A prolonged break, a fresh approach to recording and the addition of a new band member have revitalised Legends of Motorsport, guitarist Jean Claude Vangelis tells RENÉ SCHAEFER. Photos by BEN BUTCHER.

Tasmanian expatriates Legends Of Motorsport have been setting Melbourne’s rock scene on fire since the late 1990s, establishing themselves as a band with a high octane, high cholesterol sound and an untameable stage act. Enigmatic frontman Richard Fyshwick constantly threatens to inflict harm on his ancient, wheezing Farfisa organ, while guitarist Jean Claude Vangelis busts out gut-churning down-tuned fuzz riffs with perfect nonchalance.

With an ever-evolving cast of drummers and second guitarists, they create absolute mayhem on stage, in the audience, and sometimes even outside the venue. Vangelis achieved lasting notoriety early on in their career when he played a guitar solo by placing his instrument on the road outside Melbourne’s Empress Hotel, backed his muscle car onto it, and did a squealing burn-out in front of an audience who couldn’t believe their eyes.

Over the years, the band has released a bunch of EPs, 7” singles, and albums with such classic titles as Parking Like A Fuckhead, Beef With Cheese and Duel Fuel. After an absence from the live scene for the last year, The Legends are back with a new album, Yeah Uh Huh, which overflows with wry humour, catchy numbers and dirty riffs.

It’s three years since you released your last album. Why is that?
There are several reasons. We changed drummers during the recording, so that caused a bit of a delay. We also planned to do a few different recording sessions to try a few different sounds to get more variety. When we did the last album we were locked in the studio for nine days and knocked it out in one go. You lose perspective a bit if you take that approach. This time we decided to do a few songs at a time, listen to them and then go back and record more. It gave us the opportunity to re-do things if we weren’t happy with them and take the pressure off ourselves. We ended up going for three different sounds on this album because we recorded with three different engineers in different studios.

Did you write any of the songs during this period of experimentation?
Some songs came together during recording, but how we approached the recordings was based on what would suit the songs we already had. The songs we did with Paul Maybury [of Rocket Science] have more of a garage tendency, whereas we did the heavier songs at Head Gap with [engineer] Sloth. Another reason for the delay was that Richard Fyshwick has been overseas for the last year. We actually finished recording a year ago and did the mixing and mastering while he was away. Richard went on a long trip around India, Nepal and the Middle East, doing community work. Basically, he bummed around for a year. When you work in the public service you have the benefit of being able to take a year off if you feel like it.

Do you think his job in the public service had an influence on the song ‘From Work’, which is about stealing office supplies and sticking it to “the man”?
Definitely! Thankfully we are not releasing the album in an explosive pre-election environment. I work for the unions, so conservatives would probably flog us to death: “Union official endorses stealing from work!” Actually, that song is about a manager at Centrelink, who Richard worked with. The furniture in the office used to go missing. They reviewed the security video footage and discovered that the manager had hired a truck on the weekend, come in with his kids and lugged all the furniture out of the place.

What a perfect scam. Nobody would really suspect someone like that.
Exactly! Who would want to steal Centrelink’s furniture?

So, Legends Of Motorsport are tackling the big political issues and controversial topics of today?
We’re about cars, chicks and politics these days.

Your song ‘BBQ’ would fit that mould. What to do about screaming children at backyard parties is a topic that deserves serious consideration.
That’s always been a pet issue of Richard’s. It’s a time where a lot of our friends are having babies, so we don’t mean it in a nasty way. Our friends get the joke, but it was definitely something that Richard needed to get out of his system. He may not be in a hurry to have a baby, but that doesn’t mean he wants to eat one on a spit roast either.

As you mentioned earlier, there are a few different sounds on this album. Where are you heading, musically?
I don’t think we are heading anywhere in particular.

Just doing circle work?
That’s always been part of our vibe. In some ways we progress, but in other ways we stay in the same spot. You just notice our different styles a bit more on this album. The couple of songs which have our new drummer Hertz Van Rental playing on them have an almost heavy metal sound, but that’s not a general direction we’re heading in. Ultimately we still want to be a dance band. [Guitarist] 2Stroke’s songwriting is coming through a bit more on those heavier songs. He’s been in the band for about five years now and he’s writing a fair bit these days. He’s probably the one with the most “Doom” tendencies.

How does your writing process work?
It’s different all the time. Sometimes Richard writes a song and we’ll add and subtract things. At other times we’ll sit around in the loungeroom and come up with something together. The intro and outro on this album just came from mucking around with 2Stroke one night and realising it was a great idea for a song.

What inspired the use of Ben Morieson’s great photograph on the album cover?
I was familiar with his work through the Fitzroy Muscle Car Club. I had come across it ages ago, around the time he was taking those photos. For this record we thought it was time to do another dumb car cover.

To me, it’s a striking image that sums up the music perfectly.
We had a bunch of images to choose from and this one suited the theme. It has texture and movement and all that kind of stuff. The circle work theme you referred to earlier is relevant as well.

The video for ‘Pushin The Envelope’ is visually arresting as well, although in a completely different way. I love the fact that the band doesn’t actually appear in it.
Personally, I’m a big fan of that. I’m never one to put my hand up for band photos or performance-based video clips, because they turn into cliches way too easily, not to mention that our heads aren’t going to sell too many records anyway. The video was Richard’s idea. We worked hard on that one. Richard shot and edited the whole thing himself. It was done in two days.

I really like how it’s edited to the beat and there is a lot of movement, using only a few visual elements.
The board game theme seemed like a good contrast to the usual rock’n’roll cliches. There was something daggy about it that appealed to us. It fits in well with our last video as well, which used an old slot car set. We nearly used that again, because I bought it off the guy who made that clip, but it would have been overkill to use the same idea twice. The games suit the song in a way. Richard and I wrote the words to ‘Pushin The Envelope’. It’s about language cliches and the corporate double-speak you hear every day.

