TRIPOD'S STEVEN GATES | PYRAMIDISLAND.COM |INTERVIEW 06.2016

One the eve of Tripods 20th anniversary tour, Steven 'Gatesey' Gates shares his reflections on Tassie rap battles, Hobarts Muppet Theatre and his deep level of appreciation for scallop pies.

A: Hey Steven, thanks for taking the time to chat with us at Pyramid Island. Do you realise that it’s the 16th of the 6th, 2016 today? Thankfully you’re touring 101 Hits and not 666 Hits or there’d be a chance you’d draw the number of the devil in your show…

S: Yes! Y’know what?! The 15 year old in me just went a bit bananas with excitement ‘cause I saw the billboard for Iron Maiden’s latest tour and they were selling tickets for 66 dollars and 66 cents and although I didn't get my shit into gear quick enough to buy them I thought “You’re bloody geniuses!”  I’m sure they would’ve been pretty crap seats right up the back of the stadium but just getting to see any band for under $100 these days is pretty amazing!

A: You can’t argue with that. So for those who don’t know much about the concept of your 101 hits tour, can you explain to us what we’re in for with your live show?

S: Well, unlike a greatest hits show that we could've done (we might have gone crazy with the concept of playing the same 12 songs every night) what we did instead in order to celebrate our 20th year together is we began working on a book. A music book. Sticks and dots on a music stave embracing 101 of our favourite songs! So these are songs we've written for cartoons shows and video games and last year we got to work with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and we wrote about 2 hours worth of material about video games. Some of the songs we loved and they made it into the book and so we've got this book and that’s our little gift we gave ourselves for twenty years of working together!

The show for 101 Hits is essentially us standing in a line armed with the instruments that we play and we’ve got a bingo barrel with 101 ping pong balls in it marked with a song and we pretty much generate a random playlist every night. So when you say 101 Tripod hits were not playing 101 songs it just means we've got one hundred and one to choose from and it means that every show is totally different. It really embraces our entire career rather than just say the audiences favourites and it’s exactly like when we began and we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, it really reminds me of those days.

A: Yeah, I’m feeling pretty old today in the knowledge that you’ve been playing together for 20 years. 14 was the age at which most young women started listening to JJJ obsessively in the 90’s. This is where I first discovered Tripods crazy brand of genius and now I’m 34! Does that make you feel even older, especially given that your current tour sees bingo balls featuring heavily?

S: Yeah, we did a gig for a uni five or six years ago, back when there was union fees and this tall guy with a beard came up to me and said “Oh you guys were great tonight thanks for the show, I saw you play at Southbank once.” And I said “We haven't done Southbank since the late 90’s” and he goes “Yeah I was 4!” I'm thinking “This grown man with a beard doing first year uni is telling me he last saw us when he was 4 years old?” I’ve gone “Oh fuck off mate that’s not on. You basically embody my age.” He was one of the kids we were playing up to at an outdoor gig on the banks of the Yarra. For him we were these colourful idiots who kind of resembled the wiggles in his mind, meanwhile we were just trying to carve out a career for ourselves in the comedy world. But yeah thank you Amanda that does make me feel old.

A: Seeing as you’re coming back to Tassie in July, can you cast your mind back can you tell us about some crazy experiences you’ve had while touring Tassie over the past 20 years? Mad Storms? Pants falling down, weird hecklers, too much whiskey?

S: One of my favourite and rather innocuous memories of Tassie is that a comedian friend of mine Justin Hamilton and I were just enjoying a pasta place somewhere and we ate this amazingly huge bowl of pasta, we walked away and went “D’you wanna go back?!” So we went back directly and had another huge bowl of pasta. It was really good.

Also, we saw our first rap battle in Hobart. We descended down the stairs in some sort of skanky drinking hole and there was an 8 mile-esque rap battle taking place between a posse from Hobart and a posse from Launnie and it was like rivalry to the extreme and everyone was just free styling bad mouthing each other and there was like the most impressive display of verbal diarrhoea I’ve even seen in my life.

Our first times in Tassie were with the Melbourne Comedy Festival Roadshow and it was with our generation of comedians (the Pete Helliers, Will Andersons and Corrine Grants) we were all starting out pretty much at the same time and we all went down to Tassie and it was just this drunken haze of being so excited to make these new friends who are now lifetime friends. We’ve got specific places in Australia where we had the best times and certainly Hobart was one of them. It’s probably because it seems so far away for someone growing up on the mainland, it has this sort of magical thing you know it might as well be Middle Earth. You might as well be somewhere in New Zealand for all we know. It’s beautiful there.

A: Are you feeling well researched in terms of the best places to buy pies and down inappropriate shots of malt whilst on the road in Tassie? And any particular culinary highlights that you think you’ll be able to squeeze in to your 2 days here?

S: We know that the seafood certainly is exceptional down in Hobart. All along Salamanca there’s some great eateries and things. And I wouldn't mind another bloody scallop pie thank you. There's that place in between Hobart and Launnie that they've kind of turned into mural town. Do you know that one?

A: Oh yes, Sheffield right?

S: Sheffield! Yes. Hopefully we’ll be passing through there because I remember that being home to a specific bakery that had the best fucking pie I think I’ve ever had. But yeah I love how you have embraced the scallop as your kind of state symbol and stuck it in a pie and now that’s yours.

A: It’s basically our coat of arms.

