Singer Chit Chat Von Loopin Stab sat down with the AU review to discuss Machine Gun Fellatio’s reunion and recent performances, including a secret gig in Newcastle. The band members, who hadn’t played together in 20 years, felt a sense of nostalgia and rejuvenation, with standout moments like rehearsing with Marshall stacks and the entire band being together for the first time in two decades. They appreciated the crew’s dedication and the audience’s enthusiastic response. Chit Chat discussed the impact of their songs over time, the joy of performing, and the importance of believability in songwriting. He also touched on the logistics and emotional aspects of organizing such a reunion tour.
Maybe we start with the secret gig that was played in Newcastle just recently?
Yeah, it was fucking amazing. There was a guy playing keyboard there that I’ve been giving hand jobs to all his life. It was wild. There’s been a lot of amazing moments. There was a moment a few weeks ago where we’d had a lot of rehearsing. Normally, as a band, you hate rehearsing, but it’s been so good just to get back. Because, you know, over the last 20 years, you don’t tend to listen to your music. It tends to be, you’re at a party, and someone puts it on and it’s embarrassing hearing it through tiny speakers. To be in a rehearsal room and hear it with the Marshall stack and drums and you’re inside it again. I genuinely had hairs standing up on my arms. A lot of these songs I wrote, but you sort of lose touch with them. They’re like kids, you know?
There was a moment a couple of weeks ago or about a month ago, when for the first time in 20 years, all seven of us were in the same room. That was really beautiful. It felt like no time had passed, which was kind of surreal. Your biggest fear going into this sort of thing, is the last thing you want to be is tragic, but I thought, fuck, these songs are great. I really enjoyed hearing them and playing them, and everyone was in good form, but people were playing better than ever. Genuinely, the drummer’s been playing in a disco band, like cover things the last five years, and he’s slam, just amazing. But our guitarist has also been playing in a concert band, and his playing is just tighter. Pinky’s voice and KKs and Widows are all just amazing. I think Pinky’s singing better than ever. I always thought he sang bright, but we were writing songs together when he wasn’t a singer. You know, back 27 years ago, whatever, writing songs in my bedroom, and he was trying to find his way, and now I hear him like knocking these songs out.
The other thing was also the crew. Our tour manager came to us with when he was 19. He’s now doing massive shows, Kid Leroy and all that. Timmy Peterson, who was our monitor mixer, mixes Empire of the Sun. They’ve all got much bigger careers and whatever. When I put the call out, they all said yes, because it meant so much to them. We then hired Liberty Hall in the old Fox studios, to try it out before anything. We actually hired a stage, and the crew saw it for the first time, and they went, Oh, fuck, nothing’s changed. So that was kind of nice to hear it from them, because out of anyone they would know. Then we went out on the stage on Friday night, and the audience just went screaming and singing louder than we could play. It’s all the kind of things in your fantasy you think will happen, yeah, so now we get the opportunity to fuck all that up and do some big shows. They’re all three stages we’ve never played before. Riverstage, Hordern and Myer Music Bowl, they’re all so iconic. For us personally to finish in Sydney at the Hordern will be, you know, it’s great thing.
I had a look on Facebook. There was some photos and clips of of the show. And, yeah, it looked amazing like and, you know, for myself, I thought that the songs were just really familiar. There are so many good songs there, like “Unsent Letter” which is one of my all-time faves. “Girl in my Dreams”, “Pussytown”, “Roller Coaster”, “Not Afraid of Romance”, “My Ex-girlfriend’s Boyfriend”: literally classic songs.
You know, a lot of the songs had sort of lyrics, and the world’s turned. We’ve had to re-examine a little bit of that, but not too much, because we are who we are. But what was great was that most of what we’re playing still works today. I actually found that I really fell in love with the songs again. There are some songs that people can sing along to and then to go out and play them. “Unsent” is our most modified song. The crowd was singing louder than you know, because that that gap has allowed for these songs to get into more people’s hearts. Yeah, interesting to see what’s lasted and, yeah, so all those songs you mentioned. And, you know, “Motherfucker on a Motorcycle”, people were really reacting to that.
