How Brisbane's The Iron Eye One-Upped Violent Soho

Never, ever, ever let The Iron Eye borrow/hire/use or… well… breathe around pretty much anything you own. In making their five-track EP Foreign Bodies, vocalist/guitarist Nick Lythall proudly announces that he managed to blow up not one, but three amps. Oh, and they also managed to simultaneously trash their bass player's boss' shop and turn it pink. 

"I'm a bit like a hurricane," Lythall announces. "I just came in and destroyed - well, I didn't destroy them, they were sorta on their last legs." Yeah, we're not buying it, and neither did their engineer John Grace. Lythall was metaphorically plonked in the naughty corner and given "a tiny amp that is half the size of a lunchbox" instead.

"It took us a good ten hours on the Sunday night to clean the floors and then obviously we had to go back in the next weekend and paint the walls!"

The Brisbane three-piece have clocked up an impressive log of support slots with the likes of Harts, DZ Deathrays, Grenadiers, King Of The North, Jericco, and more, but the ultimate notch on their belt was punched by The Iron Eye's "childhood heroes I guess, [a] band we looked up to - Shihad - I remember watching their videos on Rage on Saturday mornings when I was younger," smiles Lythall.

Tom Larkin from Shihad ended up producing Foreign Bodies. "Honestly he's very to the point; he doesn't talk shit... But when we met him he was just the most humblest, sweetest dude, incredibly intelligent guy as well, just his insights not only to the music industry but just life as a musician and life in general," Lythall enthuses. "It was pretty daunting, not gonna lie. We may or may not have just been practicing like 24 hours a day just to hide the fact that we're pretty ordinary at our instruments!"

As self-deprecating as Lythall is about the band's musical prowess, they made an extraordinary music video to accompany single Just Started in which they play the track in reverse amidst total chaos. "We basically made a mini backing track that we learned to play the song to - you try to listen to the song backwards and it just doesn't make sense... Satanic messages coming out telling you to vote Trump or whatever," he jokes. "You've got powder and cake and water and flour and all this shit getting thrown at you - stuff in my mouth when I'm trying to sing it!" Directed by bassist David Webster, the idea was conceived after he "saw a Violent Soho video and they're playing in this rundown house and it was semi destroyed, and he thought they were going to destroy the house more in the video, but they didn't. So he's like 'cool, how about we do that and just destroy something and do it backwards'."

"[Webster's] boss was kind enough to lend us the space for the weekend... We didn't tell him that the walls were going to be dyed pink after. It took us a good ten hours on the Sunday night to clean the floors and then obviously we had to go back in the next weekend and paint the walls!"