THE SOUTHERN RIVER BAND: Thornlie On Our Side (2024)

By STEVE MASCORD

A MAN in his sixties is just grinning. Constantly, that is. The whole night. A fellow at least 40 years younger with an aristocratic quiff is shaking his head down the front like a maniac. “Say coont!” a fellow dead centre, six people back, hollers.

“Cunt!” Cal Kramer shouts into the microphone.

“Say it again!”

“Cunt!”

We’re at the Leadmill in Sheffield on a chilly, damp Saturday night and we’re watching the Southern River Band, a rockin’ and rollin’ four-piece at pains to point out they are not from Perth but from Thornlie, a suburb 15km southeast of the city. Some 11 per cent of Thornlie’s residents were born in England and now this previously anonymous patch of suburbia is sending four of its finest back to the mother country – for the second time this year.

There is a buzz around the Southern River Band in the UK; they are becoming famous for doing something countless others do and have done since the 1970s – play what is now regarded as ‘classic rock’ – but doing it with such power and panache that it takes only a few minutes for them to identify themselves as something very special.

Wiry and muscular Tyler Michie is on drums, bassist Pat Smith could be a kindly mechanic on Home And Away while hirsute guitarist Dan Carroll would be your first port of call at Central Casting if you wanted someone to play a thoughtful barista. Then there’s shirtless (like Michie) Kramer, whose poodle haircut and flashy strides can been seen from space.

Information about them all is so thin on the ground – their growth appearing so organic – that when I reviewed them in June, I was only able to correctly identify Kramer.

Even the band’s name comes from a geographical feature near their homes.

“It’s just everyday working people out here, man. It’s just the suburban dream.,” the 32-year-old told Hot Metal from Thornlie before the tour.

“The funny thing is, nothing happens out here. We’ve probably done the most shit in Thornlie out of anybody, ever. It’s just home, really. It’s just home for hard working, good, honest people. Few little bad boys too that you can draw a little inspiration from. The suburban dream somewhere out some 25 minutes from Perth City itself. I always say it’s 20 minutes from fucking nowhere.”

It is not an aspect that is really apparent from watching SRB live but when you describe them as a “slightly more serious Darkness”, it’s important to recognise the part that these “bad boys” play in their subject matter.

There’s a rock opera of sorts taking shape with “Vice City”, “Vice City II” and “Vice City III”, intense cinematic yarn-spinners with likes like “We all must meet our maker – but yours’ ‘ll make it look like suicide.” The city that gave us Bon Scott has a dark side.

“There’s a lyric in there ‘plane on the tarmac/bullet in a backpack’,” Cal says when I ask him how much first-hand knowledge he has of mafia dons and dead men floating in hession sacks.

“That happened to us … well, a group of people I was with at the airport one day. It wasn’t with the band but that was quite an interesting experience to be part of and see first hand. I’ve always had the interest in sort of the … people would call them criminals. I just call them blokes trying to make an honest buck in the modern world, mate. I’ve always found it super interesting and then wanted to do a movie for it.

“There’s going to be five Vice Cities all up. It’s all one big long story. I’d like to do a proper movie one day. But this one it was like ‘we’re going to put together the Godfather Part II, The Departed, Goodfellas, Casino …all those sorts of movies, put out own spin on it obviously with a nod and a wink … it’s a bit of fun, mate. But I do have quite the interest in the underbelly of the world, if you will.”

Here’s an artist so far spared the piercing light of media scrutiny. You don’t just get to say that, Cal! What, exactly, happened at the airport? Care to tell us more?

“Nah. Absolutely not. Haha.

“No mate, I’m pleading the fifth on that. Is pleading the fifth not saying anything? Because that’s what I’m going to do with that. But it’s a real story, that bit.”

So we’ll try another route to drill down into the artist’s motivation. Why rock, Cal?

“My earliest living memory, the first thing I can remember about being alive, is watching the VHS of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble Live At The El Macambo, something I still do regularly. Yeah, my parents are both musicians and massive music fans and we like all the exact same shit so it was almost implanted … it was almost a genetic pass-down really.”

It was a figure who may have been part of that shady underbelly of Perth who got the ball rolling for SRB, with different members, some time around 2013. This person goes by the name only of Bear.

“I don’t think he likes people knowing his real name so we’ll call him Bear. But me and Ant, our original bass player, used to drink down at the Thornlie Tavern all the time and he used to have … he had ‘Bear’ in big stainless steel rings on his knuckles. We all thought he was quite intimidating or whatever and then one day he started chatting to us. He’s like ‘are you guys in a band, are you?’ At that point we were just writing a few songs and we’re like ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah’ and he was just like ‘I’ll get you a gig down here’ and we’re like ‘yeah sure mate’.

“We came back in … I think it was two days later … and he’s like ‘right, you’re playing here in two weeks’. We had to pull together a whole bunch of covers and that’s basically the seed that required some watering for the Southern River Band grow, my friend.

“I was already doing stuff. It was just that first gig. That was the moment where ‘alright, we’re actually rolling’. We started out playing three sets of covers a night and then throwing in some originals. We started honing our craft, if you will. We started adding in some originals and went from there.

