A gifted guitar gave birth to Scott & Charlene’s Wedding, the Melbourne grunge pop “supergroup” led by Craig Dermody – but it’s all about to come to an end he tells DOUG WALLEN.

In case you don’t recognise Craig Dermody from his roles in bands like Lindsey Low Hand and Spider Vomit, maybe you know some of the guys he recruited to back his solo project Scott & Charlene’s Wedding: guitarist Luke Horton (Love of Diagrams), bassist Jarrod Quarrel (St Helens, Lost Animal) and drummer Dion Nania (Panel of Judges). That’s an impressive cross-section of Melbourne musicians right there, and it’s all the more interesting for being in the service of Dermody’s rambling, shambling grunge confessionals, which are as loveable and heartening as they are jagged and melancholy.

Named for the Australian TV event of a generation, Scott & Charlene’s Wedding has its origins in a guitar loaned to Dermody by his Spider Vomit bandmate Gill Tucker, also of Beaches and Dirtbag. Writing songs directly as events unfolded in his personal life, Dermody wound up with Melbourne-specific tales like the raggedly tuneful ‘Footscray Station’ and the casually gripping ‘Epping Line’. A nod to the Adelaide suburb of his childhood, he’s named the first Scott & Charlene album Para Vista Social Club. It was recorded by Melbourne mainstay Jack Farley in a Northcote warehouse with everyone playing live and Dermody’s voice sounding as unrehearsed as anyone’s you’ve heard.

The album is limited to 200 vinyl copies, although each has a distinct cover painted by Dermody. And just days after the band’s Melbourne launch this weeked, Dermody is off to America indefinitely. He’s not sure what will happen from there, but as a scuffed time capsule and diary, Para Vista Social Club proves a fascinating artefact.

The first thing I want to ask you about is the album’s customised covers.
Ah yeah. I do paintings as well. I did 200 record covers. I had an exhibition of all 200 the other day. They’re all numbered.

Did you just find old LP sleeves and paint them?
Yeah. One of my friends works at [used records chain] Dixon’s, and they have lots of records they just throw away. So I got the whole lot for pretty cheap. The kind of painting I usually do is I just find old paintings from op shops and then paint monsters and witches, so the same sort of concept. I add my own characters on top of the existing things that are happening.

It’s pretty funny how you integrate them.
They sort of changed a lot. Once I got to 100, I was really crazy and delirious and they started doing different things, like getting sexy.

Were they numbered as you did them?
No, we put the order on them when they were actually hung [in the exhibition], as they came out of the pile. For the first 100 [painted], I picked the [existing covers] I liked first. By the time I got to the second 100, it was the first one off the top, just pushing them through.

And it’s quite a limited release?
Yeah, just a 200 pressing. There won’t be another pressing.

Are you doing a CD?
It’s just a CD-R I’ve thrown in there [with the vinyl record]. It’s a really low-quality CD just if people want to put it on their computer. But it won’t play heaps of time. I didn’t really know how to do a digital download, so that was the easiest way.

The release is very low-key then, if it’s just 200 records with a CD-R.
Well, I’m trying to make it as big as I possibly can. There’s just over half sold now. I’d definitely like to sell them all. This show will be our last, because I’m going overseas. I’m trying to make this as big as possible, but it’s not gonna be like a big record that you see around or anything. I’m putting it out myself. That was a difficult thing. I had a pretty steep learning curve because I hadn’t done that before, but I had heaps of help from people who were doing labels. Like Guy [Blackman] and Ben [O’Connor] from Chapter helped me a lot. I couldn’t really even ask a label to do it, because I knew I was going away straight after the record came out. So I just had a crack at doing it on my own.

How long are you going away for?
I don’t know.

So it’s open-ended?
Open-ended.

Where are you going?
America. LA and New York, but mainly New York. I just bought my ticket the other day. It’s a one-way ticket. So I don’t know what I’ll do, but I just felt like a bit of a change and that. I hadn’t had the [full line-up of the] band together in a little while, and I got the band back together just for this one show, to try to make it a really fun night.

