Watch out Wiggles and hold onto your butts Hi-Five, because Aussie rock veterans Regurgitator are coming for your crowns.
The Brissie lads have just spilled regurgitated the beans on some surprising plans to record a kids’ album this year.
While the band haven’t decided whether they’ll be releasing the new album under their Regurgitator monicker or changing the name entirely, frontman Quan Yeomans told Music Feeds contributor Sarah Bellamy they’ve got a pretty good idea of how they might structure the release.
“I think the album will be structured like a show, like it’ll have a bit of dialogue and stuff through it,” he said.
“I’d really love to do more videos and do lots of different genres, and it’ll probably be quite adult-sounding, but also have cutesy kind of stuff through it as well. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes!
“We did our first proper kids’ show at the [Melbourne Recital Centre] recently, like about three or four months ago, and it went really well… It’s kind of fun, ’cause you know, we’re the kind of band who can kind of get away with double entendres a little bit.”
That said, Yeomans maintains he isn’t the biggest fan of The Wiggles.
“I think a lot of the kids’ stuff can be a little bit dumbed down and they don’t really take into consideration how tedious it actually is for parents to sit through shit like The Wiggles — not that I want to denigrate them or anything like that, I think they’ve done incredibly well, of course — but I just won’t listen to it, I refuse,” Yeomans said.
“My kid, even though he likes [The Wiggles], I’m like, ‘Nup, you can listen to it at your Grandma’s place, you’re not listening to it here.’ He listens to The Beatles, The White Stripes, The Sound of Music, anything but them. So I think there’s a huge opening to do something that’s a little bit more, I don’t know, interesting for kids, not so namby-pamby, and I think we’re going to enjoy giving that a shot this year.”
In Yeomans’s chat with Music Feeds, he didn’t hesitate to dive deep into the nuances of writing for ankle-biters, either. This is what he had to say:
“It’s really hard to approach writing songs for adults, ’cause you can’t really think about it too much. The way that I approach writing for Regurgitator is like, I have to come up with something that’s relevant or interesting to me, as an adult, and translate it in a way that’s kind of bizarre and a little bit off-base, and try and find that cool somehow, which is incredibly difficult to find. Increasingly so, because there’s so much new, incredible music being made by young people that are on the edge of what they’re doing, obsessed with what they’re doing. So there’s a lot more competition involved with that.
“With the kids’ stuff, I think we can take risks again like we used to, and just do stuff that might be a little bit risqué in that genre currently, ’cause it is so neutralised by everyone being terrified about offending people and offending children, or like damaging children in some way by exposing them to something a little bit I dunno, adult, or just realistic. So I mean, when I approach a kids’ show, I want to educate in a non-patronising way. I want to talk about science, I want to talk about the human body, and be on the level with what they’re gonna have to get used to as they grow up. My kid’s vocab is very much inspired by the way that I talk to him – I don’t talk to him like a child, I talk to him how I would talk to anyone. Obviously I’m sensible with my understanding of what he understands, but I don’t believe in talking down to children, I never have, and I think that a lot of the kids’ material that’s out there kind of does. It can be a little bit patronising for kids, and you know, they enjoy it, and that’s fine and it’s catchy or whatever, but I think there’s room for something a little bit more sophisticated ’cause we do kind of undervalue the way they look at the world.”
You can read the full interview right here.
Meanwhile, adult fans can look forward to Regurgitator releasing their ninth studio album HEADROXX on 1st August.
