Knievel’s Wayne Connolly talks to DARREN LEVIN about the band’s upcoming reformation show, indie-rock’s golden era and why they’re their own worst enemies.

Wayne Connolly is taking shelter in his car while torrential rain pours down on inner-city Sydney.

“If I run out of oxygen, I might drop off,” he tells me down a crackly mobile phone line. He’s not joking either. Thirty odds minutes into our interview and Connolly is interrupted by a concerned female voice: “I thought you nearly drowned in there,” she jokes.

Connolly, of course, is Sydney’s uber producer; the man at the heart of those ’90s indie-rock nuggets – from The Underground lovers’ Leaves Me Blind to The Fauves’ Lazy Highways, Higher Up The Firetrails by Bluebottle Kiss to Hourly Daily, You Am I’s 1996 opus which he co-recorded with Paul McKercher. The Connolly sound – roomy drums, crisp guitars and a keen pop sensibility – was honed as a member of The Welcome Mat and later Knievel, the flagship group he formed in 1994 with bassist Tracy Ellis (now his wife) and drummer-for-hire Nick Kennedy (The Dead Sea, Big Heavy Stuff).

Like so many single-moniker bands from the ’90s, Knievel were brilliant, but gloriously underachieving. Ever-elusive, they released four albums – We Fear Change (1995), Steep Hill Climb (1998), The Name Rings A Bell That Drowns Out Your Voice (2000) and No one's Going To Understand In My Way (2003) – before settling into hiatus. Knievel emerged in 2006 to play a one-off show at Petersham Bowls Club with Death Cab For Cutie and are set to do it again this weekend for the next installment of “That Then This Now” concert series alongside Big Heavy Stuff.

But don’t expect an album or tour anytime soon, says Connolly. The band, he admits, are their own worst enemies.

How have the rehearsals [for the That Then This Now show] been going?
Really well. It’s more rehearsals than we’ve ever had I think.

In the history of the band?
I think so, yeah. I was speaking to Paul Dempsey and before show days they [Something For Kate] rehearse seven days. I was like, “Wow, we never rehearsed more than once [a week].” Tracy was joking, saying, “That’s cheating. We don’t know if we’re any good if we rehearse that much.”

Is there still that sense of magic when you guys get in a room together?
There is actually. We’re playing now with Tim [Kevin] from La Huva. He’s just a master. It’s always good for us – we get a great sense of enjoyment from playing with him. He’s just the most beautiful guitarist.

How long has Tim been in the band for?
On and off for about six years. He played with us after our last studio album [2003’s No One's Going To Understand In My Way] … We’ve had a few extra members along the way like Matt [Steffen] from Decoder Ring and Dave McCormack was in the band for a brief period.

Your last show was in 2006 supporting Death Cab For Cutie?
Yeah, that was a one-off show too.

How did that show come about?
It was through our label – we’ve been on the Architecture Label for a couple albums – so they put us on the bill. It was invite-only, so there were only about 50 people there. It was at the Petersham Bowls Club, it was pretty relaxing for us really to do a support slot like that. It was a captive audience of people who liked us, which is the kind of audience you want.

Will you be playing a similar set-list on Saturday?
Pretty much … We did a show a couple years ago and played new songs, but we thought this time we’ll choose from the classics.

Was Nick the catalyst for this show?
Yeah, he rang us up and invited us to play.

So I assume you’ll be sharing backline?
I think we’ll encourage him to use a few different drums to give the audience something different [laughs].

Was it an easy decision to say yes to the show?
It was for us, because Nick’s going away with his band The Dead Sea in three or four months, so we’re really keen to play. We were going to play last December [with Midnight Oil’s Jim Moginie], but I had to cancel the show because I was working with Paul Dempsey. We’ve always had a philosophy of playing whenever anyone asks us, but no one ever asks us [laughs].

Are you hoping that the show will be a springboard for some more?
I think it would be good. I enjoy playing. It’s always hard playing a one-off show, I’d much prefer to play semi-regularly. It’s pretty nerve-wracking playing once every few years. You lose that foundation of confidence that you had.

