I suppose I should start at the beginning. Me and Andrew had been going to school together and jamming for a while when we discovered ska. Having immediately fallen in love with the deadly rhythms of ska and those blasting horn melodies, we decided we wanted to start our own ska band.
I was playing bass at that time, and drew was playing guitar, but he decided to take up trombone after our plunge into the world of ska. Midway through '03 i moved schools and met a funny looking punk kid with colourful hair called Jake.
He played guitar. At that point he knew nothing of the genre of ska, and predominantly listened to system of a down and the offspring. I showed him some less than jake, mad caddies and some rancid and he loved it. I introduced jake to andrew and it was decided we'd get jake to play guitar, with me on bass and andrew on trombone. we needed a drummer, but the only real drummer we knew was this little italian kid called Ben Zotti.
For some reason, which I still really don't know why, we thought zotti was crap at drums, and we were all really hesitant to enlist his help. But I think once we couldn't find anyone else we decided having a drummer was better than not having a drummer.
Once we got zotti, andrews older brother had said he would play sax for us. He was captain of the school band for a while so he must've been pretty good.
For a while we sat about doing nothing much, occasionally me and andrew would jam, nothing particularly interesting coming out of it. we had our minds set that we needed a front man, to sing, so as to lead us. Eventually it dawned on us that we would just have to do it ourselves, so Jake was given the task of lead vocals, and I had to do back up vocals. Jake, Andrew, Zotti, Kosta and I was what fallouts was from early '04 till early '05.
We decided if we couldn't come up with originals straight away, covers would do, so we learnt one song, 9th At Pine, by LTJ and played it over and over again. Eventually, Andrew wrote some lyrics and our first original, Desperate Till Pay Day was born. After that songs came a lot easier. We wrote Party at Adi's, Where's The Equality (holy crap I only just remembered that song), and Adelaide Skank. By November '04, Jake's other band, Red Flag Pirates, were well on their way to stardom.
They played their first full set at the underground on a friday night, with Retic, Liability of My Own, and The Jerks. I loved every second of it, and so did they. I think we then bugged Jake into letting us play a few songs at the start of their set at their next gig, which was December 9th, at the Governor Hindmarsh, upstairs, on the balcony.
Eventually the day came, and it was a shit day. It fucking poured with rain the whole day and because the balcony was only protected by thin plastic sheets the rain got in and at one point was all around the power point we were plugged into. Smoke also shot out of the back of the PA too, so that was kinda scary.
We played three songs and then got off the stage to make room for the Red Flag Pirates. After them was The Muscats, then Jerks, then Standard Union. It was a fun gig, except I'm pretty sure big Chris kicked through a window out the front and glass went everywhere. But even then he probably enjoyed it. I think we all had a wicked time playing that gig, but I think we all learnt we had a long way to go.
We played one more gig as a 5 piece, and recorded demolition, which has desperate till pay day, bad habits past mistakes, blackwood, crazy life, and represent rudeboy on it.
We then enlisted the help of Matt Green, who had gone to school with me, drew and zotti, but we'd never really known him. He learnt all our songs, except desperate till pay day, which he still doesnt know today. We played the first ever pirate boat productions gig april 22nd, with a few other bands, and that went well.
We played gigs throughout 05 and in late november played carclew's off the couch festival and was lucky enough to get a copy of our live set. We won a days recording at DST Productions, and also won $2000 bucks worth of film recording for a film clip. We never claimed the film clip, but we used to recording time and recorded a multi-track version of crazy life.
2006 saw lots of gigs for fallouts, pulling off two gigs in one night a couple of times, but things gradually slowed down towards the end as we faced Year 12 exams and then the holiday period. Andrew left for Queensland in late December and so we were left a 5 piece once again.
Our first gig of 2007 was the last ever Travelling Sacks show, and it was huge. We played to a 450+ crowd, at the underground, and with us played Jerks, Hoodoo Voodoo Dolls, and Son of Dad. We had enlisted Smith from the Travelling Sacks to play for us at this show to help beef up our sound, and because he played so well we decided that we should would get him to play for us full time. We asked him and he gladly said yes.
Now we are currently in the process of writing a entirely new set list, and have most of 6 or so new songs completed. We're trying to organise recording, T-shirts, and of course a brief tour over to melbourne.
Hope to catch you all at a show sometime,
Dieter.
