Tropical Fuck Storm — Feature Article

WORDS – NAT KASSEL PHOTOS – JAMIE WDZIEKONSKI

“You know what?” says Gareth Liddiard, getting on a bit of a roll. “Fuck humans!” It’s a Thursday morning, just after 11am, and Gaz is a little bit hungover. But he’s laughing as he says this, getting animated and outrageous. “You know about human rights? How about this: Humans are the fucking scourge of the earth, they shit on everything else. If you interviewed every other living thing on the planet, they would say that humans are fucking scum. So don’t talk to me about human rights.”

These words will look heavy in print, but they are spoken with an odd mix of cheek and sincerity. Gaz is a great interviewee, equal parts amicable and intense. I get a sense that he enjoys offending people, or at least shocking them. Having listened to his lyrics, starting with The Drones records, then his 2010 solo album Strange Tourist and now three Tropical Fuck Storm records, my guess is that Gaz actually cares deeply for humans and human rights. Maybe at times he cares so much that it hurts, to the point where he’s frustrated enough to say outlandish and misanthropic sentences like these.

We’re talking on the phone about Tropical Fuck Storm’s most recent single, ‘G.A.F.F.’, which stands for “give-a-fuck fatigue”. It’s a song replete with the crazy, layered noise and grooves that TFS have become known for, defying a single genre but spanning art rock, noise, post punk and psychedelia. It’s difficult to describe the TFS sound with words, except to say that they don’t sound like any other band. Their lyrics are always captivating to decode, with all sorts of obscure references and social commentary. ‘G.A.F.F.’ takes aim at everything from the pandemic to Antifa to QAnon conspiracy theorists to the 24-hour news cycle. It’s about being exposed to so much bad news that you’re too fatigued to engage with it. Post 2020, it feels painfully relevant.

At one point in the song Gaz spits, “The body cam’s live / the body count’s dead / next to people making babies on the World Wide Web.” He’s contrasting internet porn with the Christchurch shooter, Brenton Tarrant, who livestreamed himself massacring 51 people in a mosque. The song acknowledges the absurdity of how the Internet allows us instant access to both these things, side by side. And if there’s a single overarching theme that carries through Tropical Fuck Storm songs, it’s the argument that the Internet has fucked the world up.

“You can put any bullshit on Facebook and call it non-fiction,” Gaz explains. “And some idiot over the age of 55 will go, ‘Ok.’ They don’t realise that it’s not what it’s being labelled as. Everybody is not on the same page, and everybody has their own set of bullshit facts… everybody thinks they’re the first person in history to finally get it right. And they’ve got a platform to fucken preach that crap.

“The only good thing about humans, the only thing we have over elephants or chimps, is teamwork. We didn’t get to the moon because we’re smart, we got to the moon because we could work as a team… I think the Internet is undoing that fabric, the fabric of teamwork. No one agrees with each other.

“Look at the way we reacted to the pandemic. You’d think that would bring everyone onto the same team and would make us all fight it, together, but people don’t even want to fucking get vaccinated, and people think it’s fake.”

Gaz has a lot to say about the Internet. In a song called ‘The Future of History’, from the first TFS album, A Laughing Death in Meatspace, he laments, “If IBM is here to make your dreams come true / It can probably do the same thing for your nightmares too.”

While it’s easy to see the Internet as a sort of ungovernable no man’s land where anything goes, Gaz points out that there are people designing and profiting off pretty much everything that you see online. In the press release that came out with the new album, Deep States, there was a quote about “super yacht dwelling tech barons” who “monetise our indignation”. When I ask about this, Gaz clarifies, “It’s just a business… That’s just so Mark Zuckerberg can earn advertising dollars and sell your personal information for money.”

Along with Gaz, TFS is made up of three women: Fiona Kitschin, Erica Dunn and Lauren Hammel. Fiona joined The Drones in 2002 and has been in a relationship with Gaz for almost 25 years. In Tropical Fuck Storm, she plays bass, sings, writes some of the lyrics and manages the band. Erica Dunn is a former community radio host and Melbourne music scene staple, playing guitar and singing with bands like Palm Springs, Harmony and MOD CON. Gaz and Fi already knew Erica before forming TFS, so she was an easy fit. They headhunted Lauren “Hammer” Hammel, after seeing her play drums with her other band, High Tension, citing her as one of the best drummers in town. In a 2018 interview Gaz told the journalist Mahmood Fazal, “I look back on The Drones shit and think, ‘What a load of fucking wank.’” I wonder if die-hard Drones fans—of which there are more than a few—find this difficult to stomach, and if Gaz still sees The Drones as a wank. “Ah, not really,” he laughs. “Mahmood’s a really good friend, so I probably just said it to make him laugh. I mean, I guess what I was getting at was I wanted TFS to be a bit more simple and direct, a bit more punk. Less Bob Dylan, more Circle Jerks or Black Flag.”

Where The Drones songs were often personal and sometimes emotional (see: ‘Why Write A Letter That You’ll Never Send’), Tropical Fuck Storm songs tend to address larger contemporary issues, like the effects of the Internet, the pandemic and the storming of the Capitol building, to name a few examples. “When you’re younger, you’ve got your head up your arse and you think about yourself a bit more than you think about everything else,” says Gaz. “And that’s reflected in The Drones a bit more. So rather than looking inwards, TFS is looking outwards. And there’s so much to look at, especially in this day and age.”

