Peter Kostic

Regurgitator’s Pogogo Show gets down with the kids

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

Most rock bands work very hard at being serious. Credibility and being cool is everything – but if you’re a rock-star parent, those things count for nothing when it’s time to go home. Then you might sing silly songs to your kids in between chores, or when you’re dropping them off at school, before it’s time to put on the mask again and going back on tour.

Regurgitator have never worked hard at being serious, and have recorded an entire album of the songs they sang to their kids. The result is Regurgitator’s Pogogo Show: The Really Really Really Really Boring Album, with Ben Ely’s 14-year-old daughter Dee Dee doing backing vocals and telling stories in between songs.

The result is anything but boring, and sounds, well, like a Regurgitator album. For kids. That is, without the swearing, but with lots of farting.

The classic Brisbane three-piece (Quan Yeomans, Ben Ely and Peter Kostic) are spread out these days, with Yeomans in Melbourne and Kostic in Sydney. But all have children, and so too do most of the band’s Generation X fans, who’d come to the gigs on a night off (or on a date night). The Pogogo Show could catch on – especially since it’s already branching out into live shows.… Read more..

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Regurgitator get their roxx off

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

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.… Read more..

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Regurgitator: The J-Files

Music / / 6 minutes of reading

Potty-mouthed. Wilfully contrary. Ironically self-aware. Genre-hopping. These are all some of the obvious things that come to mind when thinking about Regurgitator. Describing the music, though, is harder: after more than 20 years, the Brisbane band formed by Quan Yeomans, Ben Ely and Martin Lee in 1993 defy categorisation more than ever.

The thick layer of irony that surrounds Regurgitator can make them more of a head trip than a band to take to your heart. But that doesn’t mean they’re not serious: there’s a genuine moral centre to everything they do; it’s just more likely to be expressed with humour, rather than slogans – and you can almost always dance to it. It all makes Regurgitator one of the most original and subversive bands Australia has ever produced.

1: The Concept

Tu-Plang, the title of Regurgitator’s first album (which was recorded in Bangkok) is the Thai word for jukebox. And that’s exactly what Regurgitator are: a machine that absorbs popular music in all its dizzying permutations, then spews it back out. This technicolour approach means that, like American genre-hoppers Ween or New Zealand’s Flight Of The Conchords, Regurgitator are free to play whatever they want – as long as it’s delivered with a nod and a wink.… Read more..

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