The bandmates only travel about 30 feet from the door of the venue before they’re spotted. Then again, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are not the most inconspicuous bunch. Here on a scorching September afternoon in Nashville, it’s hard to miss a mob of lanky, midtwentysomething, mostly long-haired Aussies in black shorts and Blundstones. They are eight in number — seven musicians plus Jason Galea, the friend responsible for the band’s artwork, videos and trippy live projections. Two fans call out and come over. “We drove 11 hours to see you!” says one clutching an empty bottle of bleach for reasons unknown. He’s thrilled to show the band a new addition to his pale forearm: a freshly inked illustration of a green gator. The musicians convey their approval without inspecting it too closely. The creature first appeared in Galea’s sleeve and animated video for “The River”, a single off the band’s 2015 LP Quarters. Though it migrated into a few T-shirt designs, no-one in the Gizzard camp gave it much thought until fans started showing off their badges of allegiance at Bonnaroo a few months on. Since then, “there’ve been hundreds,” says Galea in disbelief. King Gizzard’s 26-year-old singer, guitarist, flautist and ringleader Stu Mackenzie confesses that being the object of such devotion has been “kinda overwhelming”. He remembers the words that came to mind when he saw his first flesh gator: “Damn… you’re gonna regret that.” Such tributes are just another absurd development in a history studded with them. Gradually, and largely by happenstance, a band formed as an anarchic extracurricular for young friends otherwise busy in other bands in Melbourne in 2010 has become one of the most obsession-worthy groups on the planet. None of that “was supposed to happen”, Mackenzie explains. “This was just the weird experiment, just us fucking around.” The group didn’t even get a decent name. Instead, they got stuck with a last-minute compromise between someone’s Doors-inspired suggestion of King Lizard and Mackenzie’s arguably dafter choice of Gizzard Gizzard. Yet what started as a joke definitely isn’t one now. Later that night in the sold-out Cannery Ballroom, a sweaty 1,000-strong throng of “Gizzheads” mosh to the sound of Mackenzie’s apocalyptic sci-fi songs about cyborgs and altered beasts. An improbable but reliably thrilling stew of prog, surf, garage, Krautrock and psychedelia — with the occasional detour into folk, jazz and Tropicália, too — the band’s sonic barrage is powered by two drummers and delivered with enough gusto to supply several more bands of comparable girth. The whirlwind of activity they whip up onstage is matched by their frenzied release schedule. Since 2012, they’ve put out 10 extraordinary (and extraordinarily diverse) albums. Of the five that were promised for 2017, three are already out. Even if they miss the self-imposed deadline for the last two — and time is running short — they’ve already provided a ludicrous overabundance of stonermotorik magnificence. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are such an unlikely proposition on so many counts, it seems oddly plausible for them to be conquering America, too. Audience sizes swell with every visit and new releases score high on Billboard’s vinyl and independent charts. “It’s really exciting what’s happening with the band,” says Jon Salter, who signed them to their American label ATO after his own conversion experience at Bonnaroo in 2015. “They have this army “We wanted to put together a band where no-one had to practise” sTU MaCkENziE king Gizzard in 2017: “a weird experiment” how to buy… DECEMBER 2017 • UNCUT • 75 out and making music together when the reality is that most of them can’t afford to leave or go too far for very long!” For the Gizzard crew, an early high/low point arrived during an ill-advised dinner-hour gig before a particularly unappreciative audience. “I’d broken five out of my six guitar strings, which just seems so impossible,” says Mackenzie. “We got a few boos when we ended the show. Then this guy came up to the stage. I thought, ‘Cool, this guy is actually going to give us some encouraging feedback — that’s nice!’ And he said, ‘That was the worst show I’ve ever seen. You guys will never play a stadium.’” Walker laughs. “We probably won’t still!” “I never even envisioned us playing a stadium,” says Mackenzie. “But he did spur us on without knowing it.” In fact, Mackenzie’s haphazard operation was soon developing ideas beyond its initially humble station. Though the first EPs and 2012’s full-length debut 12-Bar Bruise were steeped in the members’ shared love of big dumb garage rock, 2013’s “cult western audio book” Eyes Like The Sky previewed the conceptual scope of LPs to come. A bludgeoning 15-minute epic from the same year’s Float Along — Fill Your Lungs, “Head On/Pill” cemented the admittedly “bizarre” but devastatingly effective double-drummer lineup. In another leap forward in 2014, they won an AU$50,000 music grant and used it to finance their first trip to America. When not attracting buzz in Brooklyn and recording part of 2015’s Papier Mâché Dream Balloon at Daptone Studios, they holed up in a cabin in upstate New York, where Mackenzie deftly avoided getting eaten by a bear. Yet they really caught fire on last year’s Nonagon Infinity, a collection of full-throttle space-rockers that are ingeniously and maddeningly constructed as an infinite loop. “That record was hard to make in a lot of ways,” says Mackenzie. that’s mobilising and spreading — one kid leaves the show freaking out then he tells 10 of his friends and they come back every time.” “Not only are they so good, but they just make so much stuff,” says Courtney Barnett, a friend of the band since their paths intersected in Melbourne seven years ago. “They’re a great example of getting on with it, just doing it and not caring about what people say — that’s really inspiring.” Says Mackenzie, “We definitely did have advice from people who’d tell us, ‘If you’re gonna tour, would you consider downsizing the group — it’ll be a lot cheaper.’ Or ‘why don’t you just cut some material out and just make one record instead of three?’ But we’ve just being driven by whatever we thought was the most fun thing to do.” Nevertheless, strangeness abounds here at the centre of the Gizzard universe, a realm that’s rapidly expanding both in terms of its audiovisual splendours and its population of acolytes. At times, Mackenzie can’t help but feel perplexed. “Four out of the 10 people I talked to after the show last night in Chicago were Phish fans,” he says. “I don’t know what that means.” O NLY an hour’s drive away from the Bonnaroo site, Nashville’s become a major Gizzard hotspot. Last year, the band sold out the Mercy Lounge, the smaller of the two clubs in a renovated red-brick flour mill just south of Nashville’s gleaming downtown. (Third Man Records is on the next block.) The fact that the band sold out the larger Cannery Ballroom indicates Nashville’s ongoing shift toward wilder sounds than the kind that made it famous. As a club staffer tells Uncut in a Tennessee twang, “Psychedelic bands always sell out here… and metal bands. The country ones don’t.” Having arrived after an overnight drive from Chicago — it’s the first time they’ve rented a sleeper bus — the bandmates have time to idle along the 8th Avenue strip of restaurants, bars and shops near the venue. At a stop in the Nashville Boot Co, drummer and manager Eric Moore reels at the pungent aroma of rawhide while fellow drummer Michael “Cavs” Cavanaugh ponders the purchase of a new Stetson hat. Further down the block in Carter Vintage Guitars, Mackenzie is excited to spot a six-string version of the Hagstrom 12 that’s one of the two guitars he uses on this tour. (The second is the custom-made yellow guitar whose nickname inspired the title of Flying Microtonal Banana, the first of this year’s Gizzard albums.) A group discussion ensures over whether a coveted pedal should be bought for Gizzard or The Murlocs — the garageR&B act that’s another creative outlet for keyboard and harmonica player Ambrose Kenny-Smith and guitarist Cook Craig. It is brought to an abrupt end when a silverhaired senior in a green golf shirt picks up a guitar and plays the intro of “There She Goes” note-perfect . The quest for vegan fare leads the mob to a roomy café bar. Over grilled cheese sandwiches and salads, they reminisce about the various teenage combos and cover bands they formed with each other growing up in Geelong and Torquay, two towns near Melbourne. After they all met up in university in Melbourne (guitarist Joey Walker is the only big-city lad), more blues, garage and psych groups followed. It was out of the ensuing gigs, parties and shared houses that King Gizzard took shape. “We wanted to put together a band where no-one had to practise, essentially,” says Mackenzie. “The early music was so primal. Our first songs had a maximum five words, three chords, preferably one — then play it as loud as you can.” Singer-songwriter Fraser A Gorman, who played in a high school band in Geelong with Craig and Mackenzie, tells Uncut it was