The last time I saw you play, it was just you and one other guy.
It was just me and Scotty [O’Hara of True Radical Miracle and Lindsey Low Hand]. They’re all my songs and everybody was playing them, but it was hard with everybody playing in their own bands. So I just decided to do it on my own. But Luke and Jarrod and Dion all play on the record, so it made sense to get them back for this last show. That should be pretty exciting. It should be, almost certainly, the last time we’ll play all together with that line-up.

It’s been interesting, both with Spider Vomit and Scott & Charlene, watching the songs change and grow as they’re played live over the course of months.
They definitely change a lot. Even when I did have the [set line-up for] the band, I’d play still with other people. When I’d go to Sydney, I’d have Jack Mannix [of Circle Pit] drumming for me, and when I’d go to Adelaide, I’d have my friend Joel [Carey of Wolf & Cub]. Every time I played them with different people, I got a little bit of a different thing from them. Those songs, I wrote them and would play them to myself nearly every night. If you play a song that many times, it always changes. I don’t know how many thousands of times I’ve played those songs on my own. But they definitely change the longer I go with them.

You recorded the album with Jack Farley, but it’s still quite raw. Did you not want to pretty it up too much?
Well, the thing is, there’s nothing pretty about my voice and the way I play guitar. Also, we’re a rough kind of band, like grunge pop. And we wanted it to sound as close to playing live as possible. We decided to do it at my warehouse, everyone just playing in the room together. It was Jack’s idea to record it onto tape and not use any computers. So there’s heaps of tape hiss and that stuff, just sounding like a rough recording. Lots of bleed from all the other instruments going into all the mics. It was nice doing it at my [warehouse I share] with Jack. He wanted me to say something about Transient Studios, which is what Jack calls the warehouse. Kind of like anywhere Jack does [something], that’s Transient Studios.

The other guys in the band are really experienced, with lots of other bands between them. What was it like getting them to play these songs you wrote?
That was really frightening. Each one of those particular guys were some of the main reasons why I actually even played in a band. I had a specific instance with each of them well before the band started that really influenced the way I played songs. I feel like I was more influenced by those guys and people in the local scene than famous people like the Velvet Underground. We were just drunk and all hanging out all the time, and it came about from there. They offered. It still took three or four months for me to actually show them my songs, because I was a little nervous about showing them to them. They were pretty nice. They’re some of my best friends now. Once it got going, it was good. But their other bands are so busy and so successful that it makes it really hard to keep it all going like that.

They’re all fairly accomplished players. Did they recognise how primitive and raw your songs are and fall in line with that?
I think that was the main reason they got on board. They were in it for the visceral, raw qualities of the songs, so they were happy to play along with that. Luke plays guitar regularly, but Dion and Jarrod were playing different instruments [than usual]. They never thought it was going to be like their bands, really, because their bands are quite polished and there’s a level of professionalism that I just don’t have. And quite happily don’t have.

Is it right that you started writing songs when you got a guitar as a gift from Gill?
Most of these songs came from a combination of things. There was a Panel of Judges show I saw that was very important. And then, during that time, I was living with Gill and I’d never had a guitar. I’d been using her old guitar, and that was her first guitar. Then she took it away and fixed it up and gave it to me for my birthday. When she did that, it was a great show of faith, I think, in me to write songs. I just wrote and wrote and wrote, and hardly put the guitar down. That was really great.

How long ago was that?
That was two years ago, I think. The guitar’s pretty ratty now. There’s a few strings not on it, and that kind of business. I still play it.

What did you play in Lindsey Low Hand?
I played bass, very badly. That was the first instrument I played, and that was another really rough kind of band.

That band’s done, right?
We played our last show the other night.

What’s the status of Spider Vomit and a Spider Vomit album?
That’s a really tough one. I don’t know. [Laughs] We’ve got it recorded, but I’m going away and we’re all really busy with other things. Who knows? At this stage, I don’t think for much of us it’s high up in the priorities.

I wanted to ask about the name of Scott & Charlene’s Wedding.
I was about 10 years old when that happened, and my mom and I watched Neighbours all the time. It was a very big deal around Para Vista, the suburb that I grew up in.

