Dead Boy Productions

 

12/18/06
Dan-Zig

Dead Boy Productions with Zombie Ghost Train

Easily one of the best bands we have seen in a long time is Zombie Ghost Train, an Australian, psychobilly band.  We were completely blown away by how great they are as musicians and how amazingly friendly they are in person. Have you ever seen real life zombies play some of the best psychobilly around?  Stu and Reckless of ZGT were nice enough to sit around with us after their gig at the Showcase in Corona, the day before Thanksgiving,  and answer some questions we had for them.

You’re in the states and you are touring how many shows in are you right now?

Stu: We’re doing a month tour of the states and a month tour of Europe and we’re five shows in so we’ve got thirty-five shows to go, which is kind of exciting and a bit daunting. The first big tour for us we came to the states last year and did like twenty five shows.

Was last year’s tour the first tour of the states?

Stu: Yeah, but tonight’s show at the Showcase Theatre was fucking awesome.

We were at last year’s show and we thought the crowd was much more into it tonight. Is that what you thought?

Stu: It was awesome because last time we played here was like on a Thursday and we had the Nekromantix show two nights after at the Glass House so the attendance was a bit down, because no one knew who the fuck we were, but after doing the Nekromantix show and the tour it was fucking great tonight because the album has been out for a year and people knew the words. We’re pretty lucky I think. It’s quite funny also you know being zombies and stuff, if we put our flesh paint on during the day and go out as humans no one knows who we are.

We had that conversation. We were kind of looking for you during the show and we never even thought to think of what you would look like without the makeup.

Stu: Really we are zombies and our disguise is the human makeup.

I read something about how your makeup was inspired by Carnival of Souls? I love that movie, but I don’t know many people who have actually seen it.

Reckless: I’m sure it’s in the 99 cents store right next to this place. Everybody should have it just because it’s so fucking cheap

Stu: It’s a great movie I got into it maybe like ten years ago. A friend had it on VHS and I watched it and I was like fuck this is awesome. I mean it’s really slow like a lot of those old horror movies. It isn’t really horror it’s kind of like an off the wall movie. Just the makeup though it’s very simple. It’s just black and white with shading. When we started we would just buy our makeup from the dollar store or whatever

Reckless: just like you would buy on Halloween

Stu: It just was so shit. It would wash off

Reckless: It would get in your eyes and sting you like a motherfucker

Stu: Over the years we’ve sort of worked out how to get it to stay on and stuff now it won’t come off, it’s permanent.

It really takes a scrubbing to get it off?

Stu: Yeah, a lot of scrubbing.

How is the scene in Australia? What’s the scene in Australia?

Reckless: It’s many scenes smashed into one. So you have goth, rockabilly, well actually there’s not much rockabilly, some psychobilly kids, punk kids, the metal kids, people who walk off the street. We have quite a large audience

Stu: There’s not really a psychobilly scene in Australia. It’s more where psychobilly sort of came from like punk and rockabilly and a bit of goth and a bit of horror punk and stuff, but there’s new cats turning up with freshly shaved sides and all the cool tattoos in the right spots, but it’s not like that. We get good crowds, but it’s just a different mixture of things.

Is it a noticeable difference here?

Reckless: Here we are playing to the psychobilly scene and such whereas in Australia we have to pull from everything. When we were first starting out we had to play to rockabilly crowds we played in bands and were playing rockabilly shit. It’s really fun to play, it’s so much fun to play, it’s easy because you can just sit back and play and not punch out something exciting and when we started out and wanted to play and write our original songs, the rockabilly scene kind of turned on us, not turned on us, but a lot of our friends didn’t want to come see us because they didn’t really get it, it was a bit too heavy for them. We had to play goth clubs and thought well they’ll like the makeup and they ended up coming to our shows and before you know it punks started coming

Stu: That’s where the funny mixture comes in, it’s like you wear face paint, oh well you’re goth. The music has a dark element, it’s not really goth.

You guys look like you have fun on stage and there is interaction with the crowd.

Stu: It’s a thin line because we’re kind of like a comedy routine. The B grade movies and stuff, which we’re into there’s a real comedic element to it anyway. There’s a lot of cool subject matter, but it’s also kind of funny and tongue in cheek as well so we are out to have fun. It’s kind of our personalities, fucking around with the crowd and getting people up on stage and psychobilly traditionally is quite serious and hey I’m fucking cool and tough but it’s not about that for us we’re into having a good time. There are other psychobilly bands around that are into having a good time, but I think there’s a bit of a line

Reckless: we’d like people to come to the show and not have to worry about “Am I wearing the right thing?” “Am I going to get picked on because my hair’s not straight up?” We’re hoping they’ll come and just completely forget that there’s fucking attitude out in the real world. So they can know if they come to a Zombie Ghost Train show, it’s just going to be a fucking bunch of fun, you can just relax, you go with the flow, you enjoy yourself, good music, you go home and you feel like you got your ten bucks worth. It’s better than going to a show and drinking and some dude pushes you and it puts a whole downer on the evening when I’ve got to pay to see the band that I really wanted to see, and you go out and you paid twenty bucks to see that band and what did I get out of it? A black eye and my hair looks like crap!

