A destroyed hard drive nearly sent him to an early grave, but Spod is back with a positive party album, writes DOM ALESSIO.

Depending on who you ask, Spod could be many things. He could be a man. Or, it could be many men. He might even be 1,000,000,000 years old. Whoever he is, Spod is arguably one of the great cult heroes of the Sydney music scene – and ultimately one of its most enigmatic characters.

So let’s set a few things straight before we continue on with the story, shall we? Originally Spod was a band, and then somewhere around the turn of the century, it became the sole musical outlet for the man known as Brent Griffin. Also, the name Spod was once, er, SPOD, an acronym for Scorpion Powers of Destruction; a moniker perhaps more befitting a goat-slaughtering Eastern European black metal band than a rambunctious, dirty hip-hop-via-punk duo.

It's an overcast Sydney evening and I'm sitting with Griffin in the back room of The Carrington Hotel in Surry Hills. Aside from a handful of people who wander in to play pool every now and then, we're practically alone, so we get our choice of grubby couches. On stage he's the self-proclaimed conductor of radness, destroyer of dreamz, inducer of fantasy. By day, he's disarmingly polite and casually dressed.

A week ago, Griffin unveiled his second album as Spod, Superfrenz, the little album that almost wasn't. In 2007 while moving house, removalists knocked his laptop and two hard drives off a kitchen bench, shattering his work and his dreams. When word got round that only not was the forthcoming Spod album – the first since 2003's Taste the Radness – in jeopardy, but the man himself was contemplating an early retirement, friends and fans rallied together and raised part of the funds needed to repair the drives. It's only fitting then that the album is titled in honour of those who helped save it from oblivion.

"Now that I look back at it," explains Griffin, "if it didn't happen, I don't think I would have been as happy with the record as I am now." It instigated a period of reinvigoration: Griffin started picking through the musical remains, discarding some songs, canvassing old and newly-created ones, and set about re-recording his whole album all over again. "It became fresh," he explains. "It ended up being an album much more representative of where I am now than I think that other album was. It all worked out as much as I wanted to die [laughs]."

That "other" album, Griffin says, would have been a far less cohesive affair than Superfrenz, admitting that "it would have been the album I thought I should have put out instead of the album I really wanted to". Like the debut Spod record, Superfrenz was recorded solely by Griffin, in six different bedroom studios around Sydney over a three-year period, exacerbated by the death of his computer. But Griffin admits that the protracted period was also a product of his own "fucking horrible" time management skills. "I'd given myself so much leeway. I'm just like, 'I can do anything, let's try and do everything’, you know? You go down a lot of avenues that are just dead ends. Like, 'Oh, I'm not Timbaland, that's actually hard to do!' I do a lot of experimenting and messing around, just ‘cause it's the best fun. If you can, go the long way around. But I enjoy that process a lot."

"I couldn’t work in a real studio, I don’t think. For one, knowing that all the dicking around I do is costing me money would give me a nervous breakdown."

The album's tracks serve as a kind of roadmap for Griffin's past couple of years. It's in the subdued numbers on Superfrenz that you can almost hear the confines of his studio, surrounded by bedrooms and neighbours. When he decides to kick out the jams, launching wails of microphone feedback and insistent drum loops, you know it was recorded in places where Griffin was allowed space for his muse to breathe. "The last place I was in was a friend’s place while they were on honeymoon, and I could make as much noise all the time in that place because it was a house with no attaching properties," he says. Griffin recalls one period where he was awake for three days straight until he blacked out. Everything after that was a blur. "It was a bit of a luxury," he says of his DIY approach to recording. "I couldn’t work in a real studio, I don’t think. For one, knowing that all the dicking around I do is costing me money would give me a nervous breakdown."

The lo-fi aesthetic is also a product of Griffin’s nonchalant disregard for conformity. It’s been there from the beginning, when Spod (or SPOD as it was then) began as a Beastie Boys-wannabe musical collaboration in 1995 for Griffin and a high school friend named Mike who had procured a four-track recorder. The young pair would loop the same song over and over again on their stereo and rap “really badly” over the top. The duo originally called themselves Gizzem, but “then we figured out what that really meant. I don't know what we thought it meant, or maybe we both knew and we just went, 'We'll just let this go until one of us brings it up.'”

Griffin grew up around Carlingford in Sydney’s north west, imbibing music in the form of punk acts Black Flag and Dead Kennedys, and hip-hop like Public Enemy and NWA. Nowadays his favourite acts are a combination of those early listening habits, such as noise rock duos godheadSilo and Lightning Bolt. “When I was a kid, all I wanted was a drum kit,” he says of his early musical ambitions, explaining that it was Animal from The Muppets who inspired him. He never did get that drumkit though.

“For my seventh birthday, that’s probably when it started,” he continues. “My mum bought me this Yahama keytar, this little red thing, and so I used to write really stupid songs on that, but I never learnt how to play it, I’d just put on ‘Last Christmas’ and make up my own lyric to it. I only ever started trying to learn guitar and stuff when I was a teenager but I’m still not into trying to learn, just going, ‘Alright let’s do this and then we’ll make a song out of it.’”

