like that a bit last night at the opera house in Toronto. A pretty exciting place to play.

Andrew

I think I would have to be …..I think was trying to do photography for a while. So do commissions here and there and doing jobs all over. I think what I would probably do…shit, I don’t know, maybe teach. I think I would have thrown in the towel. After not really having a job through my twenties and being a freelancer I was just really looking forward to being a nine-to-fiver and going into work and having a coffee in the staff room, clocking in and out, and after work drinks and having that kind of stability. I think I was looking forward to that.

Andrew

I think its played a huge role because its an easy way for people to see our music straight off, without going to a shop and without doing anything, so its great. How much? Maybe 30%? 30% of our sales came from MySpace? I don’t know. I’m just pulling a figure out of my ass.

Andrew

I don’t think it has any real influence on the style of the music. We did originally use, CoolEdit. It was very cheap and we used it to make our EP and then when we made the album we used ProTools. We put the drums in and we did the rest in ProTools. We just layered the tracks in, and it was pretty straightforward.

Andrew

Well no. What we did was, we came across Frank Frazetta's work and actually Dave, our producer suggested Frank Frazetta and thought it would match the music  and we checked it out and we just approached him and asked him if we could use it for the album he was very hesitant because I think he had been ripped off  by bands in the past. So after our manager persuaded  him into trusting the Wolfmother cause, he gave us the go-ahead and we selected the sea-witch painting for our album cover and used a few other, probably  four-five other art  works for our EP and various other musical works we did in the past six months.

Andrew

Yeah, next, tomorrow we’re going to Chicago. Then we tour through Canada and North America including New York, Atlanta, then we go down to San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and then we go back to Australia for three days. Then we tour Europe for another four weeks. Then we do a tour of Australia, then we go back to Europe and then we come over to America again  

Andrew

Umm, probably not. Haha. No, I manage to get some sleep.

Andrew

No problem, thanks for doing  the article.