Children Collide

On the eve of the release of Children Collide's second album, frontman Johnny Mackay tells Andrew P Street love, loss, and reptilian moon monsters.

Given that the album's called Theory of Everything, where do Children Collide stand in terms of current thinking on physics? Are you expecting the Large Hadron Collider to experimentally confirm the particle model, or are you more of a String Theory man?
Probably more of the string theory multiverse. I do find it hard to wrap my head around it completely. I'm also fascinated by people that think the LHC was a conspiracy to open up black holes to other dimensions.

Except that the LHC creates particles far, far less energetic than those that hit the Earth in their billions every second: if they were going to create black holes, we'd have been destroyed before the Earth even formed…
Look, I have friends that talk about reptilians building the moon as a false satellite and the moon matrix deflecting the sun's rays away from the Earth so that we don't receive them into our chakras to cultivate the emotion of fear, which is the frequency that they feed off.

Your friends sound like geniuses.
Well, I have friends that believe in Jesus too, so... [laughs]

So given that you're clearly a rational sort of a fellow, what's with the album's tarot card artwork?
Well, because we don't write all our songs in one clump before recording they're not really linked conceptually, so artwork and the album title are the things we use to tie the whole album in together. With the tarot thing, I was excited by the concept of linking a card to each song. Also, the subjective nature of the image and whatever context it's put in it can change the meaning – much like a song.

Even so, there are definite conceptual threads through the album. I'm guessing there was a relationship break-up?
There definitely was. The relationship that a couple of the songs on the first record [2008's The Long Now] are about, pretty much from the release of that record started crumbling, right up until the recording of this one. There's a lot of that on this record.

And yet the defiant ‘My Eagle' is there in the middle of the album, almost like a pillar holding the rest of the songs up.
That's a good call: ‘My Eagle' is the strength in the album. It's about how the ego can sometimes pull the wool over your eyes and how that's a good thing, especially with anything creative: sometimes you need a sort of blind tunnel vision and to ignore a bit of reality in order to get the job done otherwise you'd end up making beige cardboard so you didn't end up offending anyone or break any rules. 

It's certainly more chipper than [furious first single] ‘Jellylegs'.
See, I would have never thought that ‘Jellylegs' would be a single – I liked the song when we wrote it and everything, but we sat down with all the potential singles and that one just seemed like a good link from the last album. It reminds me a bit of [breakthrough single] ‘Skeleton Dance', actually.

Well, that makes it a perfect first single: it acts as a bridge between albums while announcing "hello, we're doing some stuff."
[Laughs] Well, we're definitely doing some stuff. APS

Children Collide Metro Theatre, Fri 17 Sep. Theory of Everything Out now through Universal