Where is Para Vista?
Para Vista is in the north-eastern suburbs of Adelaide. It’s a shithouse suburb, but I come from there so I can say that. [Laughs] It’s pretty dull, just deep suburbs.

When did you come to Melbourne?
About eight years ago.

“Para Vista is in the north-eastern suburbs of Adelaide. It’s a shithouse suburb, but I come from there so I can say that.”

A lot of songs on the album are tied to either geographical locations or specific railway lines around Melbourne. Was that just something that helped you write songs?
Well, when I write songs, they usually come out in a literal kind of way. And I spend a lot of time on trains and things. When big things happen to me, I’m at a train station or it’s got something to do with the story. That’s how it came about. Even though the album’s called Para Vista Social Club, I really felt it to be a real Melbourne album. Just all the landmarks were places that made sense to me when I was writing the songs. I don’t really write in metaphors or anything like that. It’s exactly as it happened most of the time, and a lot of it happened on the Epping Line or at Footscray Station.

Yeah, there’s a real stream-of-consciousness element to your lyrics.
Well, for the most part, these songs were like therapy. The kind of stuff that lots of people write and then never show anybody because they’re too embarrassing, but I don’t really get embarrassed. When something happened, dealing with it would always be coming home and writing a song about it. So when I do play them live, it does take me back to the places. That’s one of the reasons I wouldn’t mind, in a way, moving past this album, because there’s a fair few sad moments that I still think about when I’m playing this songs. They definitely take me back to a place where I was when these things happened.

‘Rejected’ and ‘Rational’ especially seem very personal.
I refrained from it, but I was almost going to put on the record sleeve the story, because every single song is about a specific story and I can remember exactly where I was when that song came into my head and the circumstances surrounding each particular song.

The songs have a similar tempo, often this sort of chugging crawl. Is that because you were just learning to play guitar?
I think they just come out how they come out. It wasn’t a conscious thing. Also, when they came together with the band, that’s how everyone just played them. I sort of didn’t even realise.

And all the songs were written over a two-year period?
Yeah. Probably ‘Rejected’ is the oldest song, and I wrote that a year-and-a-half or two years ago. There’s been lots and lots of songs in between, but it’s been hard showing the band all these songs. I’ve probably got like 50 more.

Do you plan to bring the guitar to America?
I won’t be taking Gill’s guitar to America. I’ve been having a bit of trouble with losing everybody’s gear lately. I enjoyed playing in Spider Vomit and just singing. Also, when I write songs [with guitar], they come out a bit sad. I wouldn’t mind just playing in a fun band, I guess. I have no idea. I’ll definitely want to do music again, but I don’t know how long I’m going to be staying for. I could be back in two weeks.

Once when I saw you play last year, you did a song called ‘Monkey Girl’ that’s not on the album.
Oh yeah, that’s about Hannah [Brooks of Spider Vomit and St Helens]. I should have put it on the album, but for a brief moment there I just didn’t think much of the song. It wasn’t as strong as the others. Now I kind of wish that I did, even just for the sake of having a song about Hannah on the record. That would have been good, but it was just a spur-of-the-moment decision when I sent it away to get mastered. There’s a few things like that that I rushed, that I’ll learn from.

And it was mastered by Mikey Young from Eddy Current?
Yeah. I’d never met him before, but he was really good to work with.

I didn’t know he did mastering.
Well, he hadn’t done much before. But I knew that he’d done recordings with Eddy Current with just tape, so it made sense for me to get someone with a lot of experience in just tape recording.

Just finally, I wanted to talk about the film clip for ‘Footscray Station’ [watch it here]. It’s pretty funny, and at one point there’s footage of you playing in what looks like a wedding dress.
Yeah, that was Halloween and I played it in a wedding dress. I’ll put that whole footage up on the MySpace at some point.

And the Brazil tracksuit?
That was a hand-me-down from someone. I’m going to be wearing that on Friday night for the show. I just got Jack to walk around with the camera and follow me running and going to Footscray Station. But we never managed to get any footage of Footscray Station, because the battery ran out by the time we got to Footscray.

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Para Vista Social Club will be launched tonight (August 6) in Melbourne at The Tote.