Eye TV is the Auckland band who showed their true pop colours among other influences on the recent album Fire Down Below and who line up at the Powerstation next Friday with their Antenna Recordings labelmates for the show Killer Licks. Doing the talking are singer-guitarist Sean Sturm, drummer Luke Casey and bassist Michael Scott.
Your last album was a coat of many colours ...
Sturm: We were trying to make it as consistent as possible, but I guess maybe we were trying to make it as rich as possible with lots of colours. I think it's actually more consistent than some of our previous ones.
As well as the straighter pop tracks, some of the songs have hints of Latin, soul and swampy blues among other flavours — it sounds like the band is working through influences it didn't know it had.
Sturm: Oh, yeah, that's what Mike has been saying, that everything we have liked over the past 30 years has worked through the band, which is nice. There were lots of things we were able to do on this record which we weren't able to do on previous records ... all of our band was really into 70s soul music and we couldn't do that before. We've just been making rock records.
There's even a disco number on it ...
Sturm: Yeah, exactly. All those things that we have always listened to and stuff that we actually haven't been able to do before.
Signs of a sense of humour that hasn't been apparent before?
Sturm: We've tried to make it a lot clearer on this one. We wanted to bring out that side of the band, because live we're not a heads-down band. We try to be entertaining and exciting and funny and that had never really come out before. We were just trying to bring more sides of the band out than had gone out previously and have some fun with the recording.
Casey: I think that like a lot of guitar-led passionate groups in New Zealand we'd got a tag as an earnest group and that was not really what we were about. We had always sought to communicate, and not in a fey way.
Sturm: The fashion in the early 90s was that it had to be serious in a deep way, almost like the 70s. That's only a portion of what music is about and that plays a lot lesser role in pop music than it does in rock music. You are allowed in pop music to be a little less serious.
How can you do a song called Soul Train without being ironic?
Sturm: Well, it is ironic in a sense. The song is basically about looking for some music that really grabs you and not being able to find it. So you just don't write your own song. Your own old soul song.
So a brass section next then?
Scott: The next step is to have the Eye TV rock orchestra with horns, percussion, another keyboard player, another guitarist.
Sounds like you'll be going through your James Last phase.
Sturm: Or the James Brown phase. Well, hopefully it will our James Brown phase ...
So for a band that's been around for a while, what keeps you going?
Sturm: We do change a lot and we really do enjoy playing music together. We realise when we first went to the US at the end of 96 that we could actually get on really, really well and all the problems seemed to fall away when we went on stage and actually played.
Casey: What do you think, Mike? What's the key to our longevity?
Scott: Well it's been five years since you joined, but it's not like it's been five years fulltime ... after the Birdy-O album came back we didn't really know what we would do or whether we would keep on going. So then we came back and did the Just the Way It Is single and that was another carrot to keep going. You never feel though as you made your statement or made the album you wanted to make.
Sturm: We really, really wanted right from the start to reach lots of people ... that has always been one of our motivations, just to actually get out there and play. You get little carrots along the way and making singles that seem to finally to connect with lots of people was a big deal for us because we always wanted to do that.
You've been quoted as saying in your early days you were outsiders fighting against the Flying Nun thing. Are you now just as much outsiders with all the younger major label bands coming up?
Sturm: Maybe we'll forever be riding between trends or something. But you are never going to seem horribly contemporary you are always going to have your own little area.
Casey: Like the REMs of this world.
Sturm: Yeah, those are people that really stand out that always do their own thing and hopefully people can come around to what you are doing and get the gist. I think that even though we've developed as a band there has always been something constant running through everything. Maybe it's not for us to say, but there is something there.
A quick word with Eye TV
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