S: That’s it! ‘The Scallop Pie Arms’. Darn we don’t have long down there on this upcoming trip. We used go all over the place, up to Burnie and Devonport and all those places but this time we’re focusing on doing the big venues like the Royalty Theatre in Hobart.

A: The Theatre Royal?

S: That’s it! I get things backwards all the time. I have to say that places that are written backwards intentionally really upset me because that’s just nasty. I’ve just celebrated the fact that I’ve remembered a name ‘The Royalty Theatre’ but NO IT’S THE THEATRE ROYAL, you silly fucking bastard.

A: I agree, it’s fair enough to actually be dyslexic but not ok to try and be clever and turn business names around backwards to make a pun work (shout out to two zillion small businesses in Tassie)

S: Yeah it’s not, it’s just nasty. But the Theatre Royal is one of our favourite places to play in Hobart. Like screw Sydney Opera House, the Theatre Royal is the greatest. The first image of a theatre I ever had, certainly in the '70’s and before I even entered one, was from The Muppet Show. And that theatre to us, whenever we walk into it, is the embodiment of the one from The Muppet Show. It’s like walking into our imagined childhood. It’s a magical bloody theatre and we love it.

A: So if that kid watching the Muppet Show hadn’t grown up to become one third of Tripod, what do you reckon he would’ve been doing instead, these past 20 years?

S: Don’t. I’ll start crying. No I remember specifically in high school the thing was music, I loved music. My whole thing was being knowledgable about music with the latest Top 40 bands and all that sort of stuff. All I wanted to do, even speaking to my careers advisor is I just said “I just wanna make a living playing music.” That’s all I said. I should've been more specific because I have fortunately made a living playing music but I always wanted to be a rock star, a rock’n’roll singer. I guess I’ve never been able to take myself seriously thought so there’s that. And when I have briefly taken myself seriously in the past (in other bands and things) I've always felt like I just can’t do it. Maybe it’s the Australian in me y’know that self deprecating desire to take the piss out of myself and those around me? I mean that just comes through in tripod anyway, that’s what the whole act is designed to do. But I’d love to say I wanted to be a pilot or an astronaut but I only ever wanted to be a musician and I only ever wanted to sing. So I guess my dreams came true? Most of the time the three of us get along but sometimes we don’t and we start resenting each other and what we do but at the same time, we’ve outlasted a lot of other groups.

I remember in 1992 meeting Powderfinger in the Punters Hotel, they were cracking onto my girlfriend at the time. In the back of my mind I was going “I’d just love to be in a band”. They became successful and huge and I was always thinking “Oh Powderfinger! I’d love to be in a rock band and play to big crowds”. But they’re no longer with us. Powderfinger are done. They’re done but Tripod outlasted Powderfinger! That’s crazy to me, just crazy. But I guess that’s the advantage of being in a comedy group, I mean Powderfinger could've done this too but I don't think they were able to put on a theatre show about lady robots in space and then do a cabaret show the next year and then the next year do a show about Dungeons and Dragons. I guess the comedy community have allowed us to express ourselves in very weird and wonderful ways so it’s kept it interesting for us. We've never ever been in a safe place, we’ve always tried to do things out of our safety zone.

And to bring it back to this show 101 Tripod Hits - we’re not allowing ourselves to be complacent or safe in any way. The numbers dictate what the playlist will be that night and rightly or wrongly we have to do those songs. So the shows not rigged at all, it’s not weighted to just be a funny show and that’s again what’s beautiful about the Festival Of Voices as well. Although we’re a comedy group the expectation is that it’s about the voice, whether it’s your artistic voice or it’s your actual literal voice. It’s a really great festival for that and that alone and I think Tassie should be really proud of this interesting new look at music and the arts.

A: Indeed, go Tassie! Thanks for your time today Steven, I’m definitely looking forward to seeing your 101 Tripod Hits show in Hobart .

S: Thanks Amanda, and thanks for tuning in as a 14 year old. We never thought that at 6.45 in the morning ANYONE was tuning in so thank you. That was the amazing thing at that point, everybody was listening to radio, there wasn't pod casts or anything and media hadn’t fragmented to that extent.

A: The other thing about that, if I can just to be entirely blunt for a moment is that Triple J was great back then! It was actually worth listening to!

S: Well yeah! There is that as well and music was very different y’know, people were still in studios making epic records and it’s probably not the thing that can be afforded of them to do now.

A: Yeah but thankfully 20 years on the ABC created Double J where they pretty much play all the songs from the 90’s just for us freaks anyway.

S: Yes! We did a little stint with Miff from Double J recently called The Writers Room and because we’re older we weren't giving ourselves an hour to write a song for listeners, we gave ourselves the morning. And some of the songs we came up with in the last 3 months we’re really proud of and it wasn’t about getting 5 or 6 random elements and shoving them into a song or trying to get comedy out of it. It was about writing a song. We wrote a song for a woman who's husband had passed away…

A: I heard you play that and it was amazing how delicately you treated the subject matter and how beautiful the final product turned out to be.

S: Oh thank you. Well that’s the kind of thing thats interesting to us now. Not only in terms of using everything we’ve learned for the last 20 years and applying it to something like that but also in the sense of just subverting expectation and going “Well Tripod doesn’t just have to be a silly comedy group”. It can write what my mum and dad would refer to as ‘real music’! That’s another thing that we’re really looking forward to embracing more of in the future.

Tripod Tour ‘101 Hits’ at the Theatre Royal in Hobart on the 6th of July and The Country Club in Launceston on the 8th of July 2016

-Amanda Van Elk.