Altered Zones

[Photo by Angaline Atkins]

By Daniel Gottlieb

MP3: The Twerps: "She Didn't Know"

MP3: The Twerps: "Bullies"

In a salient section of AZ's recent feature on Australia's R.I.P. Society, label head Nic Warnock mentioned that until recently, "no one [in Sydney] was willing to champion local bands and build them from the ground up [...] There was no real support team or independent establishment." Melbourne is a different story, and The Twerps are a case in point. Buttressed by a tight-knit DIY scene that saw one of its earliest success stories in Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Twerps started out on the city's house party circuit, sharing stages with other proto-punk/pop bands like Panel of Judges, Super Wild Horses, and Teen Archer.

Musical "mateship"-- whereby bands will unconditionally shout out one another to whoever will listen-- is an essential characteristic of the Melbourne scene, and the four-piece of Martin Frawley, Julia McFarlane, Rick Milovanovic and Patrick O'Neill has benefitted accordingly. Chapter Music, Night People, Underwater Peoples, and now Group Tightener have all fallen for Twerps' intuitive fusion of Flying Nun jangle, off-kilter wit, and Australian back porch-BBQ raconteurship. When we caught up with them on their recent-ish foray to New York-via-SXSW, however, the most striking thing about them was their genuine surprise at the attention they have been generating beyond Australian shores. Months ahead of their debut full-length on Chapter and UP, it seems that they are the only people unsure of how good they really are.

AZ: How did you guys start out?

Rick: Marty was living in a place where we were all hanging out a lot. Marty and I also worked at a video store together and straight away found that we loved the same music. That would’ve been late 2007. Around that time, we were really excited about bands like The Clean. I remember sitting around in his room listening to "Anything Could Happen" trying to figure out how to write a song like it as a joke. It came out as "Little Guys", from our first [Chapter Music] 7". I remember going to a friend’s house and playing it to them. We were so stoked.

Marty: And they were like, "you’re kidding right? Get over yourselves." That said, we had been drinking for seven hours. When we were doing the first bunch of recordings I was listening to heaps of The Go-Betweens. I didn’t know many chords, but I would watch “Bachelor Kisses” and just work out chords by watching Robert Forster. That’s why a lot of people say the record sounds like The Go-Betweens, but I don't think it does.