Hoodoo Gurus defy the gatekeepers of ‘cool’ to survive 40 years and release 10th album

Hoodoo Gurus’s new record is a defiant statement of survival from the beloved band many in the Aussie music industry didn’t want to succeed.

There would be no 40th anniversary victory lap around Australia for the mighty Hoodoo Gurus without the existence of their new album Chariot of the Gods.

Their 10th studio record, and in particular the song Carry On, is a defiant middle finger thrust in the face of music industry gatekeepers who have always treated one of Australia’s most popular bands as outliers.

The Gurus celebrate their 40th anniversary with a tour and new album. Picture: Supplied.

“Carry On has a bit of my feelings about how the band has been always on the other side; we’re too ‘uncommercial’ and too commercial for (Triple J). Everyone’s got a reason for why we don’t belong with them and why they won’t champion us,” frontman Dave Faulkner says.

“So we’re just going to do what we do and f —k you all.”

The Hoodoo Gurus formed in Sydney in 1981, charged with the punk energy and attitude the musicians had forged with their previous bands in Perth.

While there was no disputing the visceral attack of their brand of guitar rock, the Gurus were armed with a secret weapon – Faulkner’s innate knack for a melodic hook.

His pop sensibilities were undeniable and the band quickly crossed over from the indie rock scene to the top 40 with a string of hits including My Girl, Bittersweet, Like Wow – Wipeout! and What’s My Scene?

Faulkner speculates that pop chart success saw them banished by their “cool” contemporaries and the alternative airwaves of Triple J.

The Gurus remain one of Australia’s most loved live acts. Picture: NCA.

“I’ve always felt like we were blamed for having success too early and a lot of people who were our contemporaries in that underground scene may have been envious and you were disqualified from being a cool band anymore,” he says.

“If you got played on commercial radio, you couldn’t be played on (Triple J) any more and it wasn’t until Nirvana had a hit with Smells Like Teen Spirit in 1991 that it was suddenly OK to have success and still be cool.”

Regardless of the perverse indie snobbery, Hoodoo Gurus have remained a “cool” band – and their songs indelibly stamped on Australia’s cultural psyche – to not only their legion of loyal followers in Australia but throughout America, Europe and Brazil.

Any mention of upcoming gigs and the band’s social media pages are inundated with “please come to my town” requests. And they are now in a position to entertain the possibility of international tours thanks to the release of Chariot of the Gods last week.

The Gurus decided to Carry On after longtime drummer Mark Kingsmill retired. Picture: Supplied.

Faulkner had always thought the band would pull up stumps if any member of the “classic” line-up since 1988 decided to quit.

When drummer Mark Kingsmill retired in 2014, Faulkner, guitarist Brad Shepherd and bassist Rick Grossman hired Nik Rieth to fill the seat for the gigs they already had planned.

But their continued existence after four decades and a lot of water under the bridge – a four-decade musical marriage is not without its tensions – was wholly dependent on their desire to make new music. Faulkner and his bandmates didn’t want to spend the next 10 years just playing the old songs.

“Why do you do a new album in this day and age? In terms of income, it probably is more like an advertisement for your wares if you are a live touring entity; it’s like a glamorous poster,” Faulkner says. “But obviously it means so much more to us because we want to keep exploring our world of music and find what else we are turned on by.

“And last but not least, making this record was the reason why we continued. Are we going to stop? If the answer was no, then we had to make a new record.”

Chariot of the Gods feels like a classic Guru record – coming 12 years after their last studio album Purity of Essence – but its songs are almost entirely inspired by the zeitgeist.

The video for Carry On is a tear-jerker, a short film that casts the song as the soundtrack to a day in the life of a nurse and the physical and emotional toll suffered by frontline workers during the pandemic.

The title track tackles the experience of the First Nations people witnessing the arrival of British ships on Australian shores and the colonisation of the country. Faulkner recasts the experience as aliens landing on Earth now.

Chariot of the Gods is out now. Picture: Supplied.

“The whole song is a metaphor to try to give people who may have zero understanding or never think twice about what happened in Australia 200 plus years ago when the Europeans landed here and how that would have seemed like science fiction to the Aboriginal people, these strange craft and people in strange garb turning up with exotic weapons and disease,” he says.

“I want people to, in a sense, relate how it would feel to lose everything that to you is normal, when this other unstoppable force comes in and just changes everything. And you know, that could have been Covid, as well.”

Chariot of the Gods is out now. The Hoodoo Gurus 40th Anniversary tour begins on April 5. Dates and tickets via frontiertouring.com