Have you got a big promotional campaign planned to push this new record?
Our old manager Dave, who had worked with us for the last 10 years, decided to move on, so it’s probably going to be a lot more slapdash this time. We’ll have to do a lot more ourselves. We’ll be touring interstate again, which we haven’t done for a while. We’ll be going to Queensland, then Sydney in December and then head to Tassie. In Melbourne, the launch on November 7 at The Northote Social Club with The Dacios and Kids Of Zoo will be a big one. Also, there’s the River Rocks festival in Geelong with bands like X, Hoss, Warped, Spencer P Jones, Six Ft Hick. It’ll be massive, with 20 bands playing over a whole day.

The record will be coming out overseas as well, so hopefully we’ll be touring there next year, although we say that every year. So far, we’ve only been as far as New Zealand. We’re sending ‘Freedom’ out to radio stations, as it’s pretty friendly on the ears. We’re also planning to release a remix of ‘Statistical Mind’, that our old guitarist Baked Ben did. He moved overseas to work as a hip-hop producer. He went to town on it and did all this crazy stuff that in no way resembles the original song. He chopped it up and put crazy beats on it. I don’t know what the appropriate dance music sub-genre is, but it’s a bit nightclubby, with big bottom end. It still rocks though. That song almost had some rap elements to it anyway. It just seemed to make sense. People who have never heard us before will possibly be quite confused by it.

There’s nothing wrong with confusing people. It’s like that song Linda J from Dacios sang on, ‘RX7’. That was completely different from the rest of your material.

We haven’t played that song since the Big Day Out in 2003. It tends to scare a few people.

On a slightly different note, are you planning to do any more burn-outs on your guitar?
I would like to, but it seems a bit hard to organise these days. Maybe if we do Meredith or Golden Plains I’ll find a way to recreate that stunt. It’s one of those things that maybe only works once.

Was it spontaneous when you did it that one time at The Empress?
It was semi-spontaneous. I had to get a long enough guitar lead to be able to go out onto the street, and I just happened to get a parking spot right outside the window. Once those things fell into place, I figured I just had to do it. It’s weird – that was seven or eight years ago and people still talk about it. It’s the first thing people mention when they hear I play in Legends Of Motorsport.

I guess it’s one of those situations where 20 people witnessed it, but 500 people claim to have been there.
It was funny at the time and I don’t think I’ve been able to top it since. Our main aim at gigs is to get the audience moving around a bit.

Hertz Van Rental is your new drummer. How did he come to join the band?
He only plays on three songs on the album, ‘Intro’, ‘Outro’ and ‘Up To The Challenge’, another one of those cliched motivational rock songs. He’s also playing in the reformed Warped, Johnny Casino, and I think he still does The Palenecks occasionally. He’s a busy boy. It’s great having him in the band because he’s an old friend and he’s a great drummer. It’s weird, but changing line-ups works really well for Legends. It keeps it fresh for us. Every time we change musicians it’s an evolution and contributes to our longevity.

Richard’s Farfisa organ and your guitar sound have remained consistent throughout though.
That’s been the common thread for most of our existence. The organ didn’t actually come in until we’d been playing for a while. Richard and I both played guitar originally with a drummer. We found the organ at a garage sale and about a year later we added another guitarist. It took a while to take shape.

Is Richard still using the same old organ from the garage sale?
Yes, but we bought a second one in order to butcher it for spare parts. Richard’s become a bit of an expert at organ-wrangling. He can pull it apart and do a quick repair during a gig if he needs to.

I imagine it would be pretty cumbersome to lug around.
When we go interstate it certainly bumps up the excess baggage fees a bit. That’s the price you pay for organ rockin’. Initially we only used it on a couple of songs, but gradually it took over. The sound of it stands out against my fucked-up distorted riffs and gives us room to move.

Were there any particular influences and inspirations to start writing with a combination of guitar and organ?
The closest thing I could relate it to would probably be [’60s garage band] The Monks. I hadn’t heard them at the time we first got the organ, so it wasn’t an influence as such. Mudhoney used an organ on some of their stuff on Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. I could relate it to things like that, but there was never a decision to sound a certain way. The main thing was that it was different to what most bands were doing at the time. I like the combination of being really heavy, but being happy too. Bands that are only heavy and nasty sounding are a bit of a downer, and they’re all tied up in rock’n’roll cliches rather than having fun with it. We’re treading a fine line really. I wouldn’t like to be classified as a novelty band, but for us there has to be fun and entertainment involved in making music.

You can still take yourself seriously as a musician and entertain at the same time.
When I first moved to Melbourne in the early 1990s, there were a lot of great rock bands, but there were also a lot of rock-by-numbers acts. Especially coming from Hobart, where things were a bit more arty, it was odd coming here and seeing all these straight-down-the-line four-on-the-floor rock bands. It was a bit of a shock. I was playing in [Hobart post-punk band] Mouth then, so to some degree when we started Legends we were reacting against those Melbourne bands and taking the piss a bit. We wanted to rock, but we didn’t want to be one of those lame rock bands you used to see around. We like to be a bit more left-field and engage the audience in a bit of a conversation so to speak. We always throw in something a bit unexpected, like ‘RX7’ or ‘Stoneage Woman With Manchild’ from the last album, which Richard recorded on a four-track in his bedroom. We work with certain formulas instrumentally, but I don’t think we’ve finished exploring them yet.

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Legends of Motorsport launch Yeah Uh Huh at the Northcote Social Club on November 7 with The Dacios and Kids Of Zoo, and at Sydney's The Excelsior on December 12 with Hell Crab City and Mink Jaguar.