A Day At The Park

The Hoodoo Gurus are about to play their only Sydney show for 2009, which they'll be doing from the top of the bill of the first ever A Day at the Park, but before we get excited about that there's a little bit of housekeeping. Most importantly: how is Brad Shepherd doing?

"Oh, he's fine!" replies Dave Faulkner, clearly relieved and delighted that his friend and long-time guitar-wrangler's brush with cancer has a happy ending. "I actually just saw the scar tissue for the first time yesterday; it's always been covered in bandages before when I've seen him but yesterday we were actually doing a little bit of extra recording for our album and the engineer asked him what it looked like and he opened up his shirt and you could see like a shark savaged him under his arm. It's crazy! He looks like a little genuine surfer.

"We rehearsed for the first time since the operation last week and he said it was the most fun he'd had in weeks."

Well, one would hope so...

"Exactly, yeah!" he laughs. "It'd be a worry if he was like 'yeah, it's not as good as cancer surgery, guys.'"

As you've doubtless surmised from the above, the Gurus have been working on a new, as-yet-untitled album. "We were hoping to have it out this month but fate intervened – actually, the delay had nothing to do with Brad's health, that all arose afterwards. We basically had problems with the mix, we just weren't getting what we wanted and it was clear that we didn't have the right formula, we didn't have the right studio or the right engineer so we had to do a bit of a rethink."

That rethink took the form of former collborator, US producer Ed Stasium. "He mixed Kinky for us and he produced the next album, Crank," Faulkner explains. "He's over in the States mixing at his studio home so we've finally got to breathe a sigh of relief because we know the record's fantastic, it's just getting it to sound as good as we know it should be."

It speaks volumes for the band that they're still bringing out new material: it's not as though the band couldn't rest on their laurels with a back catalogue as strong as theirs. Think about it: 'I Want You Back', 'What's My Scene', 'Miss Freelove '69', 'Bittersweet', 'My Girl', 'Like Wow - Wipeout!'... in fact, it's a surprise that they hadn't been tapped for SBS's Great Australian Albums series.

"We were. We said no."

Really?

"Yeah."

For which album?

"Oh, which do you think?" he chides. "They said 'do you want to do something for [debut album] Stoneage Romeos?' and we kind of get sick of always talking about that one. I mean, we like a lot of our records."

So there's never an on-stage moment of "oh god, 'I Want You Back' again..."

"To be honest, I don't," he laughs. "I'm rather preoccupied with trying to control my instrument and sing, and also how the crowd's feeling, and thinking ‘do I want to change the set list?' I'm sort of going a million miles an hour in my head and I don't really get the luxury of sitting back and being bored by myself." He barks another laugh. "That's somebody else's problem, really. As a band we really enjoy going out there and feeling the energy - not the crowd so much, but our own energy and the music. It just gives us a huge boost so we don't question it really."

And these days there'd be a couple of generations who grew up on the Gurus.

"Exactly. I'm waiting for the grandmothers to come up now." Andrew P Street

Hoodoo Gurus play A Day At The Park with You Am I, Kate Miller-Heidke, Ash Grunwald, The Beautiful Girls, The Vasco Era and more.