Rhubarb Reflect As Their Catalogue Hits Streaming Services: 'I'm Really Proud Of Our Adventure Together'

When Brisbane Indie-rock quartet Rhubarb pulled up stumps back in 2006, they well and truly did so on their own terms.

Despite possessing a CV that put most bands of their ilk to shame and having three increasingly accomplished albums under their collective belt - Kamikaze (1999), Slow Motion (2002) and Start Again (2004) - they were nonetheless sensing diminishing returns, so went out in style with a sold-out farewell show at iconic hometown venue The Zoo. That was the end of that chapter. Until now.

Over 17 years after that auspicious goodbye gig, the band have finally gotten around to placing their entire catalogue - all newly remixed and remastered and augmented by a new ‘best of’ collection, Exerciser: The Singles - onto streaming platforms, embracing an aspect of the digital realms that barely even existed when they were still a going concern.

For a band who’d been flogged on triple j, toured the country relentlessly and scored countless high-profile support and festival slots - as well as selling ludicrous amounts of albums for a staunchly independent act - it seems incongruous that their music has been inaccessible for so long. However, as founding frontman Steve Drinkall explains, it’s always been out there somewhere in the dark recesses of the interwebs.

“We had this idea when we finished that we'd just give it all away for free, so we've actually had it up on our website available for free download the whole time,” he laughs. “The whole catalogue has been available to download, but it's now got to a point where no one does that. I mean, even our kids can't figure out how to download it, so that world just does not exist at all. 

“Probably one thing that prompted me, too, was a couple of years ago in the Hottest 100, there was an article about someone remembering these great bands from past Hottest 100s, and they picked five or six kind of forgotten bands, and they put Rhubarb as one of them but also as one of the only Hottest 100 bands that you can't listen to online.

“That made me think, ‘Okay, this is getting a bit ridiculous. We need to let people reconnect with it again’. I'm looking forward to what kind of conversations and stuff comes out of the woodwork now that it’s out there again.”

No doubt the track that the Hottest 100 article would have been referencing was Rhubarb’s 1999 smash hit Exerciser, the catchy-as-hell paean to healthy living which was omnipresent on the triple j airwaves that year and came in at #20 on the fan-voted end-of-year poll.

But even that epic result for a young up-and-coming band had been preceded by another leg-up from the national youth broadcaster, when Rhubarb’s track Zero had found them Unearthed by triple j.

Drinkall - who’d formed Rhubarb in 1996 with his brother Dave (guitar), Paul Harvey (bass) and Ian Buchanan (drums) - admits that this initial traction proved imperative to their long-term success.

“We had been just kind of starting out as a band, just mucking around playing gigs where we could, then at one point we decided that we needed to record something properly,” he recalls. “I remember us pooling around three thousand bucks each - somehow we got together 12-to-15 grand - and we said let's just write a bunch of songs to record them well and just kind of let that be our platform.

“I think we only ever wrote like 11 songs, and ten of them are on that first album, Kamikaze. And that was literally finished about a month before Unearthed came to Brisbane, so the timing was pretty perfect. Everyone submitted their tapes back in those days. I think it was like 2,000 entries they got for Brisbane, so we submitted ours at the same time and got picked up. 

“That made a huge difference because you go from being known a bit in Brisbane to being known across the country really quickly. So it kind of just broadens the scope for playing, for interviews, for publicity, for everything. It made a huge difference.

“I remember one of the station’s presenters telling me that when you win Unearthed, you’re not just winning a competition, but you’re winning a relationship with triple j, so maximise it.

“And that proved to be true, they really did they really did get behind lots of our music. Not just that first song, Zero, but when Exerciser came out, they really got on board with that, and it got some momentum, and it made a huge difference to us.

“We really went from zero airplay to being on high rotation on triple j and even getting some play on the commercial stations. There was a period there when you couldn't drive anywhere in the car without hearing one of our songs, which is pretty amazing.”

Changing Faces

Kamikaze would go on to sell 15,000 copies on the band-affiliated Toupee Records - a staggering amount for an independent act - but the young band’s musical horizons were shifting, as were their personnel.

When Harvey decided to leave the ranks, it prompted a line-up shuffle, with Dave Drinkall taking up the four-string and Caleb James - who’d produced Kamikaze as well as already being a mainstay on the Brisbane scene fronting a handful of respected outfits - joined the close-knit outfit on guitar/vocals.

“Bands aren't always the most organised creatures; they can be really creative, but they're not necessarily the most organised,” James smiles. “But the Rhubarb boys were really switched on. They were super-creative but really organised and really savvy with the way they approached their business and their structuring, approaching how they used their money and everything. It was really impressive. 

“So when Paul had to leave the band, things were going really well for them in terms of traction and momentum. But when the boys asked me to join the band, at that stage, I was already in a few other bands, and I’d just gotten married - it was literally a few months after I'd been married. So, I had another person to include seriously in the conversations, and we had a chat about it. 

“And I think what took me over the edge to join the band was just how solid they were as a unit. They were musically really capable - great songwriters - but just super-organised and prepared and with an amazing work ethic. So, I just thought, if I'm gonna throw a whole bunch of hours and days and months and years into another project, I wanted to be with some people that I trust to do the same. And that's exactly how it worked out. 

“So, I joined the band and Dave, and I basically stepped into a pretty immediate co-songwriting relationship from the start. We were doing that a bit anyway, in a less formal way, when I was producing. So I was working with him and the boys, but Dave and I worked together a lot. And then when I was in the band, we just kind of stepped that whole thing up and were really, really proactive together in terms of generating material.

