Kram

Sitting in a café in the middle of Sydney, Kram (known to his mum as Mark Maher) brushes his hair back off his face as he explains why he's decided to make a solo album. "It's been coming for a long time," he begins. "I've been thinking about it for years and years and it took me this long to get off my arse and do it. But also it came at a time where we're weren't doing much, so it seemed like a good idea. Everyone was cool with it."

It also gave him a chance to bail out some of the floodwaters of his restless muse. "I'm a compulsive writer. I've always written heaps of music that doesn't end up on our records – or on any record," he explains. "So there's some old stuff on there, like 'Live a Long Time'. Other songs are brand new written in the studio. I'm always writing music: I just can't help it."

Despite having, by his own admission, "a whole room full" of tapes with song ideas, the writing process for Mix Tape was surprisingly disciplined. "I worked on the principle that if you have a song in the morning, by the night it should be finished, and that's the way we worked. I'd have this song in my head, I'd go into the studio, put the drums down, put the bass down, the guitars, layer up all the music, and then by the time you were driving home in the car you'd put the CD on and it sounded finished – and the next day you'd do an acoustic song, or chuck a loop on and try something. So the whole idea of the record was to completely change everything about what we were doing, but do it in the same way each day."

That being said, Spiderbait are hardly averse to making varied albums – so is Mix Tape really that great a departure? "It's already there on our albums, yeah, we were heading in that direction," he admits. "But I felt that it was a little bit more achievable to [make a really diverse album] if it's just coming from one person – to play all the instruments and do it all yourself. It gives it a little bit more of a twist.

"The hard thing we always found when we did it with the band is there were a whole bunch of songs that we were recording that we never did live because we'd be like 'how the fuck do we do that?'" he laughs. "So I've got two guys I'm playing with and everyone can play a few different things, so we can move around. So on one song I could be singing, on another I'll be on keys, another on guitar and harp, on drums for a couple, and that's the big difference. Spiderbait, we could never really do that. We were most comfortable playing like a blues band more than anything else: everyone has their thing and everyone puts their head down and gets to the heart of it."

While the 'Bait are in semi-hibernation at the moment, Kram has no doubt that there's more to come. "I think our next record, when we do it, will be really live sounding – we've never really been able to capture that on a record. Whereas with this record it's really been about what I can do myself."

Kram plays at Spectrum on Fri 11 Sep and Mix Tape is out now through Universal.

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