Interview: Last Dinosaurs

Last Dinosaurs have a lot to be excited about: the Brisbane indie quartet have recently signing with Dew Process, toured with Foals and released a music video with hits into the hundreds of thousands. Try telling that to frontman Sean Caskey though. We caught up with him ahead of Last Dinosaurs’ co-headline tour with Papa Vs Pretty.

For a man with the world at his feet, Sean Caskey doesn’t sound too enthused with his current situation. “We are still in the process of writing songs for the album,” he groans. “It just fucking sucks so much.” Eager to jump headfirst into the studio to record the full-length follow-up to last year’s Back From The Dead EP, Caskey (who formerly moonlighted as a member of fellow Brisbane act The Cairos) feels held back by something. He won’t say what exactly, but it’s likely the band’s new label have told them to get their songs up to scratch before a lengthy (and expensive) stint in the studio.

Until then, Last Dinosaurs will be spending some time on the road with Papa Vs Pretty, a prospect Caskey seems slightly happier about.

This would be just about your biggest tour yet wouldn’t it?

“Um I don’t actually know. Maybe. Yeah I suppose it would be. The other one we did with Neon Love, I don’t know how many shows that was, but that one was maybe similarly sized. But this one’s probably more important.”

Do you need to do much preparation for something like this?

“Not really, just save money, that’s all.”

Are you mates with the guys from Papa Vs Pretty?

“Yeah, we met them after a Foals show in Sydney to do some photos for this thing. I met the singer (Thomas Rawle) and I think the bass player (Angus Gardiner) and they seemed like pretty cool guys. And then I've been talking with the singer a fair bit on Facebook lately. So yeah, they seem like pretty cool dudes and I'm looking forward to getting to know them over the nine shows.”

On these co-headline tours, is there a fight to see who gets top billing at each show?

“Nah, the managers do all that sort of stuff. We’re gonna headline Queensland and they’ll do New South Wales, and we’ll do a coin toss for Victoria and South Australia.”

Hopefully luck’s on your side then.

“Yeah, we’ll have to get a double-sided coin.”

You mentioned Foals before, what was it like touring with those guys?

“That was incredibly good. If we weren’t playing, I probably would have bought tickets to two of the shows. They’re my favourite band and I know they’re up there for the other guys as well, so it was an honourable experience.”

Did you learn a lot on that tour? They must have been some of the biggest crowds you’ve played to?

“Not the biggest, but they were good audiences. I learned a lot by just watching Foals and talking to them and just understanding them. They’re ridiculously good as a band, they’re just so, so tight. I like the way that they write their songs, I understand a lot more now after seeing them live. I talked to Yannis (Philippakis, frontman) a bit about song writing and I'm going to try and take his advice on board as much as possible.”

Are they good guys?

“They are awesome. Understandably because they’re pretty big, you’d kind of think they’d be a little bit arrogant but they’re really humble and nice and talk the time to chat to us, so it was really cool.”

Your new single Time & Place has this sort of controlled hyperactive pop feel about it, kind of similar to some stuff on the last Phoenix album. Is that the kind of thing you were going for?

“We love Phoenix. They’re probably our favourite band, next to Foals. But that song, it’s really just a simple, riffy song and everybody – the label people, et cetera – think it’s the most radio friendly song so it turned out to be the one we released. But it’s just a really basic, easy-to-digest song compared to the ones.”

I'm guessing it’s going to feature on your debut album, whenever it comes out. What’s the latest with that?

“(sighs) We are still in the process of writing songs for the album, unfortunately. We got that news just recently, which is a gigantic blow.”

You got the news you had to go back and keep writing?

“Yeah well, we’ve yet to do that and we’ve been told we have to, which just fucking sucks so much. ‘We’re in the process of writing the album’ is probably what I should be saying, and hopefully aiming to record this year at some point to release the album this year at some stage.”

Is Time & Place  a pretty good indication of where the album might be heading towards?

“Yeah, maybe. I have a list of the songs in my head that I want to put on the album and Time & Place is probably the most pop sensible one and the other ones, in my opinion, have a bit more soul than that one. Time & Place is just one end of the spectrum and there’s another end – the less happy stuff. All of the stuff that I write’s probably melancholy but the other end of the spectrum’s more on the darker side, which we like as well. With the album, the idea is to cover the entire spectrum. But it’s not too wide and we’d be able to bridge all the songs together relatively well I think.”

So you’ve got a pretty good idea of where the album’s heading?

“Well I do now but hopefully after I write two more songs things won’t change too much.”

Last Dinosaurs at Splendour in the Grass 2010 from Michael Sloane on Vimeo.

You sound a bit hesitant to keep writing at the moment, are you not feeling very creative?

