It’s been a huge run of late for Brissy’s Last Dinosaurs. After a hectic slew of sold-out tours through Australia and Asia over the past 18 months in support of their sophomore LP Wellness, the band are backing up their huge touring schedule with a hometown headlining slot at Brisbane’s Caxton Street Festival this weekend.

Having now played shows in most countries around the world, there’s no doubt a few locations have captured the their minds along the way, and for primary songwriter and lead singer/guitarist Sean Caskey, the City of Angels is now the focus of his attention.

“We have talked about living in the UK, going to Japan, and the next place now is Los Angeles, just for a little while to immerse ourselves in the American music scene,” Caskey enthused. “Not to invade it, just to have a crack and see how it all is over there. It’d be quite interesting. We’ve got a fair few fans in America, particularly LA, so it’d be really awesome to play to those guys. It’s been many years coming really.”

Despite the possibility of an America-based Last Dinosaurs on the cards, Caskey has no plans to stop creating his own guitar pedals, sold under Ryusuke Effects. He claims to have never experienced a mad-scientist moment that sent him scrambling from the studio to the pedal lab in an attempt to create the perfect sound that a song was missing, but he did stumble across the twinkling guitar notes in ‘Andy’.

“I was using my brother’s pedals, and I happened to step on a weird combination of pedals and I was like ‘holy shit, it sounds like a steel drum!’. Otherwise, it’s all been pretty deliberate for the most part, using delays and filters and all that stuff, everything is pretty organised by the time we get into the studio.”

Loaded with warm tones and British indie vibes, ‘Andy’ built upon the earlier success of ‘Honolulu’ and ‘Zoom’. It magnified the crowd sizes and festival opportunities, but that success initially brought slight complications into their touring lives.

“As a band, you develop and what is supposed to happen is that the venues get bigger and bigger, and you get paid more, and everything gets bigger and greater. But, to be honest, we don’t really like playing massive stages because it’s really hard when everyone is so far away, and you spend all your time rehearsing in a tiny room where you can hear everything bouncing around in the room.”

“When you go on stage there’s no back wall, so you can’t hear the drums at all. You’d be amazed how weird a drumkit sounds in the open in comparison to a room. It’s totally unfamiliar territory for us still. You grow up with that extremely loud atmosphere.”

One of the perks of these larger shows and festival slots comes in the form of riders. When you’re as big as, say, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, you can get away with requesting 634 grams of Turkish dried figs along with your other tasteful needs, which may or may not include Jack White’s own guacamole recipe. Last Dinosaurs, just like most bands, go with the spirit of things and request their whims and desires.

“You obviously ask for the most ridiculous stuff you can, and see what sticks. But sometimes in Asia, you actually get everything, like frisbees, soccer balls, sushi, chewing gum, all the things you really want, but doubt they’ll actually get for you. It definitely happened in Thailand, they ran around and tried to get everything, which is very impressive. We felt bad, they actually got everything, it was meant to be a joke… but we were pretty happy about it [laughs].”

Now, with only one show on the horizon at Caxton Street Festival, the band are leaving the touring life behind to enter the studio to create the followup to Wellness.

“I just really want to get a new album out now. We’ve got a bunch of songs that we’re really happy with, so we want to record and get them out there. This time it’ll be on our own accord, rather than having to wait years to record. I don’t know how much I’m allowed to say, and how badly the bridge would burn, but it was pretty shit. It wasn’t our call, we weren’t in control, we had to please people and we had no idea who they were, didn’t even know their names and they probably didn’t even know our names.”

“There was a whole chain of people that had to be answered to. It’s a really weird thing, the way the music business and artists’ relationships work. It’s a bit of a shitfight really. They have to know who the artist is, what they’re trying to do, what they like, and they’ve just gotta understand – but they didn’t. They just wanted straight up pop-rock. We did it a couple of times by fluke, but they just expected a certain sound that we weren’t ever gonna produce. We never were straight-up rock, we had edgy sounds. Now it’s awesome, because it’s all about the songs we can make. It’ll be more us than ever, I reckon.”

It sounds like the world will finally get an exact taste of what the Last Dinosaurs sound like, and it’s not going to take forever for their new tracks to come out. Now, Brisbane locals are the only ones who can see the band live before they disappear back into the studio at Caxton Street Festival alongside Urthboy, Stonefield, Cub Sport, Elizabeth Rose and local legends The Creases. The festival is running on the Queen’s Birthday long weekend, which is October 2nd for the uninitiated, and tickets are available here.

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