THE GIFT OF GREAT GABLE

Interview with Alex Whiteman from Great Gable

Great Gable, who are easily some of the coolest musicians to come out of Perth are rolling into Lion Arts Factory on Friday, 7th of October to celebrate the release of their sophomore album ‘On The Wall In The Morning Light’ out via Rainbow Valley Records.

We had a great chat to vocalist Alex Whiteman about the love of playing Adelaide, the new album, Perth’s fast-growing music scene and pairing bands with coffee, of all things. We could have gone on for hours.

So, the tour is kicking off in Adelaide. You've had a pretty good time down here, haven't you?

Yeah man, we played a lot of places in Adelaide before. I remember there used to be a place called the Rhino Room. That was our first ever gig there. We used to play with these guys called Chiara La Woo, so Adelaide was the first place we ever kind of went off to on tour with them. We’ve done Jive and stuff like that too. We must have played Adelaide around