And I guess your audience would be quite familiar with your back catalogue, so they’d really pounce on mistakes.
We don’t really have a following [laughs]. We’ve played some pretty small shows over the years. This day and age may be better suited to us because of things like MySpace.

Have you found that the internet has boosted your profile a little bit?
Yeah, a little bit. You realise how much people really do like your stuff. You don’t obviously realise that when you’re playing to a crowd and then going home after the gig. It’s fantastic to get feedback like that.

Your albums are quite difficult to find, so at least MySpace gives a little window into the band.
Yeah, that’s true … We’re really happy to have our songs up there because it’s a bit hard to re-press a CD these days. Obviously we’ve been thinking of re-doing our second album [Steep Hill Climb] before … but it’s hard to know whether it’s worth it or not, really. I think we’ll eventually get around to putting it on iTunes.


What’s everyone been doing in the intervening years?
I do a lot of production, so that keeps me pretty busy … Tracy has played with a few people on and off over the years – Holidays On Ice and Marty Wilson-Piper – but not for a while. Nick has had an untold number of bands. He’s been in Todd Sparrow, The Dead Sea, The Cops and, on occasion, Big Heavy Stuff; a few other bands as well I think. Tim keeps the Lu Huva flag flying …

It’s interesting because all of us have a whole new group of friends who have never really seen us or had any concept of us playing in a band really. They’re really curious: “You playing a guitar on stage? That’s weird.” That’s how long it’s been.

Do some of the younger bands you’ve worked with know of Knievel?
Yeah, I’m surprised by that really. I was talking to the Seabellies and they have some songs they like of ours … And the songs they liked aren’t on our MySpace, so I’m not sure how they hear everything [laughs]. The first two albums of ours have been out a particularly long time.

‘A Hobby Band’

Let’s talk about the early days of Knievel. You were all in different bands when you started?
I was in a band with two other songwriters called the Welcome Mat, so I always felt like I wanted to write more songs and do more. Tracy played in a fantastic band called Oliver, who became Golden Rough. I’m not sure how much people know about Oliver, but they were just a brilliant band, fairly strongly influenced by Teenage Fanclub, but brilliantly original as well. Nick was in Big Heavy Stuff. I’ve got a feeling, and I only just remembered this, but I think I was auditioning for Big Heavy Stuff as one of their guitarists. I saw Nick play and thought he was absolutely amazing. I know I was in a rehearsal room with him and I’m pretty sure it was an audition. I didn’t end up joining, but I came to know Nick through that.

We decided we were going to be a recording project, we weren’t interested in playing. After that we got a deal with Sony [imprint Murmur], so that propelled things along a bit.

So Knievel were a sort of side project in a way?
Pretty much, we were always a bit of a hobby band. We didn’t play much. I was still playing with The Welcome Mat. There was a bit of resentment there, because I was in another band. We [The Welcome Mat] had a deal with Polydor, so it wasn’t easy for the Welcome Mat to accept that, which was fair enough probably. And then I was doing other stuff, going overseas with You Am I.

“There are different degrees of success and there are different degrees of failure. Everything’s a disappointment really in the indie rock world.”

Was your production work a barrier to Knievel becoming a full-time thing?
Pretty much, yeah. And the fact that we were all in other bands. Nick had a stronger commitment to Big Heavies, which is totally fair because we poached him [laughs]. We did what we could. We had an ambition to try and go overseas and play. It was more for the enjoyment of it, not to build a career, but to fulfill a lifelong dream. It’s still a lifelong dream … We ended up having a release in the States and in Japan [The Name Rings A Bell That Drowns Out Your Voice].

Did you have a lot of interest in the states, because I imagine your sort of sound would resonate more with a college rock audience? We kinda did. But we never had a manager, so we never had anyone to follow it through. We’d get various notes from people. It’s partly that American thing where they’re really enthusiastic and generous with their praise. We’d play a show and we’d get an urgent fax from Ice-T’s management, saying they loved our band [laughs]. And then a phone call saying, “We’re in the office listening to your record and we absolutely love it … Send us more stuff, send us more demos, we want to see where you’re going.” That would take us six months and by the time we got around to sending them it’d be like [in a fake American accent], “Oh yeah, he’s left the music industry now.” [Laughs] That happened to us about three times … We really didn’t have the resources to keep sending demos to people.

