This week New Gods will be performing in the Great Hall for Friday Nights at Italian Masterpieces. Here, we asked them a few questions about music and art. Book tickets now.
Describe your sound in 5 words or less?
It’s art: anything goes!
If your music was an artwork what would it look like?
Mostly people’s faces, sometimes scenes of wilderness: oceans crashing; sometimes just like mother’s piano room or someone’s lonely little house.
Who’s your favourite artist/artwork?
Van Gogh’s my favourite artist. It’s difficult to pick one particular piece. It’s just so mad and vibrant, ecstacy and torment. I feel like he’s the artist that blew open the emotional world in painting and maybe more than that: uncontainable passion that is too overwhelming, it just bursts out.
What’s your favourite gig you have played to date?
I don’t know if it’s my favourite but last White Night. I went into the city with my own P.A. and battery and set up and played a guerilla gig because I wanted to play at White Night and they wouldn’t let me. I played my backing tracks and sang like karaoke to my songs and all these passerby’s stopped and started dancing; it was crazy.
What inspires/influences your music the most?
Other good songs and just life and the world
What song do you wish you wrote?
Lot’s of songs I’d like to write something as good as but i don’t necessarily want to steal someone else’s song ha ha. after all it came from the life they lived and i’m here living my own song, i mean life.
What part of making music excites you the most?
Getting on a feeling and channelling it out through a song is so good, it’s really satisfying and cathartic. and then it’s really great if that song/feeling resonates with other people
What can a punter expect from your live show?
we try to freak people out a bit, just surprise them you know. not wearing freddie kruger masks. just with the songs we play. some sad slow folk and then some persian techno.
Tell us about the last song you wrote?
last one i wrote was called melbourne massive and it’s sort of about the city being this dream. i’d spent a few afternoon/evenings walking around the city and looking at all the people, sometimes catch someone’s eyes. i mean it’s the people that make the city so beautiful and fascinating. all the different kind of people. melbourne’s so beautiful and maybe more at night actually than in the day. just as it’s passing into evening. and at night on the weekend all the people all get mixed together with the help of a little booze.
The collection of the Spanish royal family formed the basis of the Prado Museum collection. If you could develop a collection including any artists past or present, who would be your top three?
Van gogh, Monet, Yoko Ono