I was looking around the stage and everybody was just smiling, the crew was smiling the audience was smiling, the band was smiling. It was like, Fuck, this is actually all right. Why did we ever stop doing this? I mean, thank God we did, because I would have been dead, or pretty close to. The weird thing is, now that I’ve got two teenage daughters that are about going to see the show. One’s a theatre kid, though. She’s 13, and normally I wouldn’t take a 13-year-old to see something like this, but she loves musicals and theatres and costumes, and she goes to a performing arts school. The few people who hadn’t seen the show before, saw it on Friday night, and they just said, it’s, this is so much. Yeah, this, you know, we’ve had some new Pyros, we tried out right, lots of different lighting design, which we treat it like a give a shit.
I saw TISM in Adelaide last weekend, and I said to someone, it’s a bit like those B-grade movies that look really low grade, but over time, you start to realize that there’s a lot more depth to them. With the distance of time, it’s given them space to mature, you see them again with fresh eyes, and you go, wow, this is really amazing.
That’s the way it seems to feel, in general. These shows we’re doing are big money shows, and to be honest, we probably spent as much as we earned on the Mystery Show. That’s who we are and based on that, we couldn’t have happened now. With how touring is, it’s all gone. A big production like this and travel, you know, we’re sort of 12 or 13 on the road, they all need hotel rooms, flights and accommodation. Only because we’re doing these big shows can we actually afford to bring the full show, because I don’t think any of us would want to do less. We’ve always aimed for that point between have I won the lottery, or have I been assaulted?
You were saying that when you all got back together it was like just catching up with old friends. What’s happened in between? Has everyone kept in contact and things like that, or have you all gone off on different paths?
It depends, like decade birthdays, like 50s and all these different birthdays. I got married 20 years ago now, but everyone was there but Pinky wasn’t at that. There’s been other things that different people have been at, but not all of us have been in the one room together. I’ve probably seen the least of Pinky, and that’s just the way things are. I’ve been writing songs with Widow; I’ve been writing songs with Love Shark and Krista and KK. We’ve all been in each other’s lives in different ways. The weird thing about it being so long is that is you start to think it was a dream. Memory of a memory of it being amazing, but you don’t know if that’s memory fucking with you.
So, to put it under the spotlight in a thing like Friday night and have people that had never seen it in the day. It’s one thing when people go and say, oh yeah, they’re playing the song I like from when I saw them when I was 20, yeah? I’ve got some neighbours across the road who are 30. They came over and were just hugging me and just going fuck yeah. They had no point of reference, and it was just great to get that. There was no way they were patronizing me; they couldn’t control their emotion. What was really strange is I got a Facebook message from my mum who’s 90; one of her friends who was 80 was at the gig, and she loved it. I had a guy ring. He said, “Look, my kids were too young when you were playing last time, but they all grew up on your music. It’s my birthday coming up, and my son bought me a ticket for the TISM show so we can go together”.
Yeah, you don’t realise how much having kids changes things, which is why I realised that I never saw you play back in the day.
I’ve got a 16-year-old that was in New York. She went to New York herself for two weeks. She got back on Friday morning, right? So, logic says, if you’ve got a gig on Friday night, don’t wake up early. But I knew she was going to get into Auckland, and she’d be almost safe, you know, and I was awake at four, and so I kind of didn’t sleep from four in the morning till I went to bed at three, the next morning. But it’s that Papa Bear thing.
