![]() ![]() “Stu got heavily into sampling,” remembers Kenny-Smith. An “absolute cabin-fever delusion,” says Walker. The Gizzards agree that their stir-craziness peaked with “the rap album”. “Somehow, two years went by, and I was like, ‘OK, what’s the point of this?’ It was grim.” “I was losing my mind, partying at home every weekend,” he remembers. While most of the Gizzards had relocated to Melbourne’s suburbs, Kenny-Smith, the youngest member, remained in the city. “Coping mechanisms only get you so far,” says Walker. Home recording offered some respite, but the group weren’t immune to isolation gloom. The pandemic wore on, Melbourne’s restrictions loosening and then tightening with each new Covid variant. Photograph: Richard Nicholson/REX/ Shutterstock ![]() ‘Crossing a force field’ … King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard play Melbourne in 2021. You have a kid, and suddenly you can’t just be cynical any more. It made me reflect on how primitively, viscerally beautiful it is to be human. “That had an incredible impact on my mental space. ![]() The shift to positivity was partly motivated by the birth of his first daughter, Minty, in November 2020. ![]() “I wanted to do something upbeat – I don’t just think about dark shit, I’m not some fucking psycho,” he says. And in case the resulting pop-adjacent synth-prog didn’t shake the Gizzard paradigm hard enough, Mackenzie challenged himself to write the entire album, Butterfly 3000, in major keys, avoiding the dark imagery that characterises much of the group’s output. But before Gizzard could celebrate a mission accomplished, Mackenzie lit off in pursuit of another lunatic concept: an album written around the Roland Juno-60, an 80s analogue synthesiser that creates primitive arpeggiated melodies. Released in late 2020 and early 2021, those twin albums of correspondence-rock, KG and LW, did indeed sound like six dudes rocking in the same room together. ‘That ephemeral aspect of improvisation’ … Back in their Melbourne studio. And then, suddenly, we’d made two albums.” “We needed to prove to ourselves that we were still a rock band,” Mackenzie says. Every day, the Gizzard communal WhatsApp chat buzzed with new riffs and song ideas, while the band members rigged up home studios of varying sophistication, playing Midi pianos on kitchen worktops and recording into laptops on bedside tables (“I definitely pissed my housemate off,” says Kenny-Smith). “It seemed impossible, so we thought we’d try to pull it off,” grins Mackenzie. The concept for this new project was simply to sound like six musicians in a room together – a big ask with the band members quarantined miles apart. Still, while lockdown precluded in-person recording sessions, Gizzard merely greeted this as another creative challenge. “They’re my best friends,” says Mackenzie. “You certainly couldn’t go meet up with your friends.” This cut Gizzard’s tight fraternal order deeply formed while housemates at university, their bond had strengthened over the dozen years since. “You could only leave your house to buy gas or groceries,” remembers Mackenzie. Melbourne’s notoriously strict lockdown didn’t make things easy. So I played late into the night, trying to keep busy.” If I sat still, I thought about the reality of everything. When I couldn’t do it any more, it was like part of my soul had been ripped out.” Overwhelmed with anxiety, Mackenzie turned to the only guaranteed cure. When you work that hard to be good at something, it becomes part of who you are. Their vivacious releases and live show took them out of the cult bracket usually reserved for aural spaghetti westerns and into the mainstream, headlining UK festivals and playing big venues such as London’s Alexandra Palace.īut as the seriousness of Covid became apparent, Mackenzie felt “scared and depressed. On 2017’s Flying Microtonal Banana, the group mastered custom-made hybrids of guitar and bağlama (a Turkish lute) to absorb Turkish psychedelia into their musical lexicon. The startlingly prolific Gizzard had released 15 albums in eight years, each following its own unique concept: 2019’s Infest the Rats’ Nest, a thrash-metal science-fiction odyssey about the climate crisis 2013’s Eyes Like the Sky, an aural spaghetti western, narrated by singer-multi-instrumentalist Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s actor father Broderick Smith. When we couldn’t do tour any more, it was like part of my soul had been ripped out Stu Mackenzie ![]()
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