Tim Wild - along with Tim Watson, Dan Hall, and Jason Singh - of the Melbourne pop outfit Taxiride, is in Perth on the band's second promotional visit around Australia. This comes on the back of their Top 10 hit, Get Set, and just prior to their Best New Artist - Single award shared with Alex Lloyd at the 1999 ARIA awards.
Tim Wild is literally radioactive. People aren't meant to look this healthy at 9 o'clock in the morning. Rock stars aren't even supposed to remember what it's like to be up this time of the day. So what's going on? The Taxiride express is in town - a whirlwind of hair gel, harmonies, and teenage dreams made good, talking up their debut album, Imaginate. Only thing is they aren't your archetypal boy band, nor the last gang in town, more a mezzanine. Pitched somewhere between two floors on the musical elevator and straddling the pages of both Smash Hits and Rolling Stone, the only thing beyond doubt is how fast their star is rising. 'Get set everybody we're on our way.'
"It wasn't a super conscious thing, appealing to such a wide audience," Wild says, "but hopefully it's working out like that to some degree. Hopefully little girls will go gaga and buy it, and then their parents will find it and discover they like it too. We build the songs towards adults as well because kids change their minds so quickly. Get Set is pretty much just right, around three minutes 20.
"We recorded a lot of the album in Melbourne. We met our two managers through years of playing around the music scene, and they became mates and we had worked with them in some capacity in bands before. Pete Dacy, one of them, has a studio in a converted garage and we did a lot of the recording there before flying the reels over to LA once we had a recording contract and everything. We started some songs again, finished some off, using the basic core of the demos, and heaps of famous people passing through there."
'There' being the birthplace of The Beach Boys' magnum opus, Pet Sounds, Ocean Way Recording on Sunset Boulevard with Jack Joseph Puig (Rolling Stones, Goo Goo Dolls, Black Crowes) behind the board. The recording contract being a pretty rare international signing by Bud Scoppa to Seymour Stein's (Ramones, Madonna, Replacements, Talking Heads, k.d. lang) legendary Sire imprint.
"It was a fascinating place to be. There's a big picture of Brian Wilson on the wall and you use all the same microphone stands and headphones because they are still using all that junk. Only it's not junk, it's like a museum. The bass pre-amp is the same one used on Pet Sounds, and there's gear there from Abbey Road and also stuff that was used on Dark Side Of The Moon.
"At first it was a little daunting," Wild admits. "But everyone was so friendly up there. Seymour Stein came into the studio a couple of times to see how we were going. We always secretly videotaped him when he came in, just hid the camera and pressed record so we could have some footage of him hanging down in the studio listening to the stuff … something we can all look back on one day. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers were recording their album next door at the same time too. One of the guys finally got the guts to go in, but they weren't there at the time so he just stole a guitar pick. Then Dan Hall bumped into Dave Navarro in a toilet at a Hollywood party.
"Everything about LA was great. It's so '50s looking with all these car washes with faded out colours," Wild enthuses, lost in the happy daze of his memories.
Having worked on the demos for over two years, there was still some slight concern over maintaining the energy in the songs. Wild explains how that was remedied by the relaxed nature of the initial recording process.
"We kept a lot of the vocal performances and really great guitar sounds from the demos to keeps the freshness intact. I had a 12-string Rickenbacker guitar going through a tiny Gorilla amp and it had a really ace sound, so we said 'oh, we've got to keep that'. We could then put it into something quite fancy, but it's hard to reproduce that particular quality. Same with the vocals, they were fresh at the time and because we weren't aware that they were going to be on such a big album, we did them however we wanted to. Then in LA it was like a compromise between the different technologies."
So do they ever feel compromised doing the promotional side of the work?
"Well you know what you are doing and if you're realistic about everything, you know what you are getting into. I mean usually the girl from Smash Hits is cute and you mess around, take some photos, she asks you what you like for breakfast, big smile, and you're out of there. So it's not that hard. I mean at the ARIAs we are supposed to be entertaining a competition winner. But that's a really controlled environment, where for half an hour we might hang out with them. Usually they don't speak for the first 15 minutes and the they ask, 'So when did you write Get Set?' and it's over before you know it."
Imaginate flows from a strange pool of innocent '60s psychedelic folk into a river of '90s pop packaging. One predominant thread apart from Wild's name between the writer's brackets is the sitar infused introductions which kick start half of the album's tracks.
"Well I can take credit for the intros because I went out and bought the sitar. This guy who runs an Indian restaurant in Melbourne brings them in with his spices. But live now we use this re-issue of those '60s Coral guitars, which have sympathetic strings that ring out whilst you pick out things on the fret board above. Like on When I Was Young by The Animals.
"As far as songwriting, there's a few co-writes on there, but the main reason I wrote most of the songs is because Dan Hall joined so late. About two and a half years ago I saw him busking in a market and asked him to come down the studio. We already has a pretty full repertoire ready to go, so he'll feature more prominently on the next record. The other three do more of the lead vocals than I do, so it pretty much balances out."