Fur Patrol returns

By REBECCA BARRY

If Fur Patrol lived together they would have ripped each others' throats out by now, jokes drummer Simon Braxton. Today it doesn't seem an overstatement. Frontwoman Julia Deans has lost her voice and is relying on a barely-there whisper and animated gestures to communicate.

According to the band, I'm lucky to be talking to them at all. "For a while we were just flailing around in the doldrums feeling depressed," says Braxton of the past two-and-a-half years they've spent in Melbourne.

"Eventually we just went, 'Okay, this is stupid. Either we break up or start working towards something because we've got to make this happen ourselves, it's not just going to fall into our laps. Do we want to carry on?' "

A five-track sampler of their second album Collider confirms the answer with a vengeance. They're now based in Melbourne but left New Zealand at the height of their popularity. First EP Starlifter stayed in the New Zealand charts for six weeks and debut album Pet sold double platinum (30,000 copies).

Bittersweet single Lydia can take a lot of the credit - it spent seven weeks in the top five and earned Deans two New Zealand Music Awards for Single of the Year and Best Songwriter. She also won Best Female Vocalist.

But after four years together, the band were ready to move on. They had toured Australia before and found Melbourne had the best live scene.

"The size of New Zealand means you can't actually tour that much or you end up over-promoting yourselves," says Braxton. "In Australia you can tour and tour and keep doing it, which is kind of scary."

They soon discovered just how scary it could be. For one, they were bound by a claustrophobic record deal with independent Wellington label Wishbone Records, whose lack of funds prohibited the band from recording an album in Australia. A licensing deal with Warner Music Australia proved no more helpful, falling well short of their expectations. The band lay a good deal of the blame on Bardot, the manufactured girl-band who were the label's priority at the time.

It meant that aside from a few support slots, Fur Patrol were basically cold-calling the Australian audience with virtually no promotion other than word of mouth generated from their live shows. They now see those 212 gigs, touring in a beat-up Econovan, as a blessing in disguise.

"It tightened us up as a live band," says Braxton. "And Aussies love their rock. It encouraged us to go with our natural rock tendencies and actually turn the guitars up and be a little bit more in-your-face."

But with little financial input from the label and no new material to tour, the band were forced to take a six-month hiatus - and day jobs.

"It was terrible," says bass player Andrew Bain. "We actually didn't have much of a purpose there as a band. It was pretty bleak."

Braxton worked part-time at a cinema making ice-creams, guitarist Steve Wells worked at a bar "cleaning up glasses and vomit", Bain took on a short-lived stint at Australia Post and Deans worked as a barmaid - getting a prominent part in the musical tag-team in Telecom NZ's television campaign for jetstream only paid so much.

"We began to see very little of each other," she whispers. Bain adds: "It wasn't just that we didn't have an album planned, there was no light at the end of the tunnel. There wasn't even an option of recording an album."

Braxton: "But it's that whole thing - if it doesn't kill you it'll make you stronger. Our manager Dave [Benge] is largely the reason we're still together. Every time things got really, really bad and we'd be just so depressed and freaking out, he would always have something positive to say: 'Come on guys, we'll get through it.' It totally saved our ass.

"We all decided we're all still really into the band and we really like each other as individuals and the only way through this is to just keep going. And things started changing. Once we'd changed our attitude, everything started falling into place."

Some good lawyers helped them shed their contracts and they scored a new record deal with Universal Australia (Warner Music New Zealand will continue to distribute their albums in New Zealand.)

They employed British producer Mark Wallis, and Deans and Braxton flew to London where the album was mastered at the legendary Abbey Road studio.

"It just looked like in all those pictures you see," says Braxton. "It's a very classic-looking studio. The only thing missing was the white couch. It's bizarre, you get out of the tube station, walk round the corner and there's this white nondescript-looking building, white picket fence with graffiti all over it with messages to John Lennon. The guy who mastered it had been working there since ... when was it?"

Deans spells out "1969" with her hands.

The next step was to record a video for Precious, which they did at a gig at LA's ultra-cool Viper Room, playing mostly to friends and crew and a handful of music industry folk.

The experiences encouraged them to rock out even more, with Wallis helping them to develop their dynamics to create a more dramatic sound. Gone is the pretty pop nous of Lydia and Spinning A Line - in their place are brazen, churning guitars, a more provocative vocal style and a macabre new video in which they slice groupies' ears off.

"You can tell we've played a lot more shows, I think. We have a lot more punch," says Braxton. "This album's more aggressive than Pet."

But considering it's that sweet melodic style that won them so many fans in the first place, isn't that a dangerous move?

"Lydia has just gone out for a walk," quips Braxton. "She'll be back. I think we might be lynched if we didn't play it. We don't play it in Aussie because no one has heard it, they're definitely into the more rocky stuff. Except very occasionally when diehard Kiwi fans turn up screaming out for it. [Collider] is still pop songs, just with more gusto."

Influential radio network Triple J have already put Precious on high rotate - the band heard it before they jumped on the plane to New Zealand, where they're on tour with Pacifier. Deans gets the last, raspy word. "We've been working our asses off so that we can come back here and play. So they'd better [expletive] come."

* Collider is out on September 26.