If we had management we probably would’ve followed through a bit more. That being said, the cost of touring the US is prohibitively expensive. Last time we spent $45,000 in 2002 when the exchange rate was 48 cents. We had a fair bit of enthusiastic support on that tour as well and we just felt like saying, “Thanks, but we’ll never be back as long as we live.” The cost of it was just ridiculous.

‘The Murmur Years’

How did your deal with Sony imprint Murmur come about?
Through [label founder] John O’Donnell. I presume I gave him our record and he liked it. At that stage he was a bit more open to building a label based on curiosity and discovering interesting things. A couple years down the track, he was probably under pressure to sign international blockbusting acts … He never really pressured us to be a career band or anything, and we probably should’ve tried a bit harder.

By the time we came around to our second album [Steep Hill Climb], he took the hint that we didn’t do a lot to promote ourselves, so it was a good time to cut ties. At the same time, he was interested in our second record. He had already talked to us about getting, of all people, David Fridmann to produce it … but we didn’t follow through with it. I remember saying that I liked his production on The Flaming Lips’ records, but not with other bands. Further down the track, I’ve been proved wrong by MGMT.

Were all your records self-produced?
Pretty much. We would’ve liked to have other people involved, but it was a money issue. Paul McKercher mixed a few tracks on Steep Hill Climb and a guy named Pete Jones helped engineer a lot of our recordings. He’s been very helpful to us.

Were you reluctant to produce your own albums?
Definitely. It’s exhausting trying to combine the artistic and scientific parts of your brain – even though you kind of have to do that as a producer. But to do it and write the songs and write the lyrics is very taxing I find. In those days it was more complex obviously because we were using tapes rather than Pro Tools and digital systems.

Did you hone your craft producing Knievel records?
Pretty much. That and The Welcome Mat was the only way I learned. Unlike some engineers/producers they get an internship in a studio before they graduate from producing. I never did that, I had never really seen anyone work in the studio apart from the few people who worked with The Welcome Mat. We had a couple American producers do an album with us: Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie, who had worked with Dinosaur Jr and The Pixies. I learned a fair bit from them.

What was it like being an indie band in Sydney in the early ’90s?
Well it was not totally different. You’d still play The Hopetoun and The Annandale [laughs], so a lot of things are pretty similar. The major difference was the festival circuit. The Welcome Mat were literally the first band on at the first Big Day Out. We played at 11.45pm on the first day. That was a real transformation because we got signed a month after that. We played to a crowd of 2000 kids. The record company that came to see us [Regular Records] had never seen anything like it before … They just thought we had this massive following, which we really didn’t. It was just a surge of interest for The Big Day Out.

There were already bands like Ratcat and The Hummingbirds that forged a course there. Before The Hummingbirds there was no one that broke through from indie rock to the mainstream. They were really the torchbearers of the scene … Indie bands were suddenly expected to break through into the top 40, but it didn’t happen that often.

A lot of people see that time as a golden era of Australian indie rock with bands like Custard and The Fauves emerging and getting a lot of airplay. Did you feel part of that scene?
Yeah, definitely. I was at the centre of it because I started working for rooArt, who did those Young Blood [compilation] albums … There wasn’t any cynicism towards those compilations like there might be now. They were important compilations. That was courtesy of all the money INXS made. Their management owned rooArt Records and put a lot of money back into the Australian music industry through rooArt. A few years later when they folded in the late ’90s, that whole philosophy of helping new bands totally died …

In that era too, just coming out of the ’80s, bands had an attitude to just play and write songs. Putting records out was still beyond the realm a bit. Back then there were quite a few bands you’d see that would never end up making a record. I’m thinking of bands like The Craven Fops who had one 7” single out or something. They had a one-hour set full of absolutely brilliant indie rock – they were one of my favourite bands – but they never put a [full-length] record out. That probably happened to a lot of bands who played regular gigs at The Hopetoun every month.

I guess if you didn’t have aspirations, you were more likely to fall by the wayside.
Yeah, but you also tended to be more original though.

Who were Knievel’s early influences?
Initially we were probably more interested in the Flying Nun sound, The Verlaines, The Bats, The 3Ds … I’ve always seen us as an indie rock band, particularly [antipodean].