I love the symmetry of playing with TISM. Before MGF was band called Vrag that I started with 3K who’s in MGF; our guitarist was Love Shark, and our drummer was Brian. Krista would get up and sing with us sometimes, and Widow would get up, and so everyone but Pinky kind of played in that band. The night that we came up with that band name was a night that we saw TISM play for the first time at the Trade Union on their first trip to Sydney. We were just so blown away by what a show could be. I’d been in a band of big things before, and I loved that Stop Making Sense, Talking Heads, thing that had a big impact on me. We were walking home, and we saw a bench that had the word VRAG written on it that same night, and really that was a direct line between that and what we were doing on Friday night. The fact we’ll be playing with TISM and that there is literally nothing planned at all past the shows, and there’s a great freedom.
Let’s just throw everything at that and make it the best it can be, knowing that there’s nothing after that and we’re not trying to pace ourselves or whatever. We’re just giving it everything, every gag, every best song, every costume, every whatever. For example, the guy who manages Empire does a lot of stuff, you know, he’s flat out, with all this stuff going on, and he rang me and said, “Look, the crew used to dress as tennis ball boys. Do you want me to go at Big W and buy Volleys and headbands for everyone”? I said that I’m embarrassed that you thought you had to ask. That’s just a tiny detail that a few people might notice. The crew running on dressed as ball boys. Yeah, the ethic that runs through the band runs through the crew. Everybody is fighting for the show, and that just makes me so happy that when everyone is doing that, we’re unbeatable.
What makes a good song? Is that something you can define, do you know when you’ve written a good song, that is going to work? Or have you had some full flat that you thought were amazing?
Sometimes you know, but you don’t always know. Like I remember when Pinky, who write My Ex-girlfriend, brought it to me as a thing, but he wanted some help with the lyrics, and I was floored by it. I said, I can only fuck this. In fact, he played a gig at the Hopetown, just a solo thing. Our engineer recorded it, and I heard that version. I had finished Paging Mr Strike. The artwork, everything was done, and this was back in the day when things weren’t as easy to change. He played it to me on a Sunday afternoon, we were going to press on Monday, and I stopped the presses. We put “My Ex-girlfriend”, the Hopetown version on the album. Because I just knew it was a hit.
I remember we had a really rough version of “Roller Coaster” that had Shark singing on it, where he was singing, baby, I can make you gravy. So that’s how fucking far away it was from what it became. A lot of it was there, though, musically. I was playing at a party, and the piano came on the Dun, dun, dun. And this mate of mine is a massive pop head turned around and said, that is your hit. He picked it by that. And then, you know, like, not long after that, we had that in “Pussytown”, the top 10 at the hottest 100 like two songs in the top 10, and that’s one of our most played songs on Spotify. It seemed the most unlikely for us. But you know what? “Motherfucker” went nuts on radio in England? Well, we went to England because BBC One were playing Motherfucker, and all these clubs were slamming it, and we put out “Roller Coaster” out there, and it went nowhere. No one was interested.
I’m so glad people got “Unsent Letter”, because it’s a long song, and radio always played five minutes. Whatever it is, it’s millions of plays extra on Spotify than any other song. I was living with Pinky when he was writing it, and I got luckily enough to add some lyrics to it, but most of it was him; that melody is so hypnotic. I heard him playing like, six weeks before he finished it, and I helped him with some lyrics. I think 3K changed a chord or two of it, but it was so beautiful. He lost his mum at that time, and it was amalgam of many things, but that was the main thing. He was just going through this absolute devastation, and you can hear it, it’s so believable and the vocal in the delivery background. That’s what people connect to – believability. I’ve had this conversation with Paul Kelly; I used to be an interviewer as well. People always say that it’s about honesty and music, but it’s not. It’s believability. “Sweet Guy” is about a girl singing about a domestic violence situation, and Paul Kelly is the girl in that scenario. You believe it, because you think he’s in jail. It’s about believability, and I think that really comes across.
Featured image by Kevin Bull
TISM – Death to Art Reunion tour
Featuring TISM, Eskimo Joe, Machine Gun Fellatio, Ben Lee and The Mavis’s
Sat 9th Nov: Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne
Friday 29th Nov: Hordern Pavilion, Sydney
Tickets on Sale now Destroyalllines.com
