You know you’re a band worth listening to you when Bernard Fanning is singing backing vocals on your record. From listening to Big Heavy Stuff’s latest offering, Dear Friends and Enemies, it’s not hard to see why Powderfinger’s frontman was keen to be involved. On what is without a doubt, the most amazingly raw, evocative and powerful Australian release for some time, Big Heavy Stuff dish up fourteen brilliantly crafted tracks. It’s perhaps the best work of a career spanning over a decade. Genial bass player, Eliot Fish, chats to Opus about the band’s current movements.


NM: You're currently on tour, testing a lot of your new material. What’s the crowd response been like?

EF: We’ve noticed on this tour that a lot more people are responding to the old material. I guess that the radio play we’ve been getting has really reignited fresh interest in the band again, which is great. About half the sets we’ve been playing have been new stuff. I noticed last Saturday night in Queensland that more people are singing along to the songs. That’s new for us. Generally people just like to stand there and absorb it all, but we seem to be attracting a lot of people who are happy to sing out loud. It seems a lot of fans came on board with our last album, Size Of The Ocean. We get a big response from songs on that album. Although people come out of the woodwork and request songs from the very first release, which Nick [Kennedy, drums] and I didn’t even play on.

NM: The tracks on the new album have been built upon Greg Atkinson’s acoustic songs, which have been expanded by the band, as opposed to earlier Big Heavy Stuff recordings. How does this affect you as a musician?

EF: It's kind of affected the whole band. We used to always work on material as a four-piece guitar band in the rehearsal studio, and I think as a result, the earlier stuff is a lot more rocky and angular. Because Greg wrote most of the material on acoustic this time, it required us to work on the material in a very different way. It didn’t really suit to blast it out in the studio as a rock band. A lot of the songs on the Dear Friends and Enemies, Greg literally laid down as just guitar and vocals and we built upon it. It was a creative way of doing it, because we were able to slowly layer the album.

NM: On this new album, you guys wanted to explore mood and atmosphere. How did you go about this musically?

EF: It’s a case of trying different instrumentation and recording techniques. Even using the instruments you have in a different way, as opposed to a traditional way. You get more interesting sounds and unpredictable noises. That can add certain mood and atmosphere to a song, even if its something you can’t quite put your finger on. For example, Nick played some bedposts in the room we were recording in, and some guitar parts were reversed. You can come up with stuff that you didn’t intend, and it inspires you to take a song in a certain direction. You come up with sounds that are unusual to give songs a certain character.

NM: How did you guys get Bernard Fanning to sing backing vocals?

EF: We’ve known Bernard and the other Powderfinger boys for many years now. We toured with them quite a few times, back when Pick You Up was becoming a hit. We did a massive national tour and went to Alice Springs, Darwin and all these other places we’d never been to before. It was a really long tour and we all bonded, I guess. Powderfinger were in town doing some recording and we called up Bernard and said there was a backing vocal that would be perfect for him. We recorded him with Pro Tools and the hard drive wasn’t backed up and it crashed and died. We lost his vocals and a whole bunch of cello tracks that had been done. Probably a months worth of material. The second time Bernard was available he was in Brisbane, so we had to do the recording long distance. We sent all the files to them, they did them in their own studio and then sent it back to us.

NM: How do you guys decide which song will be a single?

EF: We’ve always felt like we’re one of those bands who don’t write anything that’s an obvious single. It’s always really difficult for us because we all have our own favourites. I’ll say, “I think this song is really a great song, and it should be a single” and someone else will say, “No, but this other song is more of a single-single.” It’s just so hard. Over the years we’ve tried to guess and no matter what we choose, nothing’s ever perfect. This time around we put out Mutiny because it was something we all felt strongly about. It was one of the band’s favourite songs. It’s a good performance and we love the recording. It took a bit of convincing for some of the people around us that we should release it, but we just wanted to say that this is who we are.

NM: Is it true that the name of the band came from a football commentary?

EF: Yeah, that’s right! So the story goes. I remember asking Greg and Carolyn about it years ago and they told me, and they’ve obviously told everyone, so I take it as the truth. They were watching a football game on TV and it was halftime and the camera was down on the sideline. The coach was talking to the players and he yelled, “I want you to get out there and be big, heavy…stuff!” They thought it was kind of funny so they took it. There’s some nice irony in the title, but a lot of people don’t get it. They still see the name and think we’re some sort of heavy metal band. Hopefully one day they’ll understand.

NM: How would you describe the difference between your live sound and your recorded sound?

EF: I’d say we’re more intense live, because it’s a ‘four-piece rock machine’. We end up playing a little selection of the last eight years of material and it allows us to offer a lot more in the sense that there’s some big rock in there and some acoustic stuff as well. People have always told me that we’re a lot more intense live. I wouldn’t know because I’ve never seen us live. At a gig on the Gold Coast last week, there were some people yelling out for Angry Youngish Man, which is something I don’t think the band had even rehearsed in four years. Greg had his acoustic on at the time, so he started playing it and we joined in and did a real ‘slow-core’ version of that. Stuff like that happens all the time. Playing live is great fun, because you can do stuff like that at the drop of a hat if you feel like it. People get to hear something that they wouldn’t normally otherwise.


Big Heavy Stuff will accompany Bluebottle Kiss and Centipede on The Big Blue tour when it comes to The Bar on The Hill on the 25th of March. ‘Dear Friends and Enemies’ is available now through Shock Records.