Bootleg Rascal are brilliant and mischievous, and people are starting to realise.
They both assault and caress your earholes in a manner that so few bands are capable of and with their recent US tour with Sticky Fingers, the quartet are heading back to Melbourne, Brisbane and Byron in June.
Apparently formed in the back room at seedy gig in 2013, they seem very much a band who knows what they want; making phat beats and eating tacos.
Their first album 'Asleep In The Machine' is out now and sports some spectacularly trippy artwork. Carlos (Q-Dome) Lara took some time out of the group's busy gigging schedule to answer some potentially irrelevant questions.
You're first gig as a band was at the 2013 Woodford Folk Festival, that seems like a pretty intense way to cut your teeth?
Yeah you could say that, considering we had four days of rehearsals as a band didn’t really help either. But I guess that’s what made us realise we were onto a good thing.
You played some pretty rad places in the US: Ybor City, Gainesville, etc.
It's always a roller coaster ride of up and downs like any tour, but we have toured with the Sticky lads plenty of times before so I guess you could say there is a strong bond between both bands. If anything, when we are together it's like best mates who haven’t seen each other in ages, and we probably get a bit too excited, then a week goes by and we're ready to kill each other. But that’s the just the touring lifestyle.
I don’t think you can every tire of the US; it's so freaking huge that everywhere you go almost seems like whole different world. Everywhere you go you’ll find a weird place or person. And the whole gun thing is pretty weird too, everyone is packing in some states.
Your tour photos make the road look equally as fun as the music, is this the case?
We are a band that probably don’t take our selves very seriously at all. I think that shows in our photos and our live shows. We like to have a good time, which can get out of hand sometimes. I think if we ever wrote a book about the stories off the road, we would all have some pretty good stories to add, and there are photos that you probably don’t see that are bit to red hot for the eyes of the general public.
How did you find the experience and reception of the music in Europe, in comparison to Australia?
Europe is a whole other world. I found that everyone at the Euro gigs came because they truly loved music. I have a feeling sometimes that in Australia people go to gigs almost because it's cool and they want a good Snapchat story or a cool Facebook post. There are some that come for the love, but I find a lot more people in Europe might go to a random gig; they won't know the band but will be willing to come and give them a shot for the love of music.
Your Like A Version of The Weeknd's 'The Hills' was pretty amazing. Was it excruciating trying to pick a single song to cover?
Yeah, it was certainly tough to choose. I think in the long run we felt that there are a lot of bands that will go in and just do an acoustic cover or choose a really easy song and sell themselves short. We had a short list of songs and ‘The Hills’ was probably the more risky and ambitious song to do, but it's bad-ass as fuck and we just went for it.
There were people that loved it and hated it, but to be honest, we went in and did our thing. If people liked then thank you and if they didn’t, then we really couldn’t give a shit about Gary the plumber from woop woop about which notes he thought were flat.
The video for 'Shade' is hilarious, how did you come across director Dan Hodgson?
We actually met Dan at a gig. He was this little 18 year old fan that was talking to us about his filmmaking and that he wanted to direct a film clip for us and he seemed like a really switched on kid, we gave him a shot and the result was amazing. Since then we have done a lot of our clips with him.
The clip for 'Shade' was all Dan the mans concept. It was probably the most organised we had ever been for a film clip, due to the fact that none of us were organising it. But he had the whole concept ready. He gave us a rough outline of it and on the day we just took his direction and got a pretty good result. He is a brilliant director.
What was it like working with LYMO for 'Asleep In The Machine'?
Mr LYMO is a pretty interesting character, a very talented one. He produced a lot of our album with another guy called Ian Pritchett. We did most of our recordings with LYMO in his little shack; it got pretty interesting in that little shack with five guys going crazy. Some hair was burnt, to much beer was drank [sic] and possums were fed pizza.
What's next for Bootleg Rascal?
There is always a show to play and new songs to write. After the US tour is done and dusted we hit the floor running back home and are playing a few shows around the country before we head back to Europe for a couple of weeks to play some shows. After that we got a few months off to work on a new album, which we are all really excited to get recording.
Are you guys excited about the new Gorillaz album?
Yeah, they are a huge influence, and there is talk about some pretty cool features on the album like David Bowie which is another influence for some of us. It's gonna be really exciting to see what they come up with, they always blur (see what I did there) the lines of the genre they exist in, so it's pretty exciting.
The best tacos in the world can be found in?
The best tacos in the world? We have had a lot of some pretty good tacos. Personally for me, on this tour we had dope tacos from this little shack in Detroit, but there is nothing like home, my usual go to place is called baja cantina in glebe that were you will find me pretty much every night of the week.
Written by Ryan Grice
Bootleg Rascal Tour Dates
Sat 4 Jun - Corner Hotel (Melbourne)Fri 10 Jun - Woolly Mammoth (Brisbane)
Sat 11 Jun - The Northern (Byron)