This new creative set-up ushered in an aesthetic change for Rhubarb, one that Steve Drinkall believes had a massively positive effect on their musical output.

“When we listen back to our canon, it feels like the better we got as a band, the less commercially successful we were,” he tells. “We bashed out the first album really quickly, so those songs had a lot of energy and were pretty accessible. You know, that were fairly catchy, high-energy type songs. But if you listen to it as an album, it doesn't really fit together, perhaps as well as some of the later albums. So that was the first one, and that went really well. 

“For the follow-up, Slow Motion, we took our time with a lot more, and Caleb not only joined the band but came into the band as a much stronger guitarist than we'd had before. That was probably the first time we thought of ourselves as an actual band - in the first instance, we thought of ourselves as four mates who were going to have a crack at making an album. 

“For the second one, we were starting to think of ourselves as a band and think about what types of songs we wanted to write, what kind of sound. We were much more influenced by bands like Powderfinger and Radiohead, even some of the earlier U2 type of stuff. So we took two years to make that second album and I guess a lot a lot more thought and craft and effort went into that, and it sounds so different to the first one.” 

“We had a big string section and everything, trying to really push it beyond just the four of us. I guess part of that was just us having fun and out of interest, you know, trying to work out how those songs could be bigger and better than what was just another Brisbane guitar band, which is probably how we saw ourselves when we first started.”

“I was basically trying to step up the sophistication of the music; I wanted to do something as a band that kind of shocked people with how ambitious it was in terms of some of the creative goals and some of the recording and production goals as well,” James reflects. “The boys were all on board; they were keen to jump on and go for it. And I think that record sounds a lot like the band growing up, even though we were grown-ass men at the time. But the sound was really maturing. It's a very mature-sounding record.”

Best Of Both Worlds

The more ‘mature’ sound of Slow Motion was well-received in the marketplace - Rolling Stone called it “totally irresistible”, triple j smashed power-pop bangers like New York and Caroline (even the restrained ballad Just Another Pilot got plenty of spins), and it moved a more-than-respectable 10,000 units - but Rhubarb were never a band to rest on their laurels.

For the follow-up, Start Again, they changed tack again, this time deciding not to ditch the mature veneer they’d refined on Slow Motion but to instead meld it together with the more raucous vibe of their earlier material.

“On the third album, we really just to make a rock’n’roll album and have some fun,” Drinkall smiles. “We kind of just wrote songs jamming on things that we would want to hear, just sitting around and playing in the practice studio. I think it's got a lot of the catchiness of the first album. 

“It’s just pretty simple rock’n’roll in the delivery which is actually really good fun to play, good fun to record, and I probably still listen to that album more than the others, myself. I feel like, as a band, it's probably our most complete record, even though a lot of people connect more with the early ones.”

“Start Again is kind of like this interesting combination of both sides of Rhubarb, which happens really often for bands,” James offers. “The third album has got a kind of rawness and a rock energy that feels like a band coming out of the gates, but it's got authority to it in terms of some of the songwriting choices and the performances where you can tell that the band's been around for a while.

“There’s some really confident choices in there. So it's interesting that we ended up back in our rock roots, but with much more authority in the sound and a lot more confidence in the sound as well. We sound far less naive.”

New Beginnings

It was only a couple of years after the release of Start Again that Rhubarb called time on their career, and the four members moved on with their lives.

But now that they’ve been afforded the opportunity to represent their music to the world afresh, James - who ultimately produced all three of the Rhubarb albums and took control of the remastering process (with his associate Matthew Grey handling the remastering) - could not be happier.

“I think the biggest challenge was trying to protect the feeling of those records, which for a lot of people is imprinted in their brains in a certain way,” he offers. “So trying to protect the feeling of the records but also elevate it to the level that I knew all those albums should have been from day one. I feel like I achieved that, but we'll find out when the streaming releases.

“Mainly, though, I'm really thankful for the opportunity to spend some time with those records again; it was actually a really emotional experience in the most positive way. It was literally like time travelling back, you know, to 20, 22 years ago to where we were then and remembering all the stuff that was happening and remembering writing those songs with Dave, refining those songs with Steve and Bucky, plus the tours, the successes, the challenges - it was a really, really rewarding experience. 

“And I know a lot of producers and bands don't get to do that, so I was actually really grateful for the chance to dig in and also for the trust that the rest of the band had in me to protect the legacy.”

Drinkall, too, is completely excited at the prospect of Rhubarb’s music being freely available again to fans old and (hopefully) new.

“We always used to say to each other that when you're in a band, you're always thinking about trying to do something bigger and better and get to the next thing and the bigger thing and that it becomes a bit like drinking salt water, you know, it never satisfies you,” he muses. “You can never be big enough, play at a big enough thing, get enough airplay, get enough whatever. 

“So, once we got a bit of that out of our system with the first album, we would often just say to each other, like, ‘We've got to enjoy this gig like it's our last’. We've already come further than most of our friends and people who are in bands and people who wanted to pursue this thing, so let's just let's enjoy it now while we're here rather than, you know, constantly sabotage it by wishing you were at a bigger thing. 

“So, we did. In the last couple of albums, we had lots of good fun, made good music, enjoyed hanging out together, met lots of great people and certainly got further than we expected when we first got together. Looking back, I’m really proud of our adventure together, and I’m stoked that the music we made together is back in the public domain. I hope people check it out, and I hope they like it.”