COVER NOTES
A new album, another tour... now (very deservingly) a front cover for Straitjacket Fits. It's been said of late, that if it's good original music, it's probably being made in New Zealand and the band is most likely signed to Flying Nun. "Straitjacket" fits the bill on both counts! The latest album was produced by Gavin MacKillop (Hunters & Collectors, Shriekback) and although the title is Melt, you can be assured there's no melting involved with this band. As our very own record reviewer Andrew Khedoori puts it... "When critics place Straitjacket Fits in the same class as other guitar bands like Television, Husker Du and Sonic Youth, it's not a crime of hype. The crime would be to neglect them." Don't miss their shows!

photo by Tony Mott

COME ON FEEL THE NOISE
Straitjacket Fits story by Barry Divola

Shayne Carter wants to know if the whole country is in mourning over the Rugby League. I confess my ignorance with most things involving men running around a field surrounded by cigarette advertising. Did we do very badly?

"It was excellent," he says with barely disguised glee. "They were ranked as invincibles and they were tipped off the board."

Ah, good to see there's no love lost there Shayne! I can't blame him for this little dig however. Last time we spoke was in Sydney the day after a gig at the Lansdowne. He'd lost his wallet and some bastard had relieved him of his left-handed Gibson Les Paul guitar. The combination of borrowed equipment and studio fever from the sessions for their second album resulted in a gig that suggested the Fits were flailing about underwater. Still, when you're talking about a band, of their power and beauty, they did an admirable job of keeping afloat. It's just that on a good night we've come to expect them to walk across the waves.

"We'll be sleeping and showering with our guitars this time," says Shayne. "We'll go to the toilet and sit them in front of us!"

One never knows when inspiration will strike, after all...

"Yeah, right. Although I can unequivocally say that no Straitjacket Fits songs have been written on the toilet."

So where do they usually happen?

"Most are written in the bedroom, because the flatmates can't stand it when you're sitting beside them as they watch television and you're hollering and battering away on an unelectrified electric guitar. At the moment we've got a shed out the back of our flat and it's good to go out there and make some noise. But there are these really horrible kids next door who throw stones on the roof and yell 'Woah, rock 'n' roll!' in a sneering contemptible way. Then you start singing really quietly. Our next batch of songs will probably be pretty close to George Michael's latest album I think - quiet and inhibited. All due to the obnoxious little shits next door."

Quiet and inhibited are two adjectives which totally fail to describe Melt, Straitjacket Fits' second full-length album. Keen observers have already been struck down by what this band can do with metal strings and a bit of amplification, but this record more than delivers on the promise of things to come. The Fits manage to do things with guitars that many bands with guitars rarely manage to do - they bend them into weird and wonderful shapes and put big, sometimes scary melodies over the top of them. When they're in full flight they're like a rollercoaster - if you stand underneath there's a hell of a clatter in your eardrums, but look at it from the right angle and it's poetry in motion.

Noise and melody - The Pixies know how to use it. So do Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. And so do Straitjacket Fits. In fact, I'm going to call their songs "pop symphonies."

"That's a good way of describing it actually," says Shayne. "I like a bit of goo on top, a bit of melody, but it's got to have that excitement underneath it as well. With this record I think we've got the pop factor in there, but with our band we've got to be very wary that the pop factor doesn't get pushed too far. We could very easily be cleaned up and that would totally get rid of what the band's all about. That would suck us dry. We've got to be very conscious that the edges don't get corroded... I don't know, in three years time when we're making our MOR album of sophisticated adult pop you can come around and spit in our faces!"

Thanks, I'll remember that. No need to get rash at the moment though. Melt was produced by Gavin MacKillop (who's worked with Shriekback, Hunters & Collectors and Toni Childs, if you're one of those people who like that sort of info) and Shayne admits that there were a healthy number of screaming matches and "we said 'fuck' lots of times." But he adds that this sort of behaviour is par for the course when you're working on something you love for 15 hours a day.

"I think some of our previous records have come out a bit one-dimensional and squashed up. The full glory of the band wasn't there. Gavin is only a couple of years older than us so he felt very much like a contemporary rather than an exalted authoritarian figure."

One of those "squashed up" records was the brilliant 1987 EP Life In One Chord, the first recordings of Carter, Andrew Brough (guitar/vocals), John Collie (drums) and David Wood (bass). Carter and Collie had already played together in The Doublehappys, which split in 1986 after the tragic death of guitarist Wayne Elsey. Previously Carter had been a founding member of Board Games [sic], who recorded the Who Killed Colonel Mustard? EP in 1982. It was the beginning of Carter's association with Flying Nun. In fact, his links with the label were to go even further - he became their receptionist! It's inevitable that "the Flying Nun thing" should come up in conversation.

"Well that scene started almost 10 years ago and all of us are a product of that. Our musical grounding came from the scene. But Flying Nun has been more of a facilitator. It's not as though they invented the bands and wrote the songs. It's just that Roger (Shepherd, head of the label) has got a very similar attitude towards the music and what it should be. You can get a lot of mileage out of the Flying Nun connection, but I don't think it does credit to the diversity of bands on the label. I do think that everyone's got a similar attitude to how they should approach the whole thing, but the music is quite different."

Point taken. After all, The Bats and Bailterspace sound like they come from different ends of the planet, yet there they are in adjoining stables.

As for Straitjacket Fits, well Shayne sounds like a proud parent when he talks about Melt. Of course, every artist in the history of modern music says "we're really pleased with the new album", but not many add "It's quite a foreign feeling for us because we usually go around slagging our records." Is this ridiculous modesty or just bad self-promotion?

"It's just that the 14 songs on Life In One Chord and the first album were chosen out of the first 18 songs we'd ever written," Shayne explains. "We went in just a bit too quickly. The EP was the cream on top and then you got to the layers below. Some were horrible bits of jelly and others were reasonably tasty bits of chocolate."

Ironic that a New Zealander should describe his music using a confectionary metaphor. After all, Shayne is from the land of the chocolate fish, the pineapple lump, and his personal favourite, the aniseed wheel.