When they get asked about the three-quarters-female line-up, TFS tend to play it down. Gaz was once quoted: “Honestly, having Hammer and Erica would only be political if they were crap at what they did.” In other words, the three women in TFS are there because they’re super talented and they all bring something unique to the band. During our phone interview interview, I can hear Fi in the background helping Gaz with some of his answers. At one point Gaz says that all politicians are stupid and ugly, with “heads like robber’s dogs”. Fi suggests: “What about Jacinda Ardern?”

“We’re a fairly low maintenance couple,” says Gaz. “We spend 99% of the time together – more so than other couples. And then we offset each other well, like when we’re writing music. I’m a little bit more prone to get scientific and try to experiment with stuff and see how weird I could get. Then Fi’s always saying, ‘Well, you know it still has to have some sort of emotional clout.’ So she’ll pull me back in that direction.”

Gaz and Fi clearly have a successful dynamic for songwriting and their relationship seems to suit their lifestyle as working musicians. Gaz explains that The Drones eventually broke up because the other two members were buying houses and having kids, while he and Fi were still keen to spend their time making records, partying and touring the world. “The whole point of a rock and roll band, as opposed to a symphony orchestra or something like that, is that you can move quick. You can chuck the shit in a car, drive to the airport and fuck off on short notice. We couldn’t do it with them. Plus we’d been doing it for ages and really hadn’t done anything different.”

Gaz says he didn’t write a single song for the first six months of the pandemic. He and Fi live in Nagambie, a town between Melbourne and Shepparton, so they had to endure successive lockdowns. “It was just depressing,” he says. “The wheels fell off and it didn’t seem like there was any point to anything, really. Everything was such an unknown. It was just a lost six months.”

He eventually pulled himself out of the doldrums though; TFS spent the following six months working on the new album, Deep States, much of which was inspired by the news cycle. “Yeah, I read the news too much,” says Gaz. “It’s just fascinating to see everybody’s reactions to stuff. I especially like the Murdoch press, reading the letters people write in – just a bunch of whingeing idiots. I find that entertaining. I’m looking at the comments on Twitter – dumb fucks out there in the world.”

“Dumb fuck,” seems to be Gaz’s favourite slur. It’s how he describes QAnon conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, climate change deniers, the hard right and the hard left – they’re all dumb fucks, according to Gaz. One song from the new album, ‘Blue Beam Baby’, is about Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old woman who was shot and killed by police when she stormed the US Capitol building on January 6. She was part of an angry mob who were demanding that Donald Trump get a second term, even after Joe Biden had won the US election. Babbitt was an air force veteran who got deep into various conspiracy theories, including QAnon, which is based on discredited claims that the world is run by a secret cabal of Satanic paedophiles who operate an underground sex trafficking ring. “She’s obviously just a dumb fuck,” says Gaz of Ashli Babbitt. “She climbed through that window, towards a dude pointing a gun at her, so she’s pretty stupid. But yeah, there is still compassion there. The song is basically about Q and it’s a fraud.” Gaz (and many others) reckon the whole conspiracy was probably started by Jim and Ron Watkins, a father and son who ran an online message board called 8kun (formerly 8chan). Their website has been a hub for the far right, frequently used as a platform for hate speech and violent extremism. It was also where the QAnon conspiracy updates appeared. “This is a guy who’s bringing Nazism 2.0 in,” Gaz says of Watkins. “Just this insignificant fucking idiot, and so she [Ashli Babbitt] died for him, so that’s sad.”

Gaz has long been outspoken in his criticism of the radical right, but he’s no darling of the left either. With the left’s tendencies toward cancel culture, pseudoscience and, in some cases, physical violence, he seems to hate them both in almost equal measure.

“Right wingers deny climate science, and that’s fucked, but then left wingers deny all sorts of science, like medicine. They’d rather use a crystal to cure cancer,” he laughs. “I admire Antifa for many reasons, but at the same time it’s like, ‘Go into politics if you want to do something, don’t just go and fucking punch someone. That doesn’t change the world.’ Do you think Martin Luther King went around punching people? Or Nelson Mandela went around punching people?”

This sentiment comes through in ‘G.A.F.F.’ when he sings, “Nazis hate pinkos hate MAGAts in the park / when they’re killing one another you can tell them apart”. But of course, it’s a song about not giving a fuck, pointing out that this kind of violence leaves us feeling both disturbed and apathetic. We’ve become too busy and burnt out to care: “Don’t wanna die a martyr / I’m just looking for a latte and a fucking phone charger.”

When it comes to writing lyrics, Gaz says that with TFS it’s a collaborative process. “It’s a lot of work writing lyrics, so it’s more fun if everyone helps. Generally everyone pitches in,” he says, explaining that with The Drones, he would do most of the songwriting by himself. “I think I was maybe a bit more of a control freak back then, but now I can’t be bothered being a control freak so everyone helps me,” he laughs.

It might come as a surprise to some, but Gaz says TFS have become more popular than The Drones ever were. They’re signed to Flightless Records, the niche and highly respected label run by King Gizzard, and just before the pandemic hit, they’d booked a string of international tours that were set to be their biggest yet. It was all happening for them, more than it ever had before.

“People are finally picking up what we’re putting down,” he says. “I think that comes down to the fact that the world’s anxiety levels have finally caught up to the anxiety levels in the music that we’ve been putting out for 20-odd years.”