We brought a friend who plays bass in a metal band and he was just amazed at the stand up bass because he has never seen anybody play one.

Reckless: When I play especially because I’ve heard that there’s a lot of bass players who all they think about when they play psychobilly is to play really fast. “I want to play fast” “I want to play faster than Kim (Nekroman)” They take that attitude and you can play fast, but it just gets messy at a point you’re not fast and clear you can’t get the message across, there’s no point in being a fast bass player if you can’t hit the notes.

You weren’t playing fast when you were doing your solo.

Reckless: When it comes to things like my solo I like to tell the other players look what you can do rhythmically and melodically they think “Wow, I didn’t know you could do that” but they just play really fast.

When you play fast all the time sometimes it seems like just noise

Stu: It’s only impressive for like five minutes and then it’s like “Oh man!”

Reckless: Because when you are playing fast songs, you’re already playing fast, why have a solo that’s fast unless it’s really fucking out there. The whole point though is bring it back and really show some depth to your playing so you go “Well I can do slow” and keep the attention focused on you. That’s what I  think I try to do and when I see other bass players do that I’m really impressed.

Do you play each other’s instruments?

Stu: Yeah, yeah our musical instruments. (We all laugh) Personally I’ve played in different bands, different instruments, well guitar and drums mainly, but I’ve always played double bass as well so whenever there’s one around ….and Reckless, well he’s been playing guitar for probably as long as the bass.

Reckless: I just like to be a pain in the ass and steal  his guitar as soon as he sets it down “Oh no!”

Stu: We’ve played other gigs and I’ll give Reckless my guitar and I couldn’t get it back off him and it seems like well I’ll just keep playing the bass.

Reckless: We did this one gig and we were covering a Batmobile tune and we got to this point where it was such a  great vibe and Mr T., the drummer, happened to step away from the drum kit for too long and I was like fuck this, alright let’s do it!

Stu: Reckless plays drums as well

Reckless: that show was a lot of fun. There’s times when swapping can become to much when swapping becomes look at me, it can become too much so I try to stay away from the drums, it’s not my forte.

Stu: It depends what the vibe is like too. If it’s a really enthusiastic audience then they’ll go there with you, but I was going to say before it’s hard to know, with us we play some slow songs, we’re not a fast psychobilly band by any means, we put so much other shit in there, but it’s really hard to know what the audience is going to think. Traditionally I see psychobilly is having a good wreck and getting into it, but not all our songs are like that. Mind you, the intro to Graveyard Queen I have seen people wreck to, which is quite humorous

Reckless: It’s bringing dynamics to the piece.

How have the crowds been so far?

Stu: Kind of a mixture, but always good. We’re pretty much used to as we said a diverse crowd, so it’s been pretty good, but the areas we’ve actually covered in the last five days, we’ve never played before, but people knew who we were, people still sung along. I think Danzig played one night down the road, which was like, fuck, in Seattle, we think more than half our audience was at Danzig.

Reckless: But the room was fucking amazing. It’s one of those things when you don’t have as many people as you expect turn up, you think oh fuck I hope we have a good show and then when you get onstage and you do start and then when the crowd turns, you know it could be a million people, when there’s just ten people or fifty people or a hundred people just going, then it doesn’t matter what the size of the room is

Stu: It’s all a personal thing, I think, which is what we’re trying to do. Everyone’s paid ten bucks to come to the show, not a thousand people paid, but every person at the gig we want to have a good time, so for us it’s kind of about entertainment. It is entertainment.

Reckless: We used to go see bands and you feel a bit ripped off. They just played their set and “You suck”, but the bands that actually show that they appreciate the audience being there then you really felt like they care. There wasn’t many bands doing that when we were starting off. There are a couple of bands that really show their love too much to the audience and you are just like fuck it.

Stu: You don’t want to play a stadium rock show to ten people, you see a band that always has the same schtick and it’s like man you played to ten people where do you think you are fucking Madison Square Garden?

Reckless: We have a few bands that are over the top at home and I like to think of it as adjusting to the crowd and you play for the crowd that turned up so if there is ten people in a room of 200, there’s no reason to go bashing your head against the wall and scream and cry and bleed, but then again when there is ten people you can kind of just take it easy because now you’ve got an intimate crowd and if you play to them you can suck them in rather than be a rockstar and cry and break shit. Whereas if you are playing in a room of 10,000 people and the room is just going apeshit then yeah, fuck it, start doing anything you want

Stu: Every show is different. Tonight at the Showcase was great, great crowd, great vibe. It’s weird. When you stop and everyone goes yeah and then when everyone’s quiet, do they like us because no one is saying anything

Reckless: They are out there waiting for the next thing.