Adam Said Galore

Album: The Driver is Red

See The Blurb's review here

Available nationally at all good record stores

Marching to Their Own Drum

How many drummers does it take to change a light bulb? Just the one actually. You see drummers are people, just like us. Adam Said Galore have a drummer, and his name is Matt Maguire. Matt recently spoke to The Blurb about his band's lovely new album The Driver Is Red, which was have seen reviewed in our Easter update.

The album was actually recorded a little while ago, but nevertheless has a deliciously refreshing quality about it that makes it one of the more vital debuts to emerge from the Australian music scene in quite some time. Matt told us he couldn't help but have an eye out to see just what people think of it. "I don't think any band would put out an album and not worry about how it is received" he explains. "Most of the reviews have been really quite positive, so hopefully people are digging it. We just need to get a bit more radio airplay and people might latch onto it. RTR play us all the time over here in Perth."

Look behind a number of "overnight sensations" such as Adam Said Galore and a story emerges about a period of time spent crafting and honing a sound. In this particular case there have been seven years putting together this musical beast. Yet it is only now that the press are shining a spotlight their way. Being asked curly questions about what is going on can be a bit weird when nobody has been hassling you about such things before. "To go and deconstruct what you've done is really difficult, trying to put words to what you do and explain why things came to be. When you actually do go back and pick out different elements of what you've done, sometimes you're quite surprised about what you find. So in that way it's good, but it is definitely a bit different."

As our review pointed out, The Driver Is Red bursts with spontaneity, a feeling that a song could take any number of turns, follow any number of ideas that have been offered up. "When you're playing you'll just hear something that maybe you should try and do so you try. Whether it works or not is pretty much up to everyone clicking, and the song as a whole will hopefully work as a result." >>>

This approach to song-building is not just happening in rehearsal or in live performance. It is an approach that seems to have entered what is normally that last bastion of restraint and calculation, the studio. "There's no real formula in the studio, we've only really done two albums so we're still learning what the best approach is, and are pretty much just jumping into it. We basically played it live, because that was all that we had the time to do."

This approach means that the recorded versions of the songs we hear are snapshots of where a song is at a particular time They continue to evolve and take on a life of their own, often appearing quite different when performed live. "It was a little while ago that we recorded, and we've got a lot of songs under our belt since then, but those songs are still quite important to us and we still play them live. If you go and see any live act, the actual live performance is going to be totally different each time."

Overall, the conversation with Matt seems to suggest that Adam said Galore make no apologies for doing their own thing, at a time where slavish adherence to generic bandwagon jumping is often too tempting for most to resist. Even if they were apologising, one doesn't get the impression they could do a lot about it. "There's not a huge audience, but there's still people that are always going to be interested in that sort of ilk (bands such as themselves and Melbourne's Art of Fighting). It would be hard for us to change what we do, because that's just what we do. If people don't like it then we'll have to deal with it, but we can't change because that's just the way we are." Anyone who hears the album or catches them as they tour the country through May will be damn pleased to hear that that's the way it is.

Benjamin Millar

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