For Taasha Coates, the winsome and witty frontwoman of Australian alt-roots and blues band The Audreys, the last year has been a self-described “trip.” She’s become a mum for the first time and is attempting to rock her six month old son to sleep as we speak about the string of live dates she and her longtime collaborator, Tristan Goodall, are about to embark upon.
The 15-date tour will take them all over Australia during June and July, marking their first lengthy tour since 2010. Coates discovered she was pregnant not long after the group released its most recent record, Sometimes the Stars, early that same year and quite cheerfully concedes that “impending motherhood considerably curtailed our plans to tour in support of it, yes!”
Speaking from her hometown of Adelaide, the city of churches to which she has recently returned after a stint living in Brisbane with her partner, Coates has had a difficult night. She jokes that “my nerves are frayed. The little bugger just didn’t want to sleep! He kept waking up every hour, literally, so I am consequently a bit of a zombie today. But he’s sucking on his dummy now, even though he has big fat tears rolling down his face, like his life is just so hard!”
Coates and Goodall met at university in Adelaide in the 1980s. For many years they were a couple, separating shortly after the band’s debut album, Between Last Night and Us, was released in 2006. That album snagged them their first ARIA, for Best Blues and Roots Album, a feat they’ve since gone on to repeat with their two subsequent albums, 2008’s When The Flood Comes and 2010’s Sometimes The Stars.
ABC Music/Universal Music Australia has recently released a box set, entitled The Audreys: Collected. Comprising all three albums, complete with suitably darkly whimsical artwork, it also boasts several previously unreleased rarities. When I ask Coates what prompted the decision to repackage the album she is characteristically forthright and dryly humorous.
“Honestly? People come up to us at shows and say, ‘Oh, I’ve got that album, but which of the other two should I buy? Which is your favourite?’ It’s a tough question to be asked because it’s a bit like someone asking you to pick your favourite kid! It’s really nice to now have the option to just give people all three and hopefully we’ve made it interesting for longtime fans by adding some things they won’t have heard before,” she says.
“The new stuff is actually old stuff for us as they’re tracks we recorded for each of the records that never actually made it onto the records, so they’re either stuff we recorded as we were making the albums themselves or songs that were recorded as demos in between. But, either way, it’s stuff nobody but us, really, has heard before, so hopefully it’s a nice treat for our fans to be able to hear something new and a bit different.”
The band’s unprecedented and history-making ARIAs trifecta was also a motivating factor for the repackaging and rerelease of their complete back catalogue. As Coates points out, utterly devoid of ego, “it’s kind of cool, no? I mean, people will come to one ARIAs ceremony and maybe win a bunch of awards, whereas we’ve only ever won the one award, but it’s the same award, and we’ve won it for each album we’ve released, three times in a row, and that’s a bit special, I think.”
For Coates, who spent two-and-half months on the road touring in support of Sometimes The Stars before “stopping because I was really quite pregnant,” the prospect of playing live again is both exciting and a little bit nerve-wracking. Still, as she concedes, “I think I’d be a bit worried if the nerves weren’t there, really.”
“We’ve done a few festivals here and there, but then I took most of last year off and now I’m either very bravely or very stupidly going back on the road for three weeks with a two year old, so if I go insane, then you’ll know why! The duo thing is exciting for us because back in 2010 we did a duo tour. It was just a handful of dates, but the first show with did was in Melbourne and we were standing backstage, really freaking out and just looking at each other wondering if we were insane to have done this. When you play with a band, everything’s quite well rehearsed and planned out, but we had this fanciful idea about going out there, the two of us, and just winging it,” Coates laughs.
“But then we did it, we got out on the stage and we just had one of the best gigs we’d ever had and all that stuff we’d decided to do we, somehow, amazingly pulled off and we remembered that the band really originally came down to the chemistry between he and I. We were reminded of that when there was just the two of us onstage, you know? There was this nice looseness about the songs and we just bounced off each other. It was really great. It was such a fun gig and we walked offstage with the biggest smiles on our faces! So, yeah, we’re looking forward to doing that again. Hopefully we can kind of recapture some of that old magic.”
Fans will also be glad to hear that plans for a fourth studio album are currently afoot. Goodall will travel to Adelaide to stay with Coates for a couple of weeks before the duo hits the road, hopefully providing an opportunity for the two to share various potential ideas for songs and perhaps even get down to the gritty business of what Coates laughingly calls “actual proper songwriting, the sort that involves being in the same city at the same time.”
“He’s been working on a bunch of music ideas and I’ve been writing a bunch of lyrics ideas. So, basically, we’re really hoping that the muse hasn’t completely deserted us after our year off and we can still write some tunes! I guess we’ll see. We might just stare at each other and say, ‘Bugger this, lets just go to the pub!’
We’ve known each other for a long time and our creative focus is really good, though. Life has a few more complications these days, so we have to be structured and say: ‘Okay, this is it. This is writing week!’” Coates admits.
“We’re at the point, and we have been for quite a number of years now, where there’s no pretence. We can just be really honest with each other and there’s no self-consciousness about coming up with ideas that might be crap! One of the hardest things, I think, about writing with someone new is that you feel a little bit shy of putting forward an idea that might not, you know, necessarily end up being that great whereas with Tristan and I, we know each other really well, we’re completely comfortable with one another, and we can sit down and just sort of let it all come pouring out and then see what sticks. It’s a really good creative relationship that we have.”
Given the critical acclaim that has greeted The Audreys’ previous albums, Coates admits she is “a little bit nervous” about starting to seriously write for a new recording. Still, she also reckons “not being hard on yourself about it is hugely important and if I have learned one big lesson, that is probably it.”
“There are many times where nothing works. You’re sitting there and nothing comes. The best thing to do when nothing comes is to not feel bad about it, to not put pressure on yourself. We discovered a really good trick writing our second record and that is that you just write anything. Absolutely anything. I mean, we’ve written a bunch of joke songs, a bunch of songs for kids, stuff that we know is crap, but you just go through the process of writing it because you’re stimulating the creative parts of your brain. One of the problems is dealing with the critical, worrisome part of your brain,” she reveals.
“I find that if you can turn off that part of your brain, and it isn’t always easy, and get rid of the fears and anxieties, and decide to just write, you know, a stupid song, it’s okay. All sorts of stuff comes out and you can just sort of go with it and then sift through it later. That’s kind of the idea behind the duo shows. We’re stripping it down to how the songs get written and we like to keep it quite loose and raw. When it works, it’s a really great night. It’s just the two of us, alone, so it’s much riskier, but when it works, we love it so much and it’s something we’ve been looking forward to doing, so hopefully it all works out for us each night this time around.”
The Audreys: Collected is out now through ABC Music/Universal Music Australia. They play The Sound Lounge, Currumbin, on Thursday 21 June and the Brisbane Powerhouse on Friday 22 June.