In 2000, Griffin moved to the Sydney suburb of Ashfield, bunking down with members of Further. He lost his Spod co-conspirator but after some coercion from local musician Andy Clockwise, decided to pursue it as a solo career. “[Spod] was both of us, my friend and I,” he says. “We used to do this thing, just sit down and record and record and get really, really drunk, and I was like, ‘Oh I’m not doing it by myself that’s boring.’ I had a friend, Andy Clockwise, and he used to be our drummer in that period. He was just like, ‘Oh man you gotta keep doing it, don’t be a sook.’ I used to do solo shows, but I was like, ‘Oh man nobody gives a stuff about that.’”

The Spod solo show used to consist of Griffin rapping over beats recorded on a monolithic DAT machine, “because that’s how Ween did it,” he says. “So I’m like, I have to do it the same way as they do it, because they were really good at it. For a while we were like almost like party grindcore. Yeah I just kinda quit it for a bit and [Andy Clockwise] was like, ‘You should do it and just really give it a hit and try and finish a record for once.’”

That record was Taste The Radness, an early proponent of the electroclash genre: a hormone-fuelled fuckfest of garish beats and tongue-in-cheek lyrics in the vein of 2 Live Crew that confused as many people as were impressed by it. Although it was released in 2003, the majority of the music was written during the 20th century’s twilight years, amid a period in which poker machines employed a blitzkrieg across Sydney’s live music scene. The sounds of guitars and voices that once filtered through hotels were replaced by clanking coins and cascading melodies that fooled people into thinking they were winning back their wasted money. Cultural expression was being replaced by dead-eyed cash cows, and consequently Sydney music subsumed the city’s bleak cultural outlook.

“[Sydney was] really conservative around that time,” explains Griffin. “When I first started to go see bands, which was probably around 1998-99, it was all incredibly tense, quiet post-rock bands, and it was like this weird, dark, serious time. I really liked it but I just got to the point where I just wanted to see someone look like they’re having fun, someone who looks like they want to be on stage, instead of someone who’s like, I wish I was in bed. ‘Fuck, I just don’t get it. If I had that position I’d want it to be as exciting for me as everyone else.’”

Set to a backdrop of Sealifepark and a Labor government doing its best to stymie the creative culture in Sydney, the technicolour party music of Spod was at odds with a monochromatic world. It’s probably why a little-known Melbourne duo called Midnight Juggernauts were sending him demos, and a new act called Cut Copy were a typical support act. “I became friends with bands just through playing these weird shows,” Griffin says. “All my friends now I met through that, because I think it was like if people clicked with it back then I’d just end up becoming their friend because I was like, ‘Well you must be alright if you get this.’”

With his friends now finding success, does Griffin wish Spod could reach similar heights? “I don’t think I’m cohesive enough to be as big as those guys, and I don’t think it’s inside of me to make a band like that,” he considers. “Everyone would like to live off it, but you can only do what’s in your heart to do, and this is all I can do, and if that isn’t what masses of people ever like then it’s not my problem, there’s nothing I can do about it.

“My biggest aspiration with it is just to be able to play and release records all the time and at least have enough people interested in it so I don’t have to get another day job,” he continues. “But, whatever! I reckon if I didn’t have to have a day job, I think my music would probably be pretty boring.”

So the struggle fuels the music?

“Yeah, I really think it does,” he replies. “It’s stupid and ridiculous and romanticised. I believe in that. If you have to fund what you love, then just do it. I’d rather work a job that I hate and do something I love than wreck something I love to live off it, if you know what I mean?”

But as steel-clad as Griffin may be now, self-doubt got the better of him when he sat down to begin work on a second album. Garnering an uncomfortable reputation as “that sex guy” thanks to early cuts like ‘Scorpions of Sexxx’, he admits he “went through a period where I was writing music that I thought I should be writing”. In between Taste The Radness and Superfrenz, Griffin ditched a concept album based on death, although the ghosts of his discarded record resonate on ‘Dead’, a sprightly track on Superfrenz at odds with its sombre name. It’s also the album’s lead single, and Griffin’s currently working on a suitably over-the-top film clip that involves him being resurrected from the grave and saved by eagles. Just like everything Griffin does, he’s doing it on his own. “I’m bad at saying, ‘I want to do this’, and then getting people to help me with stuff. If they offer, it’s wicked, but I can’t think outside of what I can do myself.”

After musical insecurity, destroyed hard drives and a general battle against music’s status quo, the film clip feels like an apt summation of Brent Griffin right now. He’s been resurrected, and despite the turmoil, Superfrenz is ultimately a positive party album. From the playful ‘CATS!’ to the hip-hop drum machine onslaught of ‘Time Maggots Eating The Flesh of Destiny’, Griffin’s aim is to make you forget about the darker side of life and simply have fun. “I think music has got a lot to do with escapism for me,” he concludes, “because it’s basically a hobby more than anything so I want to be in a good place, or getting to a good place, when I’m making this stuff. That’s why I do it, just to feel better and have cool shows and hang out with friends, you know? That’s pretty much it.”

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