The SPAT [Surf Coast]
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The SPAT [Surf Coast]

Playing gigs and recording music aren’t always the be-all and end-all for a band. Some musicians just want to muck around and have a bit of fun with their mates. Aireys Inlet band The SPAT has precisely this attitude. The band consists of two couples – lead guitarist Paul Plecic and his wife, Anna, on drums, and Sharon Caon on rhythm and vocals and her husband, Tony, on bass – who says none of them ever really set out to create a band. It just happened.
“We were at the pub one day at a party and said, ‘Let’s go back and have a bang on the drums and get some guitars – Anna, you can be our drummer’. She’d never drummed before. So then she just started drumming and she could actually drum, so then that’s when we started the band. We’ve got the name SPAT – Sharon, Paul, Anna and Tony. It’s a bit of a pisstake on ABBA I suppose, because we’re two couples.”
While Paul has been playing in bands since he was a teenager, Tony says this is a first for the rest of them. “Sharon has been musical most of her life, but has never really played in a band, while Tony and Anna are still very much newbies to the music scene. So it’s never too late,” Tony says.
The SPAT is mainly a cover band, playing songs from a broad range of artists – from Iggy Pop to Foster the People and Cyndi Lauper. From being a regular garage band, they have gradually started to play the occasional gig at parties. Tony says he hopes they may build up to other kinds of gigs in the future, but it’s not a priority. “I hope we can just get over that shyness I suppose.”
But just playing at the occasional party has not diluted the rockstar experience, with one of their recent sets shut down by the police. “I think we started a bit late on that one,” Tony says. “The guy whose party it was kind of freaked out a bit, like ‘The cops are here, they’re going to fine me’. But we just started up again a couple of hours later, to finish off our set.”
As in any band, each of the four brings different strengths to the group, but they also share many similarities and work well together. “Paul loves to be loud with ‘face-shredding’ guitar solos and that sort of stuff,” Tony says. “Anna and I in the rhythm section – we just try to be solid I suppose. Sharon does a lot of the working out song structures and stuff.
“I think we’ve all got very similar music tastes. And I think when people bring different songs and different influences to a group, sometimes they don’t fly. But more often than not we’ll get a new song and go, ‘Wow, great, let’s do that’. So it’s collaborative.”
They are occasionally joined by locals Chris Brick and Dave Bourke on percussion and banjo and ukulele respectively. This just adds to the atmosphere of fun, which is all that SPAT is really looking for at the moment.
“You can have the shittiest day at work and then go and have a jam. It’s fantastic,” Tony says. “We just love the fun feeling of doing that. That’s really why we did it. We didn’t do it to play in public. We’re two couples just having fun.”
By Daniel Waight