Children Collide

7 February 2011 | 8:07 pm | Staff Writer
Originally Appeared In

After a string of successful shows at Big Day Out and after revealing that they will be playing Pushover Festival in Melbourne next month, Children Collide are continuing to do what they do best - keep busy. Bass guitarist Heath Crawley stopped in with us to chat about Push Over, Big Day Out and the band's past, present and future.

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After a string of successful shows at Big Day Out and after revealing that they will be playing Pushover Festival in Melbourne next month, Children Collide are continuing to do what they do best - keep busy. Bass guitarist Heath Crawley stopped in with us to chat about Push Over, Big Day Out and the band's past, present and future.

Hey Heath, this is Jake from Killyourstereo, how’s things?

Yeah I’m good man, how are you?

Yeah really good mate. Awesome work at Big Day Out in Melbourne, how’s the tour been so far?

Cheers. It’s been awesome. Really hot, but still good. When we play we tend to lose our heads a little bit, so with the extra heat it’s been a bit chaotic. 40 degrees in Melbourne killed us.

It killed a lot of the crowd as well, I remember looking around in the Deftones mosh and half the people were almost passed out, being knocked around like ragdolls.

Yeah I saw a bit of that sort of thing as well. Especially Deftones, the pits have been a bit extra-epic.

Any bands that have impressed you in particular on the tour?

Well it’s funny that you should mention Deftones actually. When I was in school, all my friends were into music but none of us were really into the same genre. Deftones were the only real crossover band that we all liked. So their shows have been great, a little bit for Nostalgic reasons and also because they put on an awesome show. Grinderman were awesome as well and a Melbourne band called ‘The UV Race’ were quite impressive. Die Antwoord and Rammstein have also been entertaining, very funny.

You guys were recently announced to be playing Pushover festival as well, I believe it’s a return appearance for you as well. How have previous years been?

Yeah we’ve played Pushover festival a couple of times and it’s gone crazy. The venue is really cool too; the Abbotsford convent is a great place for a show.

Well Australia Day for you was spent playing Big Day Out in Sydney, but you would have to be happy with your hottest 100 results?

Very happy, that was cool. Jellylegs is one of my personal favourite songs off the latest album so it was nice to see it at #22. We were pretty happy with My Eagle at #60 as well. Obviously we were running around and catching bands so we weren’t sitting by the radio, but we got told by different people during the day and we were pretty happy.

Who were your picks for #1?

Let’s just say that I wasn’t surprised by the results at all. I actually thought Little Red was going to get it, but I’ve heard Big Jet Plane a million times on the radio, so yeah – not surprising.

You’ve been touring pretty hard since you released The Theory of Everything, how long do you think you’ll tour it before starting to think about your next release?

We’ve got quite a few shows lined up for April, promoting our single “Arrows.” We’ll probably keep touring the album until our next album is ready to go. We’re going to start demoing for album number three fairly shortly, we might even throw a few new songs into our live set.

You did some recording in Los Angeles for your latest record, have you got any plans to push some more overseas releases or touring?

Yeah definitely. The Long Now was released in Canada through Dine Alone. The biggest band on the label was probably Alexisonfire and we were lucky enough to play a couple of shows with them in Canada. We were over in the US and UK recently as well, we’d love to release an album in other parts of the world.

Awesome, what were the Alexisonfire guys like to play with?

Really cool, the Dine Alone guys were awesome too. Alexisonfire would have to be the biggest band in Canada at the moment, their fans are absolutely epic. I hang out with the bass player a lot, rad guy.

While we’re talking bass, as a bassist myself I’m curious as to some of your biggest influences are?

Well we all took a lot of early influence from the grunge scene, we were all right into it when we started playing music. I was right into the gothic side of things as well and The Cure were one of my favourite bands, so I suppose their bass player was a big influence. Other than that, I’ve always loved post-punk and Mission of Burma’s ‘Vs.’ is my all-time favourite album. I think after I’d been playing for a while though, the influences became less important as I started to develop my own style in Children Collide.

What would be your personal favourite Children Collide song?

Chosen Armies. It was recorded twice, has been played at almost every show and is very close to the heart. Fire Engine would be another one, it’s been sort of our warcry and our trademark ending. We wrote both those songs when I was basically still learning how to play bass! It’s really the two extremes of what we do, the noisy and chaotic side of us comes out in Fire Engine and the Psychedelic, poppy aspect of our band comes out in Chosen Armies.

I heard that you were responsible for Children Collide’s name, can you let us know what happened there?

Well me, Johnny and our original drummer were all living in a share house at the time and our electricity was about to be cut-off. We had extension after extension making excuses not to pay, so in order to try to unite and motivate all the other room-mates to try and get some money together, I wrote Children Collide in big bold letters on the bill. A couple of days later, we had our first jam and the name was already there. So we had a band to go with the name.

Any last comments or shout-outs?

A shout-out to everyone that comes to Push Over, looking forward to seeing the Melbourne crew again!

See you there man, thanks for the interview.

No worries mate, looking forward to it.