Earlier in the year, lucky thing that I am, I flew off to Alice Springs early one morning to do a story on Bluejuice playing at the Triple J One Night Stand. For reasons too numerous to go in to here (one of them definitely not being that it wasn’t any good), the story never ran. So for the first time ever, here it is...
Photograph: Catherine Sutherland
The makeshift Triple J broadcast booth is, in fact, the clubhouse of the local Alice Springs footy club. Faded photographs of local players line the walls, and the glass balcony doors have been slid back to circulate air. It might be the end of autumn, but in the Northern Territory the temperature is topping 30ºC. Outside an enormous team of techies is assembling a stage on the lush oval of Traeger Park. In the centre of the room, Jake Stone and Stav Yiannoukas, the singers in Bluejuice, are having a chat on-air with the radio station’s Doctor about the following day’s One Night Stand, an annual musical road trip that takes rock to the regions. “I notice you’re being followed for some sort of exposé,” says the Doctor. “Does that make you curb your behaviour?” Stone laughs: “If you try to do that everyone just feels weird.”
Bluejuice is a band renowned for its antics on the stage, where they perform with the sort of unselfish, bordering-on-insane abandon that has seen them win the hearts and eardrums of festival goers across the country in the past couple of years. (It occasionally comes at a price: Stone broke his hand during a show in 2008.) Earlier this year, though, their single ‘Broken Leg’ – about a crazy-dancing injury Stone sustained at an end-of-tour party, troubled relationships and the nature of pop songs – came in at number five on the Triple J Hottest 100, securing them a solid place in the mainstream. It also bought them the upcoming gig tomorrow evening, when they’ll appear on a bill that includes John Butler Trio, Gyroscope, Washington and local act Tjupi Band.
It’s a long afternoon, filled with press commitments (J Mag, the local newspapers, a little bit of blogging on the Triple J website), most of them carried out in the shade of the grandstand. Stone and Yiannoukas form a charming, wise-cracking double act, hardly surprising since Stone was a stand-up comedian and the two met when Yiannoukas thought he might like to have a crack at it, too. But separate them to talk about the band and it’s clear this is no joke. (For their part, the three other members – bass player Jamie Cibej, keyboardist Jerry Craib and drummer James Hauptmann – seem content to take a back seat when it comes to interviews and sit around reading or chatting.) “You know, I take this incredibly seriously,” Stone tells me in a quiet moment away from the others. “I do it with all my heart and all my guts. This isn’t just shits and giggles.”
This weekend is a big deal for Bluejuice. After seven years of gigging to little acclaim, they finally started to find an audience with the single ‘Vitriol’ two years ago. Since then, they’ve honed their style. Hard to define, it’s full-frontal pop with hip-hop, electro and even ska leanings. Lyrically, it can be angsty and angry, but the songs themselves, particularly live, feel like the sonic embodiment of fun. “With every high-rotation song we’ve had on Triple J, the band was given a reason to exist, a reason to tour, a reason to try to achieve something a little bit more,” says Yiannoukas. “I guess with something like the Hottest 100, it feels like it cements your place with Triple J for the next, maybe, six to 12 months.” Both he and Stone have already mentioned several times that the band owes its existence to the support of the station. Here, they’ll be taking their music to a new live audience, but they’ve also been invited to take part in some songwriting workshops with local musos. “We never think of ourselves as musicians that people respect in any way at all,” says Stone. “But when people want to talk to you and want you to be involved in these sorts of community events, then you feel like you’ve got something that someone cares about.”
Later that afternoon, we’re on the edge of Alice Springs in an eroded gully with the East MacDonnell Ranges looming in the background. It’s the closest thing to a quintessential red earth location for a photo shoot we can find. A few weeks before, the town was flooded by unseasonable downpours and now the landscape is never-ending green and heaving with clouds of grasshoppers. Various poses are struck – Cibej chews on a strand of grass, Craib throws the occasional ninja move – before the sun tucks itself behind a cloud and everyone relaxes for a moment.
For reasons that aren’t at all obvious, talk turns to Chatroulette. For the uninitiated, this internet pastime sees you randomly paired with a fellow ‘chatter’, with both of you free at any time to click ‘next’ and move on to someone else. Not surprisingly, it’s unbelievably popular with a) insomniacs, b) the unemployed and c) complete perverts. “In between seeing a whole load of dicks, you occasionally do get to talk some OK people,” says Stone, brushing red dust from his black jeans. We’re only a couple of hours into the weekend and, as he gets on a roll about some of the more disturbing things he’s witnessed, he is already being shot ‘pull your head in’ looks by the group’s publicist. She moves the conversation around to Chatroulette’s mystery piano man – he plays songs for and about the people he lands on. There are rumours it could be musician Ben Folds. As the suns comes out from behind the cloud and the photographer starts trying to direct the five guys into some semblance of order, you can see a look of relief pass across her face.
