It seems next to impossible to be a band that’s just starting out, is yet to release any music online, and still score yourself the support slot for The Babe Rainbows sold out tour as well as a spot on this years Gizzfest lineup. Well, not if you’re in Bananagun.
“I guess we’re just lucky we’ve got cool friends,” laughs Nick VanBakel, the groups lead singer. The truth is Bananagun have received an immediate reception because they have earned it. With Nick being a member of the now retired (for the most part) Frowning Clouds, Stella, the groups bass player, also being a part of Melbourne legends Parsnip while band members Luke and Jimmy playing the local gig scene for years it makes a lot of sense that people are keen to hear what they have been working on.
“We recorded a couple of weeks ago and I’ve just been overdubbing some stuff,” Nick explains. “We did it with our friend Luke Marizza, who is a sound guy in Melbourne and a good buddy of ours. He lives in a house with a gigantic room so we all went there and recorded it with him.”
With a gigantic room, comes the perfect location for acoustics. “I’m pretty big on making it sound good acoustically in the first place,” he says, “it is pretty important to make sure we are recording in a room with some natural reverb and it’s not too dead. If it’s a whole band, I feel recording in a tiny room gets too claustrophobic.”
With songs currently in the process of post-production, Nick hints to what fans that can expect from a Bananagun live show.
“I find it a bit weird trying to describe our sound, but the vibe is a bit less angry teenager and a bit mellower mid-20’s guy. It’s a lot more world music, tropically, jungly…” he explains.
“I’ve always been really obsessed with the jungle and exotic flora and fauna, and I’ve always been into Indian music too so that has a bit of influence. I guess the main two influences that I thought would be cool was to make something that sounded a bit like Os Mutantes combined with The Monks, which I guess are both fairly rhythmic bands with a lot of jungle juju going on.”
With Bananagun imminently dropping some songs and a few gigs in the works, they have already planned a busy conclusion to the year.
“We have a couple of tour supports coming up, we have a show with Orb and then another with Sagamore, but we still haven’t released anything so we will keep working on these recordings and writing some more songs. There’s Gizzfest too, that’ll be cool, it’s going to be monumental in fact! We are all super keen to play at that!”
When & Where: Gizzfest 2017 @ Melbourne Showgrounds – December 2
Written by Alex Callan
