Regurgitator: band of outsiders springs back to life

Regurgitator has always pleased itself — and fans are happy to tag along.

Regurgitator’s Peter Kostic, Quan Yeomans and Ben Ely in the studio in Melbourne. Picture : David Geraghty

After spending much of his adult life fronting one of Australia’s most peculiar and enduring rock bands, singer and guitarist Quan Yeomans has had plenty of time to think about the strange way in which the inherently selfish pursuit of playing music becomes selfless once it reaches the ears of its audience.

“I think that’s the trick of art,” Yeomans says by phone from his home in Melbourne. “It really is framing metaphors that resonate with other people; that’s what art is. If you can get that metaphor out in a catchy way and it resonates with a lot of people, then you become famous for that framing of that particular idea.”

Ideas for which Regurgitator have become famous include Polyester Girl, a song about a blow-up sex doll; Black Bugs, a song about a video game starring Satan’s rainbow; and Kong Foo Sing, a song about the contents of a fortune cookie.

These three singles arrived in the mid-1990s when Australian youth culture was cresting a wave of fascination with alternative rock music that coincided with radio station Triple J expanding its broadcast reach beyond capital cities and into regional centres.

From the beginning, its ­melange of punk rock, ironic pop and hip-hop beats meant Regurgitator cast a wide aural net suited to ensnaring large audiences. Its 1997 album Unit sold more than 210,000 copies and won five ARIA awards, including album of the year. Since its debut, 1996’s Tu-Plang — the Thai word for jukebox, which smartly captures the band’s stylistically erratic, distracted approach to music-making — Regurgitator has continued to surf popular culture, even if the swell has never quite reached the heights of two decades ago.

Another potent image with which the group was associated was that of a self-imposed prison — specifically, Band in a Bubble, a unique performance-art piece conceived by Regurgitator’s manager Paul Curtis, which had the three musicians holed up in a transparent dome in Melbourne’s Federation Square in 2004. There they were tasked with recording Mish Mash!, the group’s fifth album and first as independent artists after ending their relationship with Warner Music.

In the bubble, Yeomans, bassist Ben Ely and drummer Peter ­Kostic were joined by a producer, an engineer and a Channel V television presenter, with no one else permitted to enter or leave for the duration. The entire recording session was broadcast live online and on a dedicated Foxtel digital channel, with Channel V airing a half-hour highlights package each day. Other than while sleeping, showering or using the bathroom, the band members were constantly on show for three weeks.

“Like Hitchcock extras, they will be locked in with no escape from each other and ultimately themselves,” Curtis wrote on the Band in a Bubble website. “Trapped for 21 days with each other and a plethora of cameras recording every twitch as they rush to record an entire album, they will give themselves to us like no band has given before.”

Food was served by Lien Yeomans — a notable Vietnamese chef, cookbook author and mother of the band’s frontman — through a hatch that also allowed Curtis to communicate with the group, while members of the public could use an intercom system that recorded every spoken word.

In hindsight, it is unsurprising Regurgitator was the first band to try such a stunt, for its playful nature has always seemed to run parallel to traditional music-industry machinations. Rather than buying into the celebrity associated with becoming alternative rock stars, the Brisbane-born band was always the first to laugh at itself and everything around it.

The first track on Tu-Plang, for instance, was named I Sucked a Lot of Cock to Get Where I Am; it also kicked off Unit with I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff, a song whose opening lines include “Please write some songs that ­really do not suck / Please become what you were before.”

By seeking to please themselves first, Ely, Kostic and Yeomans have built a career in which they are self-styled outsiders. Despite today attracting little interest from the public broadcaster that helped to put Regurgitator’s music on the map, the trio retain a healthy fan base proudly in on the joke, no matter which weird avenues are explored on their search for punchlines and pleasure.

‘We’d actually be quite a good band if we did rehearse on a regular basis’

The latest result of that attitude is Headroxx, the band’s ninth album and its first since 2013’s Dirty Pop Fantasy. The new album comprises 12 songs across 35 minutes, with the songwriting credits split between Yeomans and Ely. The busy cover artwork, designed by Benjamin Adams, was a key influence in the writing process.

“He gave us the record cover long before we finished the record, and the art made us make it stranger,” Ely notes, while sitting in the winter sun at a cafe on Brisbane’s north side.

“All the songs have this common theme of feeling mentally dysfunctional in the modern world; stressed and anxious with the responsibilities of family life, bills, the environment and politics. A lot of these themes are pervasive through the record, and that’s why we called it Headroxx. Now that we don’t get played on the radio, it doesn’t really matter; we were like, ‘Let’s just make something as f..ked-up as we can.’ ”

Musically, it’s a melting pot of the diverse stylistic palettes with which the band has painted since its earliest recordings. The thrash-metal guitar riff that propels Graffiti is Coming Alive contrasts with the retro keyboard sounds in Weird Kind of Hard, for which drummer Kostic tackles lead vocals for the first time, eventually breaking down in laughter mid-take. Party Looks is a classic Yeomans funk-pop track whose hook features a cheerleader-style chorus, while Ely’s The Spirit of Ian Curtis ends the album on a melancholic, instrumental note.

Today, the three band members live in different cities: Ely in Brisbane, Kostic in Sydney and Yeomans in Melbourne. When they do reconvene, the goal is to maximise their creative efficiency: last week in Melbourne, for instance, they filmed six videos in a single day, and spent seven hours a day preparing for an upcoming national tour.

“We all realised, at the end of those rehearsals, that we’d actually be quite a good band if we did rehearse on a regular basis,” Yeomans observes with a laugh.

After nearly 25 years together — during which manager Curtis is said to have missed only a handful of performances among thousands of shows, according to Ely — it is a fool’s errand to anticipate what lies in store for Regurgitator beyond the dates booked this month. Both songwriters mention the idea of recording an album aimed at children, which sounds like it would perfectly suit the band’s restless nature.

Or perhaps the three musicians simply will farewell each other and return to their separate lives, with scarcely a backward glance at the colourful, memorable metaphors scattered in their wake. In that sense, the blunt name of this tour is apt: Life Support.

-

Headroxx is released tomorrow on Valve Records. Regurgitator performs in Newcastle tonight, followed by Sydney (Friday) through to Maroochydore (August 26).