Festival Coverage : HIPSVILLE - Wild Evel & The Trashbones
- Written by Kenneth McMurtrie
Garage Punk is alive & well and emanating from Vienna in the guise of the man known as Wild Evel, who would be a lesser figure without his stalwart Trashbones (who, it turns out, emanate from Graz).
In the run-up to Hipsville Murphy Morphine, fuzz-guitarist in the band, put that geographical faux pas aside and took time off from looking for empty crypts to perform in to answer a few questions we had the brassneck to put to the band:-
MG) Can we expect to hear any new material in your set?
Murphy) At the moment we're working on new songs, but we're not sure yet if they'll make it into our live set!
MG) Do you manage to attend festivals as fans or is it usually a case of playing and moving on, like a normal gig?
Murphy) We always enjoy hanging out IN FRONT of festival stages, but due to travelling long distances we often can't manage to stay at festivals for private purposes.
MG) You guys hail from Vienna - is that a city with a vibrant Sixties scene of any particular type or is it smaller than you would like?
Murphy) Actually only Evel's living in Vienna, the rest of the Trashbones are living in Graz. To answer your question - Graz is generally completely mixed up, so there's not much of a Sixties scene. The scene in Vienna is definitely "bigger", though it's more like a general rock'n'roll scene ...
MG) Are you playing a lot of festivals this year?
Murphy) Well, I'd say a couple.
MG) What have you been listening to and/or reading recently when on the road?
Murphy) Hard to say. We're listening to quite a wide range of music - sounds like organ and jazzy stuff can be quite relaxing on the road, but of course we also listen to garage, psychedelic, beat, blues and sometimes even to the traffic news on the radio. Reading on the road on the other hand is quite crappy if you have to go through countless tunnels! ;)
MG) Who else on the current scene would you suggest our readers check out?
Murphy) Always go for The Satelliters - they're about to release a new record for their 20th anniversary. We also recently met The Mergers from Nurnberg - amazing Beat & Garage sound. And of course be on the lookout for The Jackets from Switzerland!
MG) Name one tune (or one each) that is guaranteed to get you on to the dancefloor.
Murphy) Oh, again a hard question to answer - but the Trashbones will be definitely on the dancefloor if they'll play 'Abba' by The Paragons … but who won't?
MG) Do you find that club DJs tend to play music from the original era rather than the work of new bands, and if so is that something you just have to live with? Do internet radio shows mean that this is less of an issue nowadays, in terms of people getting to know your work?
Murphy) I'd say it depends on the DJs and on the topic of the party, but actually they'll always play some genre classics and also unknown stuff from '50s, '60s and '70s, which I think is a cool thing, cause there's still so much more to dig out. When it comes to internet radio shows I think the DJs do quite often present also new bands, especially to promote shows or new records, and additionally for artists the internet is a heavily powerful tool to promote themselves.
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