standard practice for his peers to have 5 to 10 bands on the go. “There isn’t the same vast touring opportunities that are available in America or Europe,” he notes. “So musicians from Australia and New Zealand seem to congregate in Melbourne and stick together and create a community. From the outside looking in, it seems like a giant pool of great musicians just hanging Mackenzie with his custom bananayellow guitar Emma mcIntyrE/GEtty ImaGEs for coachElla king gizzard & the lizard wizard King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard FloaT aloNG — Fill YoUR lUNGs FliGhTlEss, 2013 after one album of gloriously messy garage rock and another of western-inspired weirdness, the band launch into the stratosphere with “head on/Pill”, a shotgun blast of psych, nEU! and ac/Dc. 7/10 i’M iN YoUR MiND FUzz FliGhTlEss, 2014 the fifth outing is the band’s heaviest thus far both in terms of the songs’ thunderous force and the conceptual bent of mackenzie’s lyrics, which depict a malevolent force out to control your brain. Driven by Kenny-smith’s harmonica and a ruthless rhythm section, the four-song suite off the top previews the insanity of Nonagon Infinity. 8/10 PaPiER MâChé DREaM BallooN FliGhTlEss, 2015 full of irresistibly sunny psych-pop with a sometimes manic edge, this flute-heavy set belongs in the mellower end of the Gizzard canon alongside 2015’s Quarters and this year’s Brazilianflavoured Sketches Of Brunswick East. 8/10 NoNaGoN iNFiNiTY FliGhTlEss, 2016 a typically cockamamie Gizzard scheme to arrange nine songs into an infinite loop yields one of the decade’s most exhilarating albums. singles “Gamma Knife” and “PeopleVultures” hurtle along like hawkwind in hyperdrive. 9/10 MURDER oF ThE UNivERsE FliGhTlEss, 2017 the most avidly bonkers of Gizzard’s 2017 output, this concept album sets mackenzie’s doomy fantasies of mutated beasts, electric wizards and confused cyborgs to another onslaught of high-velocity space rock. 8/10 76 • UNCUT • DECEMBER 2017 “We’re happy with how it turned out, but it kind of made me go insane.” Reflecting the songs’ fantastical characters and settings, the videos for “Gamma Knife” and “People-Vultures” enhanced the music’s crackpot appeal with no-budget homages to Alejandro Jodorowsky and Japanese tokusatu. After two years of relentless recording and touring, they planned to have a breather. As usual, things didn’t turn out that way. Says McKenzie, “I was like, ‘Damn, we’ve got so many good ideas — we’ve got to keep doing stuff.’ So that’s where the idea of making five albums came from.” “You said four originally,” adds Moore, who runs the band’s label Flightless out of the same Melbourne warehouse that houses their studio. “Why did you then say five?” “I was just taking the piss out of myself,” Mackenzie admits, sparking a round of laughter. A deep dive into Mackenzie’s love of Turkish psychrocker Erkin Koray and non-Western modes, Flying Microtonal Banana arrived in February. Then came Murder Of The Universe, a heavy-duty triptych of tales with narration by their friend Leah Senior and a computer text-to-speech program, in June. A mellower set of collaborations with the American band Mild High Club, Sketches Of Brunswick East came out in August. As for the rest, well…. “number four is not finished yet,” says Mackenzie. “It’s coming along, but it needs another month. We might not get the fifth finished. I hope we will… but we’ll see.” Moore says they’ve been discussing a backup scenario. “Maybe it’ll be the very last minute of the year and we’ll put it out on Bandcamp.” “It might come to that,” says Mackenzie sheepishly. They’ll likely be forgiven if they miss the deadline. For Gorman, King Gizzard’s discipline and creativity all demonstrate another advantage that Australian bands derive from their isolation, which is that you “need to be really fucking good” to make the world notice. As he says, “You gotta try hard when you live in the middle of nowhere.” B ACK in the parking lot of the Cannery Ballroom, band and crew members set up inside while Mackenzie chats with Uncut in the bus. As Mackenzie sits crosslegged on the black vinyl sofa, a grinning Elton John looms over his shoulder, a poster for Wonderful Crazy Night having become a Gizzard fixation. (“He looks like he’s having the best time.”) Like his mates, Mackenzie is the epitome of chill when not thrashing around onstage. At the same time, he exudes a certain clarity of purpose. He got serious about music at the age of 16 in the wake of a serious knee injury playing Aussie rules football. “I was home from school and couldn’t walk