Six members, countless musical influences and one dream… world domination! CAMERON EDNEY caught up with KING CANNONS’ charismatic vocalist LUKE YEOWARD to discuss the band’s brilliant new album and upcoming tour.
Congratulations on the debut album The Brightest Light. You must be proud of the final product.
Yeah man. We’re stoked to finally be in a position where we have an album and we can release it properly [laughs]. Onwards and upwards!
Tell us how long you’ve been working behind the scenes putting the album together?
When we said that we wanted to do the album, we wanted to go in with all new tunes. We didn’t want to re-record any of the dribs and drabs that were laying around from the King Cannons back catalogue. At the start of 2011, I sat at home and started writing songs [and] I think we had a surplus of 40 or 50 tunes by the time it came to doing the demos. We demoed half of them, found a producer, and worked out what songs we wanted to lay down. We went into the studio for the first time a little over 12 months ago and recorded 75 per cent of the tunes with Tom Larkin as our producer. That was a huge learning curve for all of us. That was the most amount of time any of us had spent in a studio. We learnt so much about songwriting – how we wanted to get things to sound and what we were capable of achieving. The whole experience was positive. We went back into the studio earlier this year and recorded ‘The Brightest Light’ and the last single ‘Too Young’ and another track called ‘Too Hot To Handle’,with our new drummer Dan Mackay. It went through the pipeline and the next thing, we had a release date.
Is there anything you would have changed or wish you’d done differently? Do you now wish you had maybe reworked some of those older tracks you had been playing from earlier EPs?
Not really. I think it is important for us as a band, and in general, just to feel like you’re moving forward and taking steps into the future. For me as a songwriter, that is important. I know when I first started writing these songs, I had no idea what we were going to make. I can only compare it to making a big carving – you have this massive rock in front of you and you just start chipping away at it, taking chunks out of it and eventually it becomes a beautiful sculpture. The album only really started to make sense once I could see all of the songs together.
Is there one song on the album that you feel best sums you up or that you’re connected to most?
I think the title track. I don’t know… I’m probably too close to the whole thing to really tell [but] that song sums up the spirit of freedom and the positive outcomes that are possible when you come from a not so positive background.
When you sat down to work on The Brightest Light, was it really important for you guys to keep it creative and diverse to stop you from being pigeonholed?
Definitely. We don’t deliberately go out of our way to make sure that we’ve got the reggae box ticked or the country box or the rock ‘n’ roll box. I love so many different types of music, and so does everybody else in the band, that we just want to be as open as we can to try to incorporate all the love we have for that music in what we do. We are not reinventing a genre by any means, in some ways it is quite old fashioned, handcrafted soul music, that we record live in a studio with real guitars and real voices and a real drum kit, heaven forbid.
You all live together, some would say that’s too much togetherness. How well do you guys all get along when you hit the road?
[Laughs] We’re pretty good man, we’re not like your stereotypical trash bag rock ‘n’ roll band. We’re all mates and we all get along pretty well and have a laugh. Sure it can be a little bit tense when you’re spending a couple of weeks pissing in each other’s pockets, but I think we’re all big enough and ugly enough to know each other’s boundaries and to respect each other’s personal wishes.
As much as there is fun, it really is all hard work too isn’t it!
For me as a singer, I take it seriously. I think everyone in the group take their respective roles seriously. We owe that to the people that pay 15 or 20 bucks to come and see us play. I try to take care of my voice and my health. We don’t really play up and party too much unless we have a night off. I’ve given up smoking because it was affecting my voice and I had to learn how to sing again. We’re there to do a job… we’re not there to fuck around. We owe it to the people that enable us to do it, by paying to see us play, that we take care of ourselves and do a good job.
Apart from the upcoming tour, what other plans are currently in the works?
Not too sure when the next album will be coming out but I don’t want to waste any time. I have some inspiration now after being overseas. I think we’ll be touring pretty solid throughout Australia, New Zealand and Europe over the next 12 months on this album cycle. I hope by the time that it’s all died down I’ll have a handful of songs and we can get back into the studio and make another record.
What do you feel has been the single most important lesson you’ve learnt to date?
I think you’ve got to care about yourself a lot because no one else in the music business will care about you, your career, your music or your wellbeing as much as you do! It’s up to every musician to be educated and make sure they’re responsible solely for their own well being and their own career direction. You have to be proactive. If you can do that, then that’s half the battle won. Then you have to concentrate on making good music.
King Cannons perform at the Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle on Saturday September 8, 2012.