The Bats
The New Zealand indie rock stalwarts return - and not before time. Singer/songwriter Robert Scott reveals why.
By Andrew P Street
How's the day treating you? Good. I'm doing some painting, because I've got an exhibition starting tomorrow.
Um, isn't that leaving it a little late? Well, because I was away in Europe [with legendary NZ band The Clean, for whom he plays bass], I had to try and do as much as I could before I went – but when I got back I realised I didn't have quite enough pieces for the show. But they're water-based acrylic paints, so they dry in a couple of hours. It's fine.
So you've got an exhibition, a Bats tour, a new Bats album, and a new Clean record coming out... Well yeah. Both The Bats and The Clean projects were started quite a long time ago, but now they're coming out sort of close together. So that's kinda funny.
Is that inconvenient for touring? Slightly, yeah. It doesn't usually happen this way, usually there's a good couple of years' gap. One'll come out and then the other band will have one coming out, and for whatever reason they're coming out a bit close together. It's mainly getting time off work and time away from the family that's the trickiest thing. It's a bit of a juggle, but it's fun enough to be still doing it after all this time. If it wasn't, I wouldn't be doing it.
Of course, in Australia you'll always be known as that band that did the song from [ABC series] The Hollow Men. That's true [laughs]. And that ['North by North'] is a very old song of ours.
One lovely thing about new album The Guilty Office is just how much it sounds like The Bats. That's good. I think it's good to sound like yourself because a lot of bands out there could be anyone, in a way. If you've got a sound or a style you're happy with yourself, I think it's good to go with it and stick with it. We do get accused as well of sounding too much the same – I don't wanna be one of those bands that constantly change, but it's a bit of a fine line. I mean we're not gonna suddenly try and start playing reggae.
That said, I hear that reggae's huge in New Zealand. Yeah, it's pretty popular, actually. Bob Marley came here in the 70s and turned a lot of people on. Now it's gotten incredibly popular here.
I have to confess, whenever I think of the lazy summer rhythms of reggae, rarely do I think of Dunedin… [laughs] Well, reggae is not quite as big down here as it is up north, but actually it's still pretty popular.
The Bats play at the Hopetoun Hotel on Sat 8 Aug.
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