In 1996, Mornington Peninsula weirdos the Fauves were the rising stars of Australian rock. They had a grunge swagger, a savage wit and enough mastery of a great hook to be beloved of Triple J, who helped make singles like ‘Dogs are the Best People’ and ‘Self Abuser’ into sizable hits.
Between that high water mark and now the band have never stopped making music. They’re about to release their 11th album, German Engines, a companion piece to last year’s Japanese Engines.
“It was more for our own amusement than anything else,” explains singer/guitarist Andy Cox when asked why the band are releasing two albums three months apart, despite making them at the same time. “We initially thought maybe we’d do a double record, and then we thought we might try the Guns ‘n Roses two-at-one-time kind of thing [as per Use Your Illusion 1 & 2], I guess. I mean, after nearly 24 years, you sort of think ‘well, do we just put out another record in the same old way or try and do it slightly differently?’”
The albums are also thematically separate: “[Japanese Engines] is probably a mellower, poppier one, and we put more of the rock songs on the second one. It helped give us a conceptual reason to make them two distinctive records.”
Cox is clearly proud of the new discs, but he’s under no illusions about whether these Engines will power up a new phase in the band. “There’s not a third act to our career,” he shrugs. “The Fauves' story is an old story. People kind of made up their minds about whether they were into us or not 15 years ago.”
But surely Fauves fans are a pretty understanding bunch? “You’re right, but I think we still probably disappoint people. I mean, obviously our most commercially successful records were years ago and we’re quite a substantially different band musically to the one we were then.”
Does this mean that the Annandale set will draw heavily from the new discs? “Oh no, no, no,” he emphasises. “We’ve done the thing, back in our naïve days, of getting up there and playing an entire set of new material and you work out very quickly that audiences don’t really tolerate that,” he laughs. “It’s a bit of an indulgence to get up there and expect people to listen to ten or 11 songs they’ve never heard before, though partly the set list is predicated on what we still actually remember how to play.”
He laughs again. “A certain tolerance is implicit in being a long-term fan of a band like us.”
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