Australia is a great place to live, no question. But it’s also an exceedingly tough environment for original bands wanting to make a real go of things. For any number of well-documented reasons – our geographic isolation, our small population spread out over a massive land mass, governmental indifference, and the general public’s fixation on TV talent shows – bands often need to pack up and relocate in order to fulfil their commercial potential. With their notoriety in Europe exploding over the last few years, it’s a decision that Melbourne’s Mammoth Mammoth currently face.
“We’re looking right into that at the moment,” says frontman Mickey Tucker. “The last tour we did was with a band called My Sleeping Karma, the bass player is also the owner of Sound of Liberation, which is our booking agent over there. They’ve got a lot of big bands on their roster, and they also do a lot of great festivals.
“When we were on the bus with those guys, we were basically picking his brain on relocating and how we would go about it and how we would go show-wise – how many tours we would be able to do a year just to make it financially viable. So we’ve basically locked it in. They’re looking into visas and all that kind of stuff. We’re not quite sure when, maybe early next year, but it’s definitely the plan.”
The aforementioned isolation of our country is one of the main factors behind the move. “We’re going over there so often now,” says Tucker. “We’re always having to turn certain things down, like if we get offered a festival slot we unfortunately have to turn it down. Even though it might be playing a side stage to 50,000 people, it’s just one day, and for us to fly over there just to do that, or to try to book shows around it, things don’t always go to plan. So we have to say no to a lot of stuff. If we move over there we can basically say yes to everything, push things to the next level.”
For the time being, however, Mammoth Mammoth are still based in Melbourne, and gearing up for a set at CherryRock016. The band are ecstatic to be playing the festival for the fourth time. “We’re really looking forward to it,” says Tucker. “We’ve just toured Europe, so it’s good to get back to Australia and play to our home crowd again.”
Adding to the band’s excitement is the fact this will be CherryRock’s tenth anniversary. “It’s awesome to be invited back to play on their tenth year. We’re just coming off the back of a big tour, so we’re feeling pretty gig-fit at the moment, so I’m sure we’ll put on a pretty good show.”
The band will be showcasing a bunch of vibrant tunes from their wealthy back catalogue, plus tracks from their latest EP, Mammoth Bloody Mammoth. “Our full-length album, Hammered Again, came out a year ago and we did a European tour for that, and while we were there our A&R guy said, ‘What should we do? Should we do a live album, or did we have something else in mind?’ So we said to him that we could basically release an EP straight away, because we had some left over material from Hammered Again. Now we’re back, we’re writing for our next full-length.”
Written by Rod Whitfield
When & Where: CherryRock016 @ Cherry Bar, Melbourne – May 1