“I’ve had this haircut since … I grew my hair as soon as I could and just cut it like this. I cut it myself so I decided ‘this is what I want’ and I haven’t really changed. I don’t really use costumes per se. It’s just what we do.

“I cut my own hair. I used to make my own pants but I’ve got a lady … Metal Threads, she’s called, Steph. She’s fuckin’ great.”

The thing that resonates watching the Southern River Band is how young they are – certainly, compared to, say, the Quireboys whom your correspondent encountered the next day. These boys are half the age of many of the acts we find ourselves watching, young enough to have Sambuca shots delivered to the stage and then to follow it up with a bottle of wine passed around between them.

And then to drive six hours, do it all again, tear their own stage down and repeat.

“If I don’t have to do anything the next day I can do 20 Jack and Cokes,” says Cal. “You space ‘em out a little bit. I’m more of a cocktail guy now. A couple of Long Island Ice Teas, a couple of Espresso Martinis and we’re ready to go.”

Does he not have to look after himself the way his older brethren do?

“Nah, fuckin’ oath you do man. I’ll drink, I’ll probably have four 1.5 litre bottles of water every day that we just keep in the van which makes it fun for everybody else because you’ve got to piss every five minutes. Hydration is the key to success mate. It sounds like I’m taking the piss about that … well, that also leads to taking a piss but yeah, nah you’ve got to stay on top of it.”

There you go; Kramer loves the language, inserting “I do believe” and “per se” into conversation. There’s wonderful naivety on the part of the band too; a tendency to accentuate cultural differences when travelling rather than minimise them as older, more well-travelled and perhaps cynical acts do. “I’ll speak really s-l-o-w-l-y,” says Cramer, actually encourages dialogue with punters – instructing “one at a time!” right at the start of many shows.

Brits, particularly Northerners, love the way Australians say ‘cunt’ with that parched vowel that sounds like it’s been sitting in the sun all weekend. I ask him why he thinks the band’s Australian-ness resonates with crowds here so much, with Airbourne a much bigger act in the UK than they are at home.

“I’ve got absolutely no idea mate!” is Cal’s response.

“I’m just happy that people like the songs. If people connect with real rock’n’roll music and people connect with real rock’n’roll, which Airbourne are and we try to be as well…. I guess there’s not a whole heap of bands doing what we’re doing out there.

“The Australian thing is a little exotic right now over in your part of the world right now. Well, I say that as two guys with Australian accents talking to each other. When we were over there people are going ‘what are Kangaroos like?’, ‘what are sharks like?’. All of that shit where you think ‘it’s every day for us over here’. You can start telling them some pretty good stories about kangaroos or whatever.

“‘Where are they?’ They’re fuckin’ everywhere mate. Go play gold in Armadale. You’re going to see about 30 of ‘em! “

Would The Southern River Band move to London – or Sydney?

“The moving east thing, I think, is a bit of a fallacy sometimes because I know a lot of people who have done it. I mean, touring in itself is extremely fucking expensive no matter how you do it. But the reality is when know we want to be giving this Europe thing a crack because it’s seeming to click. Well, it clicked instantly better in one tour than it has in Australia for 10 years, you know? So we’re going to be spending a lot more time over there and whatever that looks like, we’re grabbing it with both hands.

“I dare say that Perth’s always going to be home. We’ve got some great friends out here and I don’t think I could be one of those people who goes and lives in some city chasing fame or some bullshit. But I’m more than willing to go there and do what needs to be done if we’re taking our show on the road, you know?”

SRB’s shows tend to gather momentum, to snowball. Early in the Sheffield set, Michie points at audience members and smiles. By the time the blistering “Vice City II” closes things, his arms are moving so quickly it’s an actual blur, the audience swooning at the G forces – although there’s a lingering in-joke that perhaps robs the gangland paean of some of its driving intensity.

Of course “Stan Qualen” – with its 1.1 million YouTube views – is the centrepiece of the set. But they also pull out “Let It Ride” from 2016’s Live At The Pleasure Dome and two completely new songs.

“It’s more like 18 to 65 and you’ll see all sorts of different people from all walks of life and it spreads out pretty evenly,” Kramer says of the audience demographic.

“I’d imagine it’s a real nostalgic thing for people of your generation and even older but it seems to be really resonating with young people. Even say that Bristol show, it was just rammed with all young crew down the front and I think that’s people discovering things that they may not have even known existed.

“When you see young – I’m talking 18, 19 year-olds – discovering this for the first time, they’re like ‘what the fuck is this?’. I often tell them ‘mate, we’re not reinventing the wheel here. All you’ve got to do is look a little bit back in time and you’ll see some pretty good shit man. Try it out some time, it’s fucking awesome’.”

Fans on Facebook this week predicted the SRB would one day be in the Rock’n’Roll Hall Of Fame – “up there with the greats”. Of course it’s doubtful any new band today playing the sort of music they do will ever get inducted – the Southern River Band’s audiences may be be a broad church and their numbers may multiple – but the zeitgeist has long since moved on.

Which is perhaps a blessing when it comes to this mysterious brute, Bear.

“We had a deal one day that if I ever make a million bucks I’ve got to buy him a white Porsche,” Kramer says. “It can be second hand but it’s got to be a white one.”

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