Nowadays it seems like no one can get enough of all the local A-grade musical stuff that is floating around. On our airwaves, plastered across our computer and TV screens, belted out of home sound systems, earphones and PAs across the nation. The good stuff, the Australian stuff. Our inner-city bars and pubs are literally crawling with the musicians that are filling up those airwaves, Children Collide, Die! Die! Die! (we’ve claimed ’em, NZ. Ah, heck, it’s only a matter of time before we do it officially anyway, right?) Moscow Schoolboy, Van She, Starky, The Mercy Arm, The Damn Arms, Expatriate, Tosis, The Hot Box, Temper Trap, Bridezilla… the list goes on and on and on.

We all know well enough what it is these bands do when they are kickin’ it around town in their regular bands, making kick-arse EPs and LPs, entertaining us with hundreds of gigs a year and basically just being proud Aussie musicians.

What some of you may not be aware of is the amount of band swapping that goes on behind closed rehearsal room doors. Band members joining forces with other band members, willing and able to explore the music world outside the one they experience with their primary bands.

No longer content to commit to just one band, a large percentage of our local musicians feel the need to sow their wild musical oats all about the place. Pete Kostic, drummer for Regurgitator also plays with Hard Ons and Front End Loader. Marihuzka Larenas, front woman for shit-hot Sydney garage rock band The Hot Box also plays around with The Meek and The Not Yets. Rumour has it that Matt Van Ski from Sydney’s Van She and Kirin Callinan from current band-to-watch Mercy Arms have a little project they are working on together. It’s happening all around us.

Clearly it’s about time someone took a closer look at what’s going down around the towns in the bands haunts, watering holes and private homes. We selected and dissected a couple of locally based, nationally recognised bands – most notably Children Collide, Moscow Schoolboy and Die!Die!Die! (told you we claimed ’em), in the hope of finding out their answers to these pressing questions.

Moscow Schoolboy have been providing the general public with tastes of their sassy rock styles since JC Disorder changed its face, morphing into what we now know as Moscow Schoolboy. kluster recently spoke to guitarist, vocalist, keyboard player and PA Jess Cornelius to find out a little more about what was going down in music town. According to statements recently revealed to kluster by Jess, the reality of what goes on amongst our bands is often too x-rated for us to illustrate in a family publication like kluster.

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“There is definitely a sowing of wild oats, but often they’re not of the musical variety. In fact, many of the band members have destroyed the possibility of future collaborations with other bands, due to a little over-enthusiastic or ill-advised oat-sowing.”

Not only are they prone to getting naked with one another as Jess colourfully illustrated, but they also love a good session of getting close to other bands.

“Most bands have been nice to us. Some offer sleepovers if we’re lucky. We all enjoy a good snuggle.”

And they result of these intimate “sleepovers”? Bastard-child bands like The Amazing Phillips Sisters, a collective that involves Moscow Schoolboy bassist and vocalist Billy McCabe (apparently often donning a gimp mask), Children Collide guitarist and vocalist Johnny MacKay and some other interesting characters that practice under different monikers, seemingly depending on what phase the moon is in.

Generally speaking, we found that these bastard-child bands seem to draw little likeness from their parent bands sounds and, as such, offer the community at large a whole new listening experience. One thing we did observe during our investigation is that bastard-child bands do tend to be a lot kookier than their musical kin. We are yet to discover a concrete reason as to why that is.

When he is not making beautiful music with The Amazing Phillips Sisters, Johnny MacKay plays frontman for Melbourne-based indie rock trio Children Collide. His take on collaborating with other bands is rather free-spirited:

“I’m always up for a jam with anyone, preferably to do something that is nothing like anything I’ve ever done before. Playing with new people can give you a new angle on a direction that you’d never get playing with those you’re more familiar with.”

When asked to explain the motivation behind working with other bands Johnny replies:

“We are not the same person [Children Collide], we like different things. For instance, I’m really interested in working on some modern classical music, I find that sort of thing challenging as I’ve never had any musical training and it fascinates me, feels like new ground. I couldn’t see Heath being all that interested in doing that right now, so I’d probably collaborate with other people.”

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And what of our Kiwi-cum-Aussie counterparts? Is the side-project situation the same for them? According to Andrew Wilson, frontman of Kiwi post punk explosion Die!Die!Die! they tend to keep it a little more in the family when it comes to collaboration.

The reasoning behind the lessened collaborative projects seemed to lie in the amount of time a band spend away from their home town or city at any given time: “We like to jam with lots of other people, but I mean we travel so much it is hard you know.”

Commenting on the relationship between bands on the Australian independent scene, Andrew observes:

“Yeah Australia is a funny place. We thought we made some really close friends and then lost them, but the kids who we met there still have been the closest sorta vibe which we relate to, compared to anywhere else.”

So maybe it is all about the vibe. Possibly it’s more to do with the amount of free-love genes present in the average Australian musician’s genetic make-up. Probably it has a lot to do with the fact that they (and we happily included the Kiwis in that ‘they’) are such a darn talented lot they simply have to spread their musical love around in order to stop themselves from going crazy with pent-up frustration. Much like a sex addict really… only musically speaking.

Story by Nwanda Sherry