WHOSE FAULT IS IT IF PEOPLE LIKE YOUR BAND? WELL, IT'S
YOURS IF YOU INSIST ON WRITING CATCHY SONGS. SO SUFFER
THE CONSEQUENCES....

Newtown was once Frenzal Rhomb's town. They were the
epitome of what a Newton band would look and sound like;
ugly, fast, funny, but not very serious at all. But 
while they've been out selling thousands and thousands 
of copies of Not So Tough Now and playing their poppy 
chops in front of thousands of kids in Australia and 
Japan, Newton has changed.

Gentrification is very much the flavour of the month and
so, it would seem, it is earnestness. And while their 
town has changed, Frenzal Rhomb haven't. It is almost 
impossible to keep them collectively on the same train 
though for more than a few sentences. But that's cool, 
they don't take things seriously, so why should you? 
Right? Right.

Sitting in a Newton cafe, or hardworld as they've 
re-christened it, I suggest that there's a kind of a 
family theme going on with this new record, Meet The 
Family. The first single is called There's Your Dad....

"Yeah, I don't know how that came about really. There's 
3 songs that fit that theme," says vocalist Jay, " the 
first single is a really unfunny band joke that we seem
to be the only people who find funny. It never fails to 
get a chuckle from someone in the band but everyone else
we've told it to go, "Uh, yeah."

"The first song on the record is called Oh My God, Mum's
Changed The Locks," says Lindsay, continuing however 
briefly with the same thought, "but we were gonna call
it the album Oh My God, I just Ate Shit," he adds,
destroying any sense of cohesion.

"When we were recording we were looking through this 
really crap sound magazine, with all the latest
technology and there was this picture of these guitar 
legends...", continues Jay....

"Steve Lukather was one of them," chimes in band manager
Chris.
"Toto!" hoots Lindsay.
"Yeah, anyway..." perseveres Jay.
"I believe you were drawing penises on them and sticking
pens through their eyes?" asks Chris.
"Yes, they were all standing there with their guitars
and we did really, really humorous things like that..."
"They looked really good," adds Chris.
"And the caption on the page was Meet The Family", and 
we figured,'Well, we're not gonna come up with anything 
better than that without a swear word in it," says Jay
and he is probably right. Swearing, it would seem, is
second nature to the band."

"One of the first album titles we came up with," 
continues Lindsay (or Dr Lindemans as he is known) on a
theme that he obviously finds very mirthful indeed, "was
Oh My God, I Just Ate Shit."
"We had a picture of Lindsay picked out for the front 
going..." says Jay, pulling a rude head.
Well, good move because people could've confused you
with Sdistik Exekution, but I disgress.

To record and engineer Meet The Family, Frenzal Rhomb
employed the services of Donnell Cameron, a man whose 
name would be familiar to fans of early Bad Religion
and other Epitah releases. So, I ask, tell us about him. 
What advice did he have for Frenzal Rhomb, particularly
for Lex- who has now joined us at the table- as Lex has
worked in a studio for a number of years?

"'Double-up Donnell Cameron'," says Jay.
"'Deal Me In Donnell', says the Doc. 
"Donnell's a gambler."
"Or 'Me and The Doc Are Going To Vegas Donnell'," laughs
Jay.
"Donnell's a cool cat, the coolest of all felines," says
Lindsay.

"He'd heard of the band before he got here," says Jay a
little sheepishly. "I think we'd sent him a couple of 
things that he liked, but we were really wary of ending 
up sounding like another Californian punk band if we used
him to produce the record."

But as far as his efforts in making the record sound as 
it does, that's best left to Lex. Although Lindsay needs
to speak first.

"In fact, he had every idea and every suggestion. It took 
4 days just to get my amp to sound right."
"Separation, I think was the best advice . I know," Lex
stresses. "I know you're supposed to do it. Normally you
are supposed to separate all the sounds so that you can 
hear them on the record, but he's just got the skills to
do that I didn't have."

Well, you can hear that on the record can't you?
"You can actually hear what's going on. What all the 
instruments are doing. I reckon when you listen to it you 
can hear everything," agrees Jay.
It also sounds for some reason to be typically Australian,
I offer in an attempt to continue down this relatively
sensible path. But drummer Nat has now joined us and he
demands to know why cafes don't offer any other soup
other than pumpkin. Very loudly he demands to know this,
very loudly and in the direction of my tape recorder. 
Thankfully, Jay steers his ship of fools back on course.

"Yeah, we do sound Australian, even though we don't try 
to. But using words like 'Cockhead' will always make you
sound Australian."

"There's alot of bands who don't sound Australian,"
offers Lindsay, can of worms at the ready and looking 
around for an opener.
"Yes, true enough, but let's not name fingers or point 
names..."
"Wankshaft is a good one," reckons Nat, getting back to 
the topic of Australiana.
"Fucknuckle too! Rough sack even," laughs Jay.
"Youse go sick, eh! If that's not Australian I don't know
what is," adds Nat with a tone of finality.

Aside from the family theme we talked of and the theme of
fluent, uptempo, easy to digest tunes contained on Meet 
The Family, there is a of a hell of alot of swearing, as
we mentioned earlier too. Is swearing tough, I ask, or is 
it a want of better education?
"Get fucked, ya cunt," says Lindsay.
"I happen to be University educated myself," says Jay 
proudly, although like many good Newton residen'ts he 
only completed 2 years of his BA degree at Sydney Uni.
"I think probably- and I've said this in interviews 
before- we just try and say things how we'd say it, if
that makes sense . We don't try to embelish the things we
say to make them seem like something that they're not.
It's a littlt pretentious, I reckon, to start using too 
many metaphors when it's just as easy to say, ' Well, as
a matter of fact, you're a fuckhead! It could be put a
lot more eloquently , but you still get the point across."

Do you see that as a reason for some of the antagonism
between yourselves and some of the other bands around the 
place? That you don't see the need to prove yourselves to
be intelligent....
"Or hard," offers Jay.
And in fact you are quite happy to wallow in this self- 
imposed idiocy.
"Do you say mediocity?" challenges Nat.
"Talent imposed mediocrity, more like," says the Doctor.
"I like to think of it more as a tall poppy syndrome,
for I am indeed a tall poppy," believes Jay. "We played a
show at Gosford on the weekendand these kids were
complaining to me that they thought it was bad Frenzal
were selling out shows and that people wanted to come and
see the band. I was like,"Surely anyone who wants to see 
the band should be allowed to? Don't you guys like the 
band? What separates you from other people who like the 
band?'." Jay tells me later that someone did call a bomb 
threat in on the venue that they played.

"Someone who couldn't get in," he laughs.
"I think our general plan of only doing demos and giving
them away at rallies went quite soothly..." he continues.
"Yeah, we had quite a big impact on the rally scene,"
laughs Lex.
"Rally! I don't mind car racing," says Nat.
"That Sega-Rally[TM] is pretty good, too," says the 
Doctor and thankfully our lunch arrives.