INTENSIFY - Sidewinder Interviews/Articles...

"Only one of us is!" Nick Craft loudly protests laughing loudly at the suggestion that the members of Sidewinder might hold claims to being minor film stars. As the band at a pissy teenage beach party, they provided an amusing cameo in 1997’s Black Rock, with guitarist Pip Branson even managing a small speaking part. "The rest of us were only kind of bit parts," Nick insists, denying his performance will be subjected to extra pressure when Sidewinder come to do their next video clip. "We just had to stand around and sing a song for a couple of days, but Pip had his famous "these pretzels are making me thirsty" kind of line... and yeah, he got punched, I think.

"But that’s something that while we took this year off, we all did different things. We haven’t really played for a year, this is our first run of shows anywhere, but we’ve all kept ourselves pretty busy. We all did different things." For drummer Shane Melder this meant a stint with the John Reed Club and some time in New York, while Pip kept his hand in acting in a couple of plays in Canberra. With his brother Martin hanging about in Sydney writing "loads and loads" of songs, Nick headed overseas during the band’s extended break.

"Took a couple of months travelling through Europe, doing the backpacker kind of thing," he says. "Oh, not the backpacker kind of thing, because that has so many negative kind of connotations doesn’t it - going out and getting drunk and trying to sleep with other Australians, you know? I was just travelling on my own, following my nose. Which is an interesting experience, you know, you get cabin fever of the head. Which is a bit different to getting cabin fever in a room, you can just lose it, but there ain’t no ticket you can really buy to lose yourself, I don’t think.. It was interesting, really interesting."

One might expect that Craft would have returned with a stack of new songs borne from this mental hyperactivity, and he says that before setting out he had hoped to do a lot of writing. It just didn’t work out.

"I learnt pretty quickly after a few weeks of carrying a guitar around that one of the easiest ways to attract, you know, quite dull people is to carry a guitar around. I’m not saying, you know, I just had a lot of those experiences in a very short time where somebody wanted to jam so they would run up to their room and bring out their guitars and they’d end up, you know... the blues I think is the lowest common denominator of jamming and it’s just not really what I’m into, you know. I love it, but I’m just not really into playing it. So I just left the guitar at people’s places while I was away, while I actually did stuff."

Craft can’t offer advice as to how soon we might hear a new record. After following up Atlantis, one of 1995’s best guitar rock records, with the imposingly more diverse Tangerine in ‘97, Sidewinder are currently one of the best unsigned bands in Australia, since Polygram happily agreed to their request to be released from their contract at the start of the year. They have been shopping a few demos around, but are happy to hold out this time for the "right kind of record deal". Nick is definite, though, that one way or another there will be at least an EP out by the end of the year.

"They’re all kind of up. At the moment they’re like the up side of Tangerine," he says of the new songs. "Up, tempo-wise that is, they’re sort of live orientated. I think one of the things about Sidewinder is we’ve always had two sides to us on all our albums. There’s songs that we go in and play them live and can bash out... and there’s a side of us that we haven’t played live, it always seems like a good idea in the studio to do all those songs that you write when you’re in your living room but we don’t really do them live. That’s what we want to do with the next record, make sure we can do all of it. Make it, not one dimensional, but make a record we can take on the road and do it front to back if we wanted to."

- By Greg Cormack.
INPRESS MAGAZINE - Issue #560, Wednesday 26th May 1999.