for weeks,” he says. “Basically all I did was play guitar — I really hadn’t practiced before at all. But that was it for me.” At high school in Geelong, he connected with other youngsters who shared his interests. Indeed, the social opportunities created by music have long been a major motivator. “Even for a lot of the more introverted musicians, it’s still a way for them to communicate with other people,” he says. “When I’m making music by myself for days, I’m always thinking, ‘I can’t wait to show someone this.’” Though King Gizzard became his primary creative outlet, it’s been just as valuable as a means for hanging with pals and travelling overseas. Their eagerness to roam led to a growing roster of new friends outside Melbourne, including the Oh Sees’ John Dwyer, who released I’m In Your Mind Fuzz and Quarters on his Castle Face label. In 2015, they co-headlined an Australian tour with mask-wearing Swedish band Goat, who became another ally in this global wave of boundary-busting psych acts. One Goat member (identity withheld as per the band’s preference for anonymity) tells Uncut they weren’t familiar with their hosts before arriving on their turf. “The first night in Melbourne, they started the show and blew my mind,” he says. “I was so impressed I started to regret we’d gone all the way to Australia!” Since 2015, King Gizzard have also helped galvanise a new generation of psych- and fuzz-loving Australian bands with an annual festival, Gizzfest. That said, Mackenzie was wary of getting tagged with the p-word. “In the past, I was like, ‘Ah, that’s annoying,’ since we’re not necessarily a psych band,” he says. “But I guess when you have made music that’s pretty psychedelic, that’s fair. And we’re a band that’s hard to label.” Even that rather elastic category seems too confining for King Gizzard. Variously likening his young charges to the Allmans, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, ATO’s Jon Salter hears the blues in there, too. “There’s not a lot of guys who are doing that sound with such a blues strain in it,” he says. “It feels like such an infusion.” They venture further than many peers in conceptual terms as well. With its stories of an entity that shoots lightning from its fingertips and a cyborg who longs for the ability to vomit, Murder Of The Universe belongs in a whole other dimension. Mackenzie considers the album to be a full expression of his “inner sci-fi geek”, with lyrics that reflect his taste for the macabre and love for fantasy, horror and sci-fi lit (he’s currently working through Stephen King’s The Stand). “I’ve never been super-interested in writing songs that I feel already exist,” he explains. “It’s tempting to write songs about your own experiences as it’s always to a degree unique. But I’m not going to write heaps of love songs because I just feel like: a) someone could probably do ’em better, and b) no-one cares about my own shit.” And as these sinister images and characters recur on different albums (along with various musical motifs), king gizzard & the lizard wizard Stu Mackenzie crowd-surfing at the Scala in 2015 AnDrew BenGe/reDfernS VIA GeTTy IMAGeS “And if anyone does piss you off,” he adds, “you can not talk to them for 24 hours pretty easily — you couldn’t do that in a two-piece.” I n the hours before the nashville set, Mackenzie tests his skills as band director trying to execute yet another idea that seemed fun at the time, but proves only slightly less challenging than the whole five-albums-in-one-year thing. That’s removing the usual gap between sets by having Gizzard join Mild High Club for an onstage switchover in the middle of the opening act’s last song. no-one seems convinced it’s possible until it happens. The ensuing performance has more curveballs. Whereas Gizzard sets from earlier this year bounded along at breakneck velocity, there’s more shifting of gears tonight as the berserker mode of Nonagon Infinity’s “PeopleVultures” and Flying Microtonal Banana’s “Rattlesnake” gives way to the more relaxed likes of Quarters’ “Lonely Steel Sheet Flyer” and new songs from Sketches Of Brunswick East. Conceivably, there could be two stripes of Gizzheads emerging, with some becoming just as rabid about the mellower songs. “You notice it at the shows,” says Moore. “People who want to chill just hang at the back.” That the audience cares not a jot about King Gizzard’s continual creative detours is one indication of the latitude they’ve created. “A lot of bands would be lambasted for that,” says Walker. “But for us, it’s a defining factor.” “People are annoyed with