Unabashed fun is to be had this August 15th when naughty Brisbane pop punks Flangipanis roll into town, to play Garageland @ The Grand #10. But first lets make the screen go all wavy and go back in time to learn a little about the band, like they do on the telly all the time.
Flangipanis formed in 2008 and have garnered a passionate local following, playing in and around Brisbane. In 2010 they toured and recorded, and in 2011 they released their first studio album Cover Your Ears.
The album went on to place in the top 10 in 4ZZZ’s best albums of the year, and the confronting filmclip for the single My Period Is Late placed Flangipanis 3rd in the 4ZZZ hottest 100.
2012 saw the band gig through adversities and line-up changes. When life began to get in the way, Flangipanis began a rotating line-up of anywhere between 4 – 6 members at shows.
The members have gigged in many other bands over the years including: Bottlecock, Blowhard, D Rouser, Cursed Earth, The Packets, Forty Five, Semicolon, and more.
In 2013 the band released the 6 track EP ‘Open Your Mouth’ which included the song ‘I’m Drunk, So What, Fuck You’ which would surprisingly go on to win the #1 spot on 4ZZZ’s Hottest 100 of that year.
Last year they released the 7 inch ‘Just Because It Fits Doesn’t Mean You Should Fuck it/If You’re So Antiestablishment Why Are You On The Dole? and just a mere week after visiting us will officially release their new album, ‘Gouge Your Eyes Out’.
I chatted to vocalist/guitarist Jodie Flange as she prepared for an acoustic show at Brisbane’s Crowbar, she ordered the warm cider.
Hi Jodie, so lets start at the beginning – how did all this start?
“Well we’ve been a band for 7 years now, actually we usually have a birthday party but this year we’ll be in Townsville for it, so we’ll have to get drunk there! Ok, well the drummer Hayden and I used to be in a band together called ‘The Packets’ which were a Gold Coast band… I played guitar, keyboards and electric mandolin. We were living in Brisbane at the time and we’d been driving to the Gold Coast for practice and gigs and then both of our vans fucked out and we couldn’t make the trip anymore. So we asked if they would come to Brisbane to practice and they were like, nah it’s too far.
We were like fuck you! you guys suck! So we just started our own band, originally I think we wanted to sound like Dropkick Murphy’s… but that didn’t happen.”
You guys have a very good relationship with community radio, how did that happen?
“We sucked A LOT of dick!”
Like the Regurgitator song?
“Hahahaha, we actually covered that once in the 4ZZZ car park! Um, I guess at first we just wanted to get our songs played on the radio, so we just started going to events and eventually we met some people that worked at the station. I mean that took years and years to build those relationships, it didn’t happen overnight… It’s not like we walked in and gave somebody a hand job and just got played heaps.
We really had to work from the bottom up… it’s like years ago I’d get all annoyed because i’d be like ‘oh your band is only getting played because you’re friends with the announcers and I just fucking wish one of the announcers would be my friend so they would play my band as well!’ and now we are friends with the announcers, but it’s because we’re all into the same kind of music and have similar interests and because we support each other.
You can’t expect them to do shit for you and then you never go out and support their shows or fundraisers or whatever… it took ages but yeah I think people just assume we sucked a lot of dick.”
Flangipanis have been touring this year, do you guys tour a lot?
“Funny you sat that, I finally lodged an APRA live performance return the other day and was like, wow – we have played a lot of places and states and stuff!
We like to go to Melbourne ever year, we just got back from an Adelaide, Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne tour which we did in four days – I really liked Adelaide, I’d like to go there more. But with touring in general for us is just a matter of making sure we’re all available to get off work if we need to and hopefully the flights are really cheap y’know? hahahaha”
Do you guys have a favourite place to perform?
“Um, Lismore… I do love Lismore in Northern NSW, we go back to the farm after the show and the crew there is fucking awesome!
I also like the Brunny in Melbourne, we’ve played there a bunch of times which is fucking sweet.
Have you guys done many regional shows before?
“No, not really, I mean it’s so fucking expensive. We’ve wanted to come up heaps of times, but we’ve never been able to afford it… we wanted to drive and do it but we’d never be able to get all of us that time off work….”
[A loud plane flying overhead distracts Jodie]
“Wow what’s with all the planes today?
That’s like fucking 3 in ten minutes and I just watched a season of Air Crash Investigators so I think they’re all gonna crash!”
In 2013 Flangipanis took out the #1 spot on the 4ZZZ Hottest 100, was this a surprise?
“That was a HUGE surprise, I think a couple years before we placed like #5 or something and they were like our first recordings from 2011 and that was a huge fucking surprise! The next year we didn’t record anything and then the year after we got fucking number one it was amazing!
We were playing a brewery the day we found out, we got fucking wasted that night.”
Did you get anything for winning?
“No and that’s funny I remember my Dad asking the same question when I rang him to tell him, I was like it’s just like an accolade Dad, you don’t get anything and I thought he was like having a go, y’know teasing because we didn’t win anything – he calls it ‘4 triple who cares’ hahahaha anyway it was my Birthday like 4 days after that and Dad made me a fucking trophy because he was disappointed that we didn’t get anything which was really sweet.”
You have a new album coming out, would you like to talk about that?
“Mmmm, I’m fucking over it!
Hahahaha nah I’m really stoked that it’s sounding so fucking amazing it’s just that it’s such a long process.
We started pre-production in January and we only picked them up last week so y’know that just gives you an insight into how long it takes us, thats not including writing and rehearsing the songs of course.
Then we just had to line up the time so that we could all be available and then balance that with when the studio and producer was available.
We recorded it at a place called The Shed with Darek Mudge which was really cool because it’s only just down the road from my house and I can actually walk there, in fact I walked home from the studio drunk a few times. It’s the same place where Violent Soho recorded ‘Hungry Ghost’, it’s a really cool studio… we’ve been getting…
[Another plane distracts Jodie]
FUCKING PLANES! theres goes another one! seriously what’s that like four?
Anyways yeah we’ve been getting good feedback on the album, because the process took so long I was sneakily taking in unmastered tracks to play at 4ZZZ and yeah it’s been well received. We had to tour without an album though, oh yeah we were that guy!”
Will you guys be bringing merch with you?
“Well yeah we wanna do some stuff especially for you guys in NQ because we’ll be back in Townsville later on in the year, i don’t know maybe the Flangipanis skull will get a snorkel or something or we could make thongs… I don’t know but I’m sure we’ll come up with something, we know people who know people – we’ll make it happen. We just played a festival here in Brisbane called the Dead of Winter festival, which is a horror themed thing and we made these shirts that were like a rip-off of The Misfits logo and on the back they said “Suck My Zombie Cunt” – they sold out in 2 hours.”
What are the band’s future plans, what’s the endgame here?
“Hahahaha the endgame is that we just wanna keep this lineup together for as long as possible, because we’ve had a few lineup changes…we just wanna have fun with it and y’know as long as people like it and we like it thats all that fucking matters really and yeah we just wanna party and get naked really, we haven’t got world domination plans or anything like that!”
Peter Mellor
Flangipanis play Garageland @ The Grand #10 August 15 at The Grand Hotel Cairns.
Doors are at 6pm and local supports are: Tropic Roots, Barefoot Belles, Swamp Donkey, Why Wait, and Meat Bikini.
$8 entry on the door, 18+.
Show link below.
https://www.facebook.com/events/493652070786568/
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