Taxiride: Set Up.

Taxiride play the Surfers Paradise Beergarden on Friday and the Waterloo Hotel on Saturday. Garage Mahal is in stores on August 5.

Taxiride are back, and the three years since the release of their mega selling Imaginate debut finds them with a quite a different recording. Creeping Up Slowly, the first single from their about to be released Garage Mahal long player, is the result of some serious song writing sessions.

“We didn’t want to rush into a new record and live off the success of the last record,” Jason Singh explains. “We wanted to distance ourselves from it as much as we could for a while, do a lot of playing behind closed doors and come back as something different. For ourselves as much as our fans. We had to make it interesting.”

While the big hooks and slick sounds that dominated the airwaves through tracks like Get Set and Everywhere You Go are still apparent this recording is more about the band coming to terms with their own musical personalities, and a chance to step back from it’s predecessor

“The last few years have just been writing and recording,” Tim Wild explains.

“We just had to say no more gigs until the new record comes out,” Jason continues. “I could listen to Imaginate again now, but for a while there I just couldn’t listen to it any more.”

“We’re changing the old songs around for this tour,” Tim Wild says. “You kind of adapt things more to the style of the band now, we’ve evolved as a band just naturally.”

“Our last gig was New Years Eve 2000,” Tim Watson continues. “We just had to make t a cut off point. When we were working on the new album it just felt wrong to be playing those old songs when we were concentrating on something new. Some of the songs for this record were written back during the recording of the first record, but the last year we’ve gotten really intensely into writing, and gone away on trips together. It’s easier to write when we’re stuck out in the middle of nowhere with nothing else to do.”

“Just bury your head in the sand and don’t come back until you’ve got some new songs,” Jason laughs. “When you’re at home there’s too many distractions. You go to the rehearsal room and just fuck about.”

The band have their own rehearsal and writing space set up in their home metropolis, Melbourne.

“Our sound guy owns a studio in Melbourne, called Delux Audio,” Tim Watson explains.

Time for a shameless plug..

“Yeah,” he laughs. “We’re actually decking it out like some of the rehearsal rooms in LA that we worked in, where there’s a stage, lights, so you can actually rehearse a show instead of standing around and growing piles of rubbish. You can hire out a room that you could do a gig in, and that’s what we try to do.”

Because at the end of the day, being up on stage is what being in a band is about, and after a long hiatus from the live scene, Taxiride are hungry to get back.

“There were some Japanese fans in Sydney on the last tour, who had tickets to Sting, but came and saw our gig,” laughs Jason Singh. “What are you doing? I was temped to blow out our gig to go and see Sting.”

“Nah, we couldn’t do that,” Tim Watson rebukes. “We love playing too much. If it’s for five people or 5000 it doesn’t matter.