Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats are set to make their triumphant return to Australian shores this week, complete with their fourth full-length studio effort, The Night Creeper, which dropped back in September, in tow.
To support the new release, the band will playing shows in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne, including a stop at our iconic Meredith Supernatural Amphitheatre to make an appearance during this year’s Meredith Festival.
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats have long been one of the UK’s most respected cult bands and their latest effort, which the group recorded at Toe Rag Studios in early 2015 with engineer Liam Watson, has cemented that reputation.
To get the skinny on The Night Creeper, as well as the rest of the band’s four-album discography, we caught up with band founder, lead guitarist, and frontman Kevin Starrs, who took us behind the scenes of Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats in the studio.
Volume 1 (2010)
“We sold it online on our MySpace. At the time we didn’t really have a fan base or anything like that. The whole idea behind Volume 1 was that I was unemployed at the time and I needed work so I thought I’d just invent my own job and become a musician.
“I was always a musician, but I became a songwriter, and I wanted to record music, so that became Volume 1, really.
“We just set up a MySpace and threw a couple of songs on there and for whatever reason — I don’t know how people found it — but people started to discover the page and spreading the word amongst themselves.
“We didn’t really make much money because we only sold 30 copies, but it was something so we then had more money to spend on equipment for the next album, better mics and better gear. It wasn’t a lot, but a decent amount to get started on the next one.”
Blood Lust (2012)
“Recording was over the space of maybe six months. We would just go in for a weekend and then I would take the tracks home and mix them and do some stuff over the top of them. Then we wouldn’t do anything for like five weeks and then we’d go back in again and work on other things.
“It was a long, drawn-out process. At the time, we still really didn’t have a fan base and we couldn’t find a stable enough lineup to play live, so it was a bit of a nightmare that whole recording session.
“The majority of the recording was digital. But then on Blood Lust we managed to get ahold of a tape recorded, so there’s a couple of songs where I would just track guitars on tape and import that into the digital workstation, using analog converters to take the signal into the digital realm so I could mix it.
“Initially, everybody that bought Volume 1 wanted a copy of Blood Lust, plus all the new fans that we’d built up, but we’re still talking about maybe 50 or 60 fans.
“We pressed I think initially maybe 100 copies or 150 copies and thought that would be enough for us since we’ve only go between 30 and 50 fans and that should satisfy it. And that’s how it was for the first couple of months, we would get orders maybe every couple of weeks.
“Then, Lee Dorian contacted me through the MySpace and said, ‘I’ve heard your music, I think it’s great, would you like me to put it out on vinyl?’ And that was like wow, we didn’t even have proper CDs yet so it was great to have it on vinyl.
“So the initial vinyl pressing was again only 100 copies, because we didn’t really know what the fan base was like and that just took off and sold out immediately and more and more people started to hear about us.”
Mind Control (2013)
“We knew we had some sort of a fan base now. But I also knew that if we were to give them something they didn’t want, that would turn them off in some ways. And I quite liked the idea of that, of sort of irritating people and not giving them what they expect, so I wanted to make sure that it felt different to Blood Lust.
“The concept was different, the songs felt different, the singing was different, the way we recorded it was different. So it kind of split people. There were people that didn’t like it because they wanted another Blood Lust and then there were people who loved it because it was completely not what they expected.
“We went into a studio for two weeks, just completely isolated. We were up at 10 in the morning and would work through till midnight, every day, it became like a job almost. That maybe affected the recording in some way. It was a more intense atmosphere, so it had its positives and negatives as well.
“The concept behind the record was that it was this guy that leads these people up to the top of a mountain and he says I’ll show you God at the top and they go on this long trip up there and then the guy just kills everybody and he comes down and he comes down and he thinks he’s done an act of God so he thinks he’s God and he drives out to the desert and starts his own cult and starts brainwashing people and eventually gets them to kill somebody at the end. It was a loose idea I had and it helps me to focus on lyrics and that.”
The Night Creeper (2015)
“I never really thought about whether we’ve got an audience now or whether we could tour or have the record heard. It was more like, ‘We’ve got more songs. Alright, let’s go do it.’ I never really think about the sort of external expectations or the support that we have, which is great, but it doesn’t really come into the equation for me.
“The way we recorded The Night Creeper was we did three days in the studio and it was just all live. All the backing guitar and drums and everything was done live straight to tape, which we’ve never done before. Once we had all that, I took all the tracks back to my studio and I just kind of built it up from there.
“I wanted The Night Creeper to have a bit more of a different feel to the previous albums and I think it does. I think it’s a bit more of a grittier feel because we used so much tape and all the tape hiss is left in there and everything is slightly muddy and mirky and I find that sort of thing appealing but it’s not to everybody’s taste. But again, people have said maybe Mind Control is slightly more polished and that may be the case, but this one is more of a raw recording.
“I just felt that as a band we were tighter, because of all the live shows that we’ve done. I felt that we could just go in and not really rehearse, but just have a grasp of the songs and go in and record them. I felt like that would be an interesting way to do it. We started playing live more after we recorded Mind Control, when we got to that album we felt a lot better.”
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats Australian Tour Dates
Thursday, 10th December 2015
Crowbar, Brisbane
Tickets: Moshtix
Friday, 11th December 2015
Oxford Art Factory, Sydney
Tickets: Moshtix
Sunday, 13th December 2015
Corner Hotel, Melbourne
Tickets: The Corner
