Lavaland: Coke Is It.

Lavaland play the Waterloo Hotel on Friday and the Troccadero, Surfers paradise on Saturday. Wired is in stores now.

The new single Wired is on the shelves so it’s time for Sydney-siders Lavaland to get back to the business of playing and promoting music. Singer and apparently devious bastard Jeremy Green called in to chat about the single, cocaine, yuppies, scum and most importantly, Bon Jovi. Rock, you see, turns to Lava at 9600 degrees fahrenheit, also the title of the second Bon Jovi album. Is he a Jon Bon fan from way back?

“My sister was, a bit might have rubbed off,” he says.

Subliminal influence then.

“Maybe I should admit to listening to a Bon Jovi tune when I was a little bit younger.”

Glad we got that all out in the open, fair to say Wired sounds less dense production-wise than Ever Wonder?

“Yeah, I guess so. When we’re writing songs we’re not thinking ‘this is the first single, this is the second single’. Ever Wonder was just the one song I wanted to have a crack at making a sort of electronica song out of. We put the guitars down for most of it and worked off keyboards and sequencers. When we came to Wired, we picked up the guitars again.”

No conscious change of direction?

“No just exploring, really. We’ve done a lot of exploring, and learning.”

It’s mainly you and Mark doing the exploring? Writing together?

“Every different possibility, ya know. I’ll come up with a riff and Mark will have some lyrics, or Mark will come up with a riff and I’ll have some lyrics, or we’ll both have a melody in our heads. Whenever we come up with stuff that we’re both happy with, it’s when we’ve both been there, both having input.”

Where did Wired come from?

“Basically it’s about giving myself a kick up the backside, not letting myself get run around. Ya gotta stay on it, ya know stay wired, man. No really it’s about snorting coke,” he laughs.

There’s a message for the kiddies out there in radioland. Any changes for the live show?

“We tend to rock out a little more, particularly with Ever Wonder, we have guitars on stage so we play guitars and that tends to run through the whole show. It’s a little bit more rock than the album would suggest. I like doing it that way ‘cause you gotta keep it fresh for yourself as well. If you can still represent the song the way it was deemed to do in the first place but without all the bells and whistles, then I think that’s a good thing.”

They’re still pop songs in the end.

“Yeah they’re pop songs. We don’t go to the extreme of being too self-indulgent, where you start playing something completely different. Sing one line from the song and say ‘okay that was the first single we released, you might not recognise it.”

Same line-up live as in the studio?

“We actually demo’d a few songs with Chris, who’s playing bass. We got another guy who was hanging around the rehearsal room, having a bit of a sniff around when we were looking for a drummer.”

Maybe he was sniffing around for some coke.

“We would have soon found out,” he laughs. “We’ve all been writing together lately too, so that’s been refreshing.”

No personality conflicts?

“No not at all, I mean we all hate each other,” he laughs.

But that’s just the coke talking. Ever been to Queensland before?

“We just filmed our film clip up there. In the valley.”

Did ya meet any of the locals?

“Yes I did,” he laughs. “We were in New Farm and some people did look at us a bit strangely.”

A good mix of yuppies and other kinds of scum down there.

“‘Other kinds of scum, I love it. Guns don’t kill people, scum kills people.”

Sounds like a t-shirt to me, or a bumper sticker. Perhaps we don’t wanna put that idea in their heads though, about killing people.

“True, these scummy yuppie types tend to…”