Regurgitator’s Quan Yeomans is, in his own words, doing the dad thing. “Your grandmother will be here in a second! Do you mind?” he scolds his one-year-old son Bowie, mid-conversation. He also has a four-year-old, Cassius.
Ben Ely, the band’s co-founder and bassist, is also a father to young children for the second time, with a new partner. After what Yeomans describes as their “midlife crisis record” Dirty Pop Fantasy, released in 2013, their ninth, Headroxx, finds them in a far more settled place.
“We were both in very weird headspaces, not as confident in our lives, and not in love,” Yeomans says of Dirty Pop Fantasy. “This record, we’re both married now, we both have young kids – again, for Ben – so it’s got that vibe about it.”
The exception is drummer Peter Kostic. “Got my kids once a week, sometimes for sleepovers … Take them to the zoo, maintenance not an issue,” he sings on Weird Kind Of Hard, before the song dissolves into a long, absurd scat section, the whole band cracking up laughing.
It’s typical Regurgitator, to make a joke of a serious situation. And Kostic’s personal circumstances aside, Headroxx is a joy to listen to, a concise blast of electro-pop, rock, hip hop and noise that often sounds like a return to the feel of the band’s early work.
Sometimes it sounds like Regurgitator are, to coin a phrase, almost literally returning to their own vomit – no more so than Party Looks, which sounds more like Prince than their best-loved hit, The Song Formerly Known As. Yeomans cheerfully admits he’s heard that comment a lot.
“I don’t know if it’ll get played as much,” he chuckles. “That song is based on the idea of being in a really, really loud disco and not understanding what the person next to you is saying, so the whole conversation just erupts into some bizarre abstract thing.”
Headroxx was made quickly, a reflection of the tight constraints the band works within. “The records that we do these days are kind of like thrown together at the last minute,” Yeomans says.
“What generally happens is Paul [Curtis, the band’s manager] says ‘Oh, you’ve got to do a record, we’ve got a tour coming up, let’s do it now’. And we’re like, oh god, OK! And we sit down and we kind of go through the motions sometimes, but this one was pretty fun.”
That risks making Headroxx sound like a slapdash affair, but it does an injustice to the results. The band turns 25 next year, and while Yeomans agrees they’re a part-time proposition these days, there’s a synergy between the unit that only comes from working together for a long time.
Distance is both a help and a hindrance, in terms of both their longevity and working relationships: Yeomans, after several years in Hong Kong, is now in Melbourne; Ely is in the band’s home town, Brisbane, while Kostic is in Sydney.
“We’re not the kind of band that gets together and jams now, because the distance between us is too prohibitive,” Yeomans says. “But we do work regularly enough to feel like we play well together, and we’re like a family when we get together … There’s no infighting between us.”
Some bands fade away, and come back on money-spinning reunion tours. Regurgitator never fully went away, kept making good records, and Yeomans can’t see them stopping anytime soon.
“It would be harder for us to stop I think,” he says. “[We’re] addicted to it, to a certain degree, because it’s fun. We’re still capable, I think, as a live band; we look after our bodies, we’re not falling apart. It’s not painful to play.
“I’m actually looking forward to being a really old band where we have to play in wheelchairs, with aged-care people around us. I don’t know if we’ll get that far, but we still get a good reaction from crowds, we feel the energy that’s still within us. It’s easy, it’s comfortable, and it works.”
First published in The Age (Shortlist), 1 August 2018