Short interview with Mark during Canadian tour in 1986.

Author: Liam Lacey, The Globe and Mail.

Date: 7 November 1986.

Original URL: N/A.

Article Text

If you heard early records from Australia’s Hunters and Collectors, or saw the band’s abstract, macabre videos, you might imagine a band with hacked haircuts, scars and at least a few facial tattoos. Instead, the members of the band, now touring Canada, look more like boys from a college dorm. The band’s ideas, though, are still well left of centre.

“Image has become its own cliche,” says Mark Seymour, the group’s lead singer, “and it reached the point where there seemed little point in trying to out-weird the next band. For a while we were the definitive alternative Australian band – industrial noise, expressionistic and fairly black. It was easy to see our influences, where our sources of information were, which were all English.”

“There were a couple of important changes,” he adds. “We had some personnel changes and as a result we relaxed more. We also noticed that AC/DC was suddenly developing a very hip intellectual following, simply because they were perennial and what they did transcended fashion. So, we thought, okay, we’ll just stick to what we want and see how that works. We returned to our own roots, which were very brass heavy, early seventies, Australian pub rock, the sort of stuff we’d jam at the beach when we were teen-agers.

“Oddly enough,” Seymour says, “we’re probably more hip now than we ever were, because we have persisted in doing the sort of music that is natural to us. We’re writing pop songs, but there is a roughness and dark edge, and what we’re doing in reality is far more sophisticated than what we originally tried to do.”

Hunters and Collectors will appear Nov. 18 in Toronto, Nov. 19 in Kitchener, Ont., and Nov. 20 in Ottawa.

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Thankyou to Matt for typing out this article for us all to enjoy.