Do you feel like the scene in Sydney has lost some of that early ’90s excitement?
Not really. There are so many good bands around. I still think it’s exciting. The time when it was at its worse was when we were playing a lot, around 1996-2000. It was totally dead then. Raves had totally taken over. Now there seems to be a real resurgence, actually it’s been going for a while since The Strokes, The White Stripes and The Vines. But that [1996-2000] was an amazingly dark time. We played in New Zealand in 2000. We played in Dunedin with the Datsuns and we both played to nobody.

Do you have much of a following in New Zealand?
Not really. It was just on enthusiastic fan who found us on the web. He organised our tour having only heard the first 30 seconds of most of our songs [on MySpace]. He lived in Christchurch and he didn’t quite have the resources to do the North island as well. We just did Christchurch, Queenstown, Dunedin, Invercargill, Oamaru. It was on a pretty small scale, but it was a lot of fun. I’m sure it’s a bit like going to Tasmania or something: small, but enthusiastic crowds. You feel like you’ve gone back 15 years in time.

We really wanted to go to the home of Flying Nun. When we were in Dunedin, Graeme Downes from The Verlaines came to one of our shows, so that was enough for us.

Speaking of heroes, Knievel also supported Teenage Fanclub [in 1997]. That must’ve been quite a thrill.
Well, we only did one show with them. It was just one of those more difficult ones really. It was something we weren’t used to doing – flying into Brisbane, playing with no soundcheck, all borrowed gear, a full house of 1000 people at the Roxy. It was probably one of the hardest gigs we’ve done, but they [Teenage Fanclub] were really nice.

’We’re Our Own Worst Enemies’

Are you working on anything new?
We kinda do sporadically, but then we get distracted [laughs]. I did the music for those split-screen ads on ABC2. So you’d probably get the idea of what we might’ve sounded like on recording.

What sort of stuff?
Loops and things which we liked doing later on. Guitar delay loops with more droney kinda music over the top. It’s melodic as well.

What prompted the fascination with guitar loops on [2000’s] Name Rings A Bell…?
When you work in a studio you have all those things at your disposal. We had massive pedal boards and that’s the main thing that inspired us to do that. It’s uncanny how that makes such a difference.

I’ve since read that you are frustrated with the more melancholic aspects of your sound and you wanted to make a pop record again?
I think I’m frustrated with all of our stuff in that sense, that it’s all been downbeat lyrically and that’s somehow all I’ve managed to do. I thought we can’t do another album like that, I suppose, so we stalled a bit, tried to do something different and got a bit confused about what we wanted to do.

Do you have a timeline for another Knievel record?
I think it’s still a way away, unfortunately. We really like the idea of doing it and we always have ideas, but we don’t have anyone or anything forcing us to do it, which has always been an important thing to me, to have someone telling me, “You have to do this”, or, “We’ve booked a studio.” Now we have our own studio. We spent some time creating our own studio space [Outboard Studios]. That always tends to derail bands. It certainly derailed us, because I spent a long time restoring an old Neve console, which took up all my resources … We’re now totally left to our own devices and we’re our own worst enemies, really.

So you’re now a “by request only” kind of band?
Yeah, definitely. That’s how our New Zealand tour came about.

Do you still regard Steep Hill Climb as your watershed album?
I think in that pop style, it is. I never really thought the album afterwards [The Name Rings A Bell…] was mixed to my satisfaction, so I didn’t think it did itself justice … It just needed a bit more excitement in the mixing, whereas Steep Hill Climb had a bit more of an exciting mix to it.

Were you surprised by how much of an affinity people had with that record [Steep Hill Climb]?
Not really. At the time we really liked it. We were more surprised that it didn’t do better, I guess [laughs]. We really liked the songs at the time and we still like playing them. It got a lot of airplay … We did really well from radio.

Is it still your most successful album?
I would say so, yeah. Not that we’ve really thought about it. There are different degrees of success and there are different degrees of failure. Everything’s a disappointment really in the indie rock world.

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THAT THEN THIS NOW

Saturday, April 18
The Factory, Sydney, NSW
w/Big Heavy Stuff + Knievel