Like most days in Alice Springs, Saturday dawns hot and bright. At Traeger Park, there are people milling about the stage, waiting for the bands to sound-check. While tweaks are being made to the set-up, the guys from Bluejuice are autographing copies of their latest album Head of the Hawk to send to some competition winners. The boys from the Tjupi Band and a few of their mates head towards the stage and find a spot to watch what’s happening. Bluejuice runs through a few songs, the final notes of ‘Broken Leg’ echoing back at them off the sheer rock face of the MacDonnell Ranges. Thumbs-up given, it’s back in the Tarago.
No one’s really sure how many people are going to show up when the gates open at 3pm, but hopes are high for a massive turn-out. This is the seventh time the One Night Stand has taken place, but this one is a little different. “Alice Springs is about as remote as Australian towns get, so we’re excited to be bringing the One Night Stand to them,” says Triple J manager Chris Scaddan. “It’s very difficult for live acts to get to Alice and it’s rare for a free community concert this size to hit town. Alice Springs has a young population, a giant history and a big musical heart.” The townsfolk – young and old, including the mayor Damien Ryan, who’s wandering around pressing the flesh – certainly seem to be psyched. The night before, we’d run into a group of twenty-somethings at dinner; they’d travelled all the way from the community of Kintore, more than 500km west of Alice Springs and close to the West Australian border, to see the show.
At the CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) studio in town, an eclectic group of local talent is sitting in a circle. They’re a range of ages, both indigenous and not, working across genres. John Butler and band mate Nicky Bomba are already there, and Sammy Butcher from the Warumpi Band brings in members of the Tjupi Band, who come from Papunya, 250km outside of Alice. He’s helping them follow what’s going on, since they mainly speak in their local language, Luritja. The Doctor, acting as the afternoon’s moderator, asks Stone about the first song he ever wrote – it was called ‘Julianne, I’m Not Fit to be Your Man’ – and then about whether he writes while on tour. “I find it easier to write when I get back,” he replies. “I just sit around in my underpants for four days and reverse my body clock entirely and play piano and try to make myself angry. It’s a really healthy process.” When one of the local artists asks about how the dynamic works when five people are involved, Stone jumps in – “Basically, we fight a lot” – before Craib tries to rescue things: “There are three ways really. Number one, Jake will bring in something that’s 90 per cent done.” (Stone: “So that I can control it.”) Craib: “Way number two is that we all have our equal little bits.” (Stone: “That’s the good way.”) Craib, doing an outstanding job of completely ignoring him: “Then sometimes me and Stav will get together and work on stuff, tear it all up, and sometimes get a song out of it.”
Back at the oval, the gates are just about to open. The guys from Gyroscope are kicking a footy around with breakfast DJ Alex Dyson. Rosie Beaton grabs Yiannoukas and Stone and heads across the grass with a camera crew to record an interview for her blog. Stone drops his jeans to show her his special gig undies. Red with black-and-white-striped inserts in the sides, they’re truly horrible. “What did you teach them at the workshop?” she asks. “We just told them to sit there and listen to what we have to say,” Stone answers, then laughs. Off camera, though, he’s thoughtful about the whole experience: “Everyone came to it with the right energy and it felt like everyone was being quite enthusiastic and trying to get conversations going. I found it most interesting just in terms of talking about the place. I didn’t know what to expect. Living in the city, my relationship with the Aboriginal population is very limited and, in some ways, to quite negative things. So being here, where the indigenous people are quite a sizable part of the population, that on a whole doesn’t seem to be dominated by drug and alcohol issues, gives you a bit better perspective.”
In the dressing room, there’s a serious discussion about the energy levels of the show. “We’re going to keep it down a little,” Yiannoukas explains, “because we’ve learnt if the show’s being recorded for radio and you go crazy, it ends up sounding like shit.” The costumes – white martial arts uniforms – go on, there’s a bit of stretching and a few voice exercises and it’s time to go.
By the time Bluejuice hits the stage, a good crowd is building (eventually attendance will reach 6000). As soon as the first song kicks off, though, Stone forgets the plan to take things easy. He’s pounding Hauptmann’s drums with the mike, hurling himself around the stage and then off it. The top half of his karate outfit comes off within minutes; the bottom doesn’t last much longer. Regardless, kids down the front go bonkers, singing along to the songs they know – ‘Broken Leg’, ‘Vitriol’, ‘Ain’t Telling the Truth’ – and taking photographs of one another for their Facebook pages during the ones they don’t.
Usually, gigs – especially big ones like this – are followed by some kind of beery celebration, but things backstage are just a little testy. A couple of weeks later, in the midst of their east coast tour, Yiannoukas, who was less than amused by Stone’s antics, reflects on what went wrong. He’s far more relaxed than he was after the show. “Look, you’re only as good as your last show and I’d be more upset if we’d played a bad gig last night,” he says. “Jake and I ended up talking about it because he could see how depressed I was. I tried to be reasonable about it and said, ‘You know, we went out with a game plan and I felt like a douche bag just standing there.’ The more he went crazy, the more in my own head I was.
“But it was an amazing thing to do. I found it incredible to be there [in Alice Springs]. It’s like a different country and so beautiful. And, you know what? It was a fun weekend.”
Bluejuice have a new album coming out this year, but you should still grab yourself a copy of Head of the Hawk if you haven’t already. They’re playing Hot Barbeque at Portsea on 22 January. For all other info, check out the website.
