Cassette speed it up for city gig

Cassette cross the Tasman to cut loose.

In his best boss-jock voice, Cassette frontman Tom Watson booms down the phone line: "If you're listening to one record this summer ... "

Well, it won't be his. Cassette's new album is called A Cut for Summer but Watson is wondering whether it should be renamed, "A Cut for Whenever we get our Shit Together".

Five years after the Melbourne-based Wellington band released their laidback EP EMO, and 14 months after promising an album early this year, Watson insists it's just waiting to be mastered. Really.

The good news is that fans will get a taste when Cassette play the Odeon tonight before A Cut for Summer is released in April. As for the ironic title, it's actually inspired by drummer Craig Terris' aspirations to look good in his beachwear.

"Time just seems to go in a flash," Watson says. "If no one just strolls up to you and hands you the cash and goes 'Please go and record right now,' you've got to do it yourself. It just takes an incredibly long time. Working a fulltime job doesn't help either."

At least he has a good excuse.

Now signed to independent label Infidelity Records, Cassette are looking forward to releasing something they've spent painstaking months perfecting.

Eventually they will release the album in Australia too, but it's not often Cassette gig in Melbourne these days, preferring to focus their attention on New Zealand's live scene.

"Cassette's got more of a history [in New Zealand]," Watson says, referring to his playing in Head Like A Hole, Terris playing in Hell is Other People, and guitarist Paul Trigg being part of Letterbox Lambs.

"I get the feeling there's some sort of appreciation of where we're coming from. It's not like we're trying to break a new thing. In Melbourne there are a ridiculous number of bands."

Audiences there, Watson says, can be a little blase - "especially if they've got their own scene".

Perhaps it's because Aussies like their pub rock and Cassette play country-tinged, Neil Young-influenced indie-rock.

Watson says the move to Melbourne at the end of 2002 was more a personal choice than a career-inspired one.

"I'd always wanted to go other places but, ironically, the one thing that prevented me was always being in bands. Y'know, join a band, see the world. Or join a band and just stay where you are."

Still, it was great driving up and down New Zealand with his old band, enjoying the diverse scenery, something they don't have across the ditch. And now Terris is back home there's all the more reason to visit.

Watson says rehearsals are now simply a matter of "rocking over" a couple of days before the gig to brush up on the old songs and maybe learn a couple of new ones.

An album sampler reveals that three poignant new ones - High Pressure, Anticipate and Cannot Tell - are worth the wait.

"One thing I learned throughout the whole thing is how to be much better at making decisions and moving along. You hear more and more the more you listen, so you become more and more fussy, so in the end you're listening to a fraction of a second."

So has time changed anything else? The last time the Herald spoke to Watson he talked of the band getting so boozed on a flight home that they were met by police. But that's in the past.

Watson says the pub-rock vibe has rubbed off on his songwriting. As for the personal experience of living in a foreign city, he says: "I've wondered about that myself."

"How much of it is being world-weary and how much of it has been growing up? Would my perceptions have changed if I'd stayed in New Zealand? Well it's been five years. I hope I've grown up a little bit." 

*  Cassette  play the Odeon tonight, with Conan and the Moccasins and Teen Wolf