“I haven’t felt creative for years! I probably shouldn’t say this stuff but it’s just disheartening because we’ve been trying really hard and it’s just not quite there yet. But basically we’re just really, really keen to record and get in the studio and lay these songs down and just do it.”

It’s funny you say that because Time & Place has been received so well. What has it had, like 400,000 YouTube hits or something? What do you put that down to?

“Vevo. What happens is, anyone who types in ‘30 Seconds To Mars’ or whatever, we’ll pop up on the side and they’ll see a picture of our film clip and it’s got a circuit board on it so they’re like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ and they click on it and watch it. But it’s awesome because everyone’s been liking it and we’ve got heaps more fans on Facebook and everyone’s telling us to go to Seattle or just ridiculous places.”

With such a strong reaction to it, surely you must feel pretty good about your creative abilities?

“Oh yeah, it’s good, building our momentum and hyping us up. But in reality, it doesn’t do too much. We’re just waiting for the album so that when stuff like that happens there’s something for them to have because right now they’re all just watching the video asking ‘When can we buy this?’ and no one can buy it because we only have iTunes in Australia.”

And you can’t exactly jump on the plane to Seattle for the weekend.

“No, not exactly.”

But surely that’s buoyed your confidence as a songwriter? How are you feeling about yourselves as musicians compared to say, a year ago?

“Well shit’s changed heaps. We were alright at the start. Our bass player wasn’t a bass player at the start, he was a drummer but now he’s gotten pretty good at bass. We’ve all evolved as a band but not too much because the funny thing is we’ve ended up playing a lot of our really old songs. So we’ve kept the same sound but we’ve gotten tighter and we’ve matured as a band at the same time.”

So would you say it was a pretty good decision to leave The Cairos?

“It was just something I had to do. I'm actually still good friends with the Cairos dudes. I work with BC the drummer and I sometimes play in his band Dune Rats. It’s just this surfy, lo-fi stuff, just a two-piece but I've played bass with them a couple of times. But it was definitely a good decision because at the time I was working, doing uni and rehearsing every night and I was just absolutely destroyed. I did really, really shit at uni so I pulled out of The Cairos.”

Did you end up finishing uni?

“Oh, no (laughs). I'm not even old enough to be finished uni yet. I was doing engineering and it was just extremely boring anyway. I don’t think I'll end up going back to uni because what I want to do long-term does not involve uni work really.”

Whereabouts did you shoot the video for Time & Place?

“It was in a place called Old Kareela, or something like that. It’s one of those random spots in the middle of nowhere. The closest town to it I think is Wooden Bong, which is pretty cool. There’s nothing there at all. It’s literally got like two petrol stations, which are just houses with hoses with petrol in them.”

It’s such a nice area though, at least from what you could tell on the video.

“It’s awesome. Sam (Gethin-Jones, bassist)’s friend’s parents own this farm there, and it’s five acres or something like that. We’ve done a lot of writing there, written a lot of the new songs there so it’s a pretty big part of us and we just thought it’d be sensible to use that in the film clip. And it turned out really well because the general theme of Time & Place is based on Nikola Tesla. It was supposed to be a post-apocalyptic world as if the world ended in the ‘50s and everybody had taken onto Tesla’s technology and the world had really advanced, but things turned to shit. And the people, like us, were supposed to be androids so the whole electronic theme was seminal to the entire clip.

It makes a lot more sense now.

“Yeah. It’s relatively random but it just looks good so in the end it doesn’t really matter.”

Last Dinosaurs - Time & Place from Kelvin Bugler on Vimeo.

And you shot it there just after the floods hit in Queensland, didn’t you?

“Yeah, there were so many friggin’ delays because roads were blocked. On the day we were going to the farm to do the film clip, we took this gigantic detour that took forever and when we were getting close, it turned out one of the roads had a landslide so we ended up driving back. We nearly gave up and went back to Brisbane but decided to take another detour and finally got there after like eight hours of driving or something like that.”

Were you guys in Brisbane during the floods?

“Yeah. On the first day I was in the Valley and we got told to evacuate and just go home. So I went home and stayed home during the floods and didn’t see much except for on TV.

So it didn’t fuck you guys up?

“No, not at all. You wouldn’t have known there was a flood if you didn’t have a TV, at least where I was. Same for most people actually, except for people near the river. One of my good friends, his house got absolutely completely fucked over. I know it’s going to take him a while to get everything back together and everyone who was affected, it’s going to take fucking ages because they literally lost everything.”

Last Dinosaurs play the Ed Castle on Sat Mar 26 with Papa Vs Pretty and The Salvadors. Time & Place is out now through Dew Process.

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