Final Days Of Autumn

SCENE MAGAZINE | INTERVIEWS FINAL DAYS OF AUTUMN [11.06.08] SUPER GROUP You might think an Oz rock super-group - made up of members of Shifter, The Butterfly Effect and The Resin Dogs - would live on a diet of Cristal and caviar as they toured around the country in a private plane fuelled by uncut cocaine. You’d be wrong.“We’re starting out grassroots as a band that nobody’s ever heard before,” says Joal Pascoe, guitarist and vocalist of Shifter fame. “On the last tour, we didn’t have a tour manager and we couldn’t fly anywhere, so we ended up driving back to Brisbane from Adelaide in one straight hit. That almost killed me. And I was the stupid one who didn’t put my hand up and say ‘I’ll drive’ until the last leg of the tour, so I was the one who was driving from three in the morning to ten in the morning. I must have drunk about three Red Bulls, but it just didn’t help.” Despite the success Pascoe and Final Days of Autumn bandmates Clint (Butterfly Effect) Boge, Dan Alder, and Resin Dogs Jonathon Bolt and Tony McCall have had elsewhere, this side project has nothing to do with vanity. These guys are in it for the love of the game. “Music’s never really about work,” Pascoe drawls. “I always play music because I want to; it’s never felt like I’ve had a job playing music. Going on tour is a holiday for me. There are some dreadful bits about it - you have to sleep on floors, you never get enough sleep and you never eat right - but it’s okay. We don’t need to do Final Days of Autumn. We all have different, successful bands. But we do it because we love it. The last Final Days of Autumn tour was the most fun I’ve ever had on a tour, it was just like a holiday with your mates. It was such an amazing experience. The good wildly outweighs the bad.” Like so many great bands, Pascoe reveals that Final Days of Autumn were brought together by one dominant factor: geography. “Final Days of Autumn came about because of a house. Dan and Clint used to live together many years ago in this house in New Farm, a share house that pretty much everybody in Brisbane has lived in for at least a couple of weeks at some point. Literally a couple hundred people must have lived there in the last ten years. “So anyway, after they’d been there for a couple of years, I moved in. We were all musicians - The Butterfly Effect was starting to become pretty big for Clint, I’d just joined Shifter and Dan was playing in Shifter at that point - so we just started playing music together. We used to have a glass of wine and sit under the house and write songs. All our friends came to listen to it and they said we should think about doing something serious with it. It was more about our friends forcing us into it than us wanting to do anything. We were just happy playing at the house!” Of course, the boys have moved well beyond the house now. Last year’s aforementioned tour saw them cover ground from Adelaide to Townsville, their MySpace gets more hits than Wendell Sailor and the coming weeks will see them headline Brisbane’s Massive Sounds Festival. So, any chance of getting tracks like ‘Ghost’, ‘Be Brave’ and ‘The Sadness’ onto a record anytime soon, guys? “I seriously do get asked that question every week,” laughs a bewildered Pascoe. “If it’s going to happen, it’s probably going to happen in the next few months. But we’ve just taken everything so slowly … we all want to do it, we have all the material and we’re ready to go, but we don’t want to get our hopes up or anything like that. I think by January or February or next year there should be a Final Days album out for people to buy, though. It’s looking positive, anyway.” Rohan WilliamsFinal Days of Autumn play Massive Sounds Festival at The Jubilee Hotel on June 28. Also playing on a huge bill are Diana Anaid, Dubdoubt, Stone Parade, Repeat Offender, Dogpound, Tim Steward Band and many more.WHATEVER @ myspace