us if we make two records in a row that are kinda similar,” quips Mackenzie. “We probably will have to do that at some point!” In the meantime, it’s been heartening for their peers to see the Gizzard universe expand the way it has. “They’re such a great band,” says Courtney Barnett, “And it’s been really reassuring to see there are people who care about good music.” “I can’t understand how they can be so productive, keep such a high quality and tour constantly,” says Goat’s spokesman. “We hope they can keep it up and know when they need a rest!” And rest is what they get after the show as various Gizzard members enjoy an ’80s Schwarzenegger movie with beers and await an early morning departure to Atlanta. Outside in the parking lot, a few Gizzheads linger before dispersing into the night. There’ll be no more chances to get records signed or show off tattoos. Perhaps that’s for the best given the musicians’ worries about what they might be encouraging. “A young girl recently asked two or three of us to sign her arm with a black marker,” says Mackenzie. “We saw her six months later and she’d tattooed these huge signatures all over her forearm. Then she said, “Can I get the rest?” We were all like, “I dunno… this feels very irresponsible. She was like, ‘Please just do it!’ So we all signed and she got the rest tattooed on her arm.” He laughs. “At least with the gator, Jase drew it and it’s a cool character. These were just our shitty signatures. I thought, ‘You’ll get it removed someday, but good on ya for enjoying it now!’” there’s a growing impression what the band is creating its own multi-verse. Judging by the loonier Reddit threads, many fans regard the Gizzard oeuvre as a prog-psych equivalent to Game Of Thrones already. “There’s a bit of that going on but it’s looser than what George RR Martin does,” says a bemused Mackenzie. He’s chuffed to see fans hash out theories about the interconnecting narrative threads, though to him, “the number one thing is making sure I’m super happy with the music”. He’s also happier just trying to keep his mob together. Mackenzie calls himself the “band director” — the one who finds a way to fuse together his mates’ various ideas into a workable whole. Thankfully, they’re a remarkably amiable and affable crew. Though the music’s gonzo excess may cause one to expect a tribe of grizzled acidheads, they come off more like mild-mannered Dungeons & Dragons players, what with their lack of evident enthusiasm for the usual vices of a band on the road. Mackenzie says it didn’t used to be like that. “It was like every single night was a party,” he says of the earlier Gizzard jaunts, “but you also have more stamina for that when you’re 21.” They while away most of their day in nashville eating ramen, playing pool, shooting darts and watching crap movies on the giant TV in the Cannery Ballroom’s vast subterranean green room. The only sign of intra-band rancour comes when Galea is mocked for his resemblance to a bearded homeless man they spot in Happy Gilmore. Says Mackenzie, “A band of seven could have a lot of interpersonal dynamics and tensions. But I really like being in big band. We spend so much time together, we all know how to look after each other. Sketches Of Brunswick East is out now on Heavenly Recordings The Gizzard Vs The Vulture Near-death on a video shoot! O f the many ludicrous ideas in the career of King Gizzard, all Gizzheads have a special love for the “People-Vultures” video. To accompany this Hawkwind-athyperdrive highlight of Nonagon Infinity, Jason Galea and co-director Danny Cohen mounted an elaborate parody of Japanese tokusatsu shows like Ultraman. “A huge undertaking,” Galea says, “and a big step up production-wise.” Said production involved inserting all seven bandmembers inside a giant vulture creature that most definitely did not meet construction safety codes. “It was pretty absurd,” recalls Stu Mackenzie. “That vulture had a pine frame and 12 tiny wheels. The body was made of cardboard and coated in feathers. I had a backpack on, strapped to the head so I’m holding the whole weight of it — it was heavy!” But it was when it all started moving downhill that Galea really became concerned. “So I’m standing at the top of this platform,” he says. “And it’s, like, fucking high as this bus we’re sitting in. I can’t really see anything through this vulture mouth and I’m holding onto this frame that’s bending, and we’re going down a hill on these tiny wheels. I was terrified — I thought I was going to die in this thing… But I also thought it would have been a good way to go out.”