The Holy Soul
The members of the Holy Soul met a few years back at uni, where three-quarters of them were studying music. At the University of Western Sydney’s music department, it wasn’t long before they found each other. Adrift in a world of jazz-funk and nu-metal bands, populated with guys who played in 24/23 time and loved to cover Sting solo songs – their words – they literally had nowhere else to go. Ragged and raw, their rough early shows drew some comparisons that were unfamiliar to the band (from the Cramps to the Gun Club); but a favourite cover, The Scientist’s 1983 classic ‘Swampland’ more accurately mapped the Holy Soul’s terrain: somewhere in classic Oz underground swamp-rock and raw, roots-touched classic songwriting via Neil Young and Bob Dylan. Led by the songwriting of big Dylan fan and lead-snarler Trent Marden, the young band sounded old before their time. In a really good way. A super lo-fi EP Love Has Left the City Limits, recorded in a shed, in a day, was released on Reverberation in 2004, followed late last year by their debut album, Sign of the Triangle.
The album, the band say, is “a sonic upgrade” from the EP – but only just. It took three days to record, to eight-track tape, in ex-guitarist Tim Malfroy’s shed, near Windsor in NSW. (Malfroy has since been replaced by the band’s recording engineer John Hunter.) In a sweltering pub on a Sydney midsummer evening, Marden, drummer Owen Penglis, and bassist Sam Worrad talked to M+N about being in bad high-school metal bands, getting compliments from Glenn A Baker, and – finally – address both those Masonic and Christian rumours, engendered respectively by their album title (the all-seeing eye of Mason mythology is encased in a triangle symbol); and their band name (the Holy Soul, remember?). Bear witness:
M+N: So why did you record your album to eight-track?
Trent: It sounds good. It’s cheap.
Owen: Basically we were really happy with the sound of the first one [the EP]. It sounds really ragged.
Sam: We did vaguely want to upgrade sonically a bit – there was no way but up.
Owen: Sometimes I’ve recorded in studios before and it just sounds shit. When you record live there’s an energy there.
M+N: So it was a matter of rehearsing and just rolling tape?
Sam: In about three or four hours we managed to get about six or seven songs done with vocals. We did the acoustic songs on the third day with a lot of fucking around.
M+N: How did you meet?
Trent: We all went to the same university and we shared the same disdain for funk and jazz and nu-metal – not jazz, but ...
Sam: A lot of the uni bands sounded like Paul Schaeffer’s CBS orchestra or something.
Owen: I kind of hate telling people that we did music at uni cos it just sounds like we’re just a bunch of fucking wankers. Trent: Well. We’ve unlearnt a lot of stuff.
M+N: So you hated the same stuff. Was there stuff you all liked?
Trent: We all had an MC5 record.
M+N: When was your first gig?
Sam: October 2001. That was at one such event with a lot of bad funk bands.
Owen: We just tried to make the most ragged trashy sound possible.
Trent: And that because we didn’t know how to play any other way anyway.
Owen: You’d have to practice to get good and we weren’t going to do that.
Sam: Glenn A Baker was there. After the gig Owen and I went outside and played the Compliment Olympics. If someone came up to you and said it was good, you’d get 10 points, and if they tapped you on the shoulder and said it, it was 20. First person that came up was Glenn A Baker who said [to Owen] “I loved your caveman drumming!” – so he got like 500 points or something. But then he snubbed us later on.
Trent: So it was minus 1000.
Trent, what got you wanting to write songs in the first place?
Trent: That’s like asking “What’s your favourite album?”
Owen: I can answer that.
Trent: I can’t. I guess I used to listen to ‘Ballad of A Thin Man’ and ‘Maggie’s Farm’ off the [Dylan] Live at Budokan album, which was probably his worst, and I liked the words because they were just so bizarre, and it rocked out. That was ’78, just before the Christian stuff. I dig his Christian stuff ... I didn’t listen to the radio much as a kid. When I was 12, I was a big Michael Jackson fan, and then when Dangerous came out (‘92, I was 11) I lost all faith in popular music.
Sam: When I was a little kid some dodgy uncle told me that Michael Jackson was going to come to Penrith and kill everyone. And I told my next door neighbour, I was like four, and he just freaked out. It was pretty plausible though, at the time, with that ‘Thriller’ video.
M+N: Did you guys have musical upbringings?
Owen: My dad played banjo incessantly.
M+N: ... But not well?
Owen: I don’t know, when you’re under 10, any kind of banjo sounds horrible. I’d walk home down the street and hear the banjo and just keep walking.
M+N: There’s lots of symbolism attached to your album title.
Trent: I just thought it was a nice phrase. It means something. What do you think it means?
M+N: Well, there is the Freemason symbol, the eye of providence on the American dollar bills.
Trent: Yes.
Owen: I like to think it’s a reference to the 13th Floor Elevators’ first album.
Trent: I don’t even have that one. It was more of a Prince thing, Sign o’ the Times.
M+N: Or, in Nazi concentration camps, one rank of prisoner had to wear inverted triangle badges.
Owen: (To Trent) I thought it was because you’re a Mason. Trent: I’m not. And I’m not telling you about it either.
M+N: Your music sounds like it draws on older, underground Oz sounds like the Scientists and the Beasts of Bourbon. Are you fans of those bands?
All: Sure, yeah.
Owen: Until we started playing, I’d never listened to the Scientists, or the Gun Club. But then people kept saying “You really sound like this Fire of Love album”.
Sam: I still haven’t heard that, but everyone’s always talking about the Gun Club.
Trent: I like guns, clubs. I come from the country. It’s accidental, just what happens when some guys get together ...
M+N: ... In retreat from funk. Have you played in any other bands?
Trent: Bad high-school metal bands. Nothing substantial. We were in the worst high school metal band, called Seer. Then we had a ‘name change’ to Sear.
Sam (to Owen): Have you ever seen that video of Trent when he’s got really long hair, knocking over the amp and stuff, playing Pantera covers? Trent: No that was Cave, a Black Sabbath tribute band. I was playing bass. They let me sing ‘Paranoid’ once in the set, which is why I stuck around.
M+N: How does your songwriting work?
Trent: For ‘Who’s Breaking Your Heart’ I was at work in the factory and it just came into my head, and I thought, “Which Hank Williams song is this?” And it wasn’t. It was lucky. I asked around, have you heard this before? Other times I’d be walking down the street, just the rhythm of that. ‘Dead Town’ came from that. Other times there’ll be lines that sit around for three years and I try and shove ‘em in to songs and they keep getting rejected by the songs.
M+N: What factory?
Well I’m not going to give ‘em a plug cos I hate the place. But it’s a book factory. I get to put books in boxes all day. After the first six months ... Oh god, buy the album, please.
M+N: It must be hard to rehearse with you all living so far apart (Trent in Mittagong,
Owen in Sydney, Sam in Sydney’s west.).
Trent: Well, we don’t bother. Have you heard us?
Owen: I’m sure we’ve had more shows than we’ve had rehearsals.
Trent: Heaps more. Rehearsals a waste of inspiration. What’s the difference in the band between when you made the EP and the album?
Owen: We’ve got more songs! It’s like we have more of an idea of what we sound like now.
Trent: I could sit here and like, say stuff, but it won’t necessarily be true.
Sam: It was tempting to make a very clean Kraftwerk-sounding album so the reviews wouldn’t say the Gun Club anymore.
M+N: Are you a Christian band?
Sam: I like it when people think that.
Trent: I really like the idea of people seeing us and thinking what hardcore evangelicals we are.
Sam: Hillsong get all the hot chicks.
Trent: If they ever came to us, we’d do gigs there.
+
