Chocks Away

"It wasn't until quite recently in my life that I started looking at the music of the '90s and pop music around at the moment,” singer, songwriter, trumpeter and Flap! bandleader Eamon McNelis admits. “All the music that I should have grown up with – I think was a bit of a prudish young man – all seemed a bit full-on to me. I suppose it was maybe my Catholic upbringing, but most of the repertoire of the '90s seemed to be quite stupid music, so I was into Elvis Presley when I was younger and then when I took up the trumpet, I started getting into Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong.

“And I suppose growing up in Collingwood, if you couldn't play basketball and you couldn't play Street Fighter, the arcade game, you were a bit of a persona non grata. So I found a thing – playing the trumpet – that I was good at and I suppose I hid myself in that… what's the word… retrospective world. In Melbourne, there were a lot of people taking the more modern Miles Davis approach to innovation and saying, 'Okay guys, go for it – innovate like that'. Which was impossible – you can't innovate in the same way that anybody else does – and there was just so much energy and vitality in a couple of jazz bands, The Band Who Knew Too Much and The Hoodangers, in Melbourne, so I think I was attracted to that and they're certainly massive influences on Flap! and definitely part of the reason why I started playing traditional jazz music.”

Along with the energy and vitality McNelis found, there was the sense of fun that could be had in playing music based in that earlier jazz tradition, particularly lyrically. It's something that's obvious in the music the five-piece Flap! makes and is all over their second album, A Great Day For The Race, in songs like The Northcote Rooster and Come Down To My Funeral.

“I like people who are funny; I like people who like laughing. It's one of the deepest aspects of humanity. In stuff that I read and watch on telly, the comedic aspects are always the most revealing, often anyway. [Singer, banjo and ukulele player] Jess [Guille]'s husband is a clown and my girlfriend's in the circus, so we've got a lot of clowning stuff around us and all this stuff is deeply and intrinsically linked to death.”

Originally coming together during an informal jam at the Port Fairy Folk Festival in 2007, Flap! released their self-titled debut album late in 2008, so from the outside the three and a bit years between albums might seem a long time, but as professional musicians all of whom are in anything up to a dozen projects at the same time, as you have to be to make a living out of it.

“When we recorded that first album, Ben [Hendry, drums] had only just joined the band and our regular trombone player Don [Stewart] wasn't in the band. So we did a lot of gigs and found aspects of our voice that we hadn't discovered in that first album and I think it's all part of a process and I'm very much looking forward to the next one.”