Australian pop-rockers DMA’s have made BBC Radio 1’s A-List, sold-out numerous UK shows and caught the ear of Oasis songwriter Noel Gallagher, and they haven’t even released an album yet. We caught up with guitarist Johnny Took to chat about recording their album in a bedroom, the success of their single Delete, and being ‘very fucking average’
You’re releasing your debut album on February 26th – was it easy to write and record?
‘Easy? I wouldn’t say so. The thing with a debut album is that you’ve got a lot of songs to pick from, so it was fun to be able to go through everything we’ve got and pick out the ones that we wanted on the album. The recording was pretty cool – we did it all at home, so we were able to stay up all night recording if we felt like it, and we could work on it whenever we wanted to. There was a lot less pressure to get ‘the perfect take’ because we knew that we could just keep doing it until we were all happy with it. I’m not sure if that’s how we’re going to make the next album, but it definitely worked for us with this one.’
‘We actually started in a tiny studio in Australia. That was where we did most of the bass and drums – the bones of the song, almost – before taking them home to record the guitars and the vocals. It worked particularly well with the vocals; Tommy doesn’t like being in the studio because he doesn’t like feeling distanced from the person who’s actually recording the track.’
‘You can hear in his voice how much more relaxed he was at home when you compare them to the takes he did in the studio, so it definitely worked out better in that respect.’
‘It wasn’t all easy, though. We actually recorded next to a pretty busy road, so we had to be careful that we didn’t end up with the sound of car horns on the recordings… The only problem was that we had to shut all the windows to keep the noise out, but it was the middle of the Australian summer; we were boiling!’
Your single Delete has made the BBC Radio 1 A List, and your upcoming UK dates are your biggest yet. Did you ever expect this to happen?
‘Nope! It’s been slow and steady, but we’re so glad it’s happened. It feels like we’ve grown really organically, and that’s a wonderful feeling. I’m just excited that there are people out there who are wanting to listen to the album. Plenty of my friends have invested lots of time, energy and money on their albums, only to see them slip under the radar. It’s nice to know that people are going to listen to this one.’
There are a lot of British influences splashed across the album, and that might be why we’ve embraced your music so readily over here in the United Kingdom. Did you purposely set out to create an Anglophilic album?
‘Not particularly. Some of the songs – like Delete and So We Know – were written five or six years ago, so they’ve got a very different set of influences to a lot of other stuff on the album. I was making folk music back then, but when I met Tommy… I guess that’s when I first got into bands like The La’s, Oasis, Stone Roses, The Verve, and bands like that, and it’s from there that the DMA’s developed. It’s in the tone of his voice, too – his dad’s a Scouser, so there’s a definite Liverpudlian twang in there. I think that’s a big part of our British sound.’
What’s your favourite song on the album?
‘Man, that’s hard… At the moment, it’s probably Step Up The Morphine. There’s a lot of sentimental value attached to that song – I wrote it after my grandmother passed away, and I’d never experienced anybody in my family passing away before, so it means a lot to me. I was really happy with how the song turned out, and I’ve got a lot of fond memories attached to it.’
Do you enjoy touring the UK?
‘We love it. We’ve been over here a lot, and it’s great to see the crowds responding so well to the songs we’ve playing. It’s much easier to travel across the country, too. In Australia, we always used to have to drive for about ten hours to get from one show to the next, so to only have to drive for a couple of hours every day… Man, I love it. I used to be in a bluegrass band in Australia, and we never had any money, so we used to drive for eight hours, do a show, and then drive all the way back home after we’d played.’
‘It’s pretty dangerous, too. I remember coming back from Brisbane one time, and we saw a truck where the driver fell asleep at the wheel…’
‘I sped past him, and I could see in my mirror that the truck was just veering to the left. It actually tilted onto two wheels, and then I saw the driver wake up and get it under control again. That was some scary stuff. I haven’t done that drive for a couple of years, actually – we’ve now got the money to be able to afford the one-and-a-half hour flight, which is much better! The flight to the UK from Australia is still a bastard, though…’
Let’s talk about songwriting…
‘There’s no set process to our songwriting; it’s different every time. Some songs are a Frankenstein effort – Tommy will have a chorus and I’ll have a verse, and we’ll slice them together and somehow it seems to work. With Lay Down, Tommy used to be a painter and decorator, and he used to a do a lot of voice memos while he was at work. One day he came home with a voice memo, we sat down and worked out some chords, and within fifteen minutes it had become Lay Down. You can’t dissect our songwriting process – we just see what happens.’
‘When we went to write this album, the first thing we did was to go through all of our old demos. Those were the bones of the album, and quite a few bits of them actually made it onto the record. There were so many elements of the demos that you can’t really recreate unless you’re ‘in the moment’ when you first write the songs, so we actually just lifted them and used them on the album. I think that this gave us that authentic sound that made us fall in love with the songs.’
If you could be in any other band, which would you choose?
‘I don’t even know! I’ve got a pretty easy job in DMA’s, to be honest – I just play acoustic guitar. I’d maybe go with The Travelling Wilburys. I’d get to hang out with Dylan and Harrison, which would be pretty cool.’
What’s your favourite song to play live?
‘Play It Out. Definitely. That was the first song we ever recorded – I can remember our bass player Tom recording it for us, and I’ve got a lot of personal nostalgia attached to that song. It’s got a pretty ballsy vibe, too; we can extend it for as long as we like, and we do a pretty cool little ‘wall of sound’ thing with it. It’s fun.’
Describe yourself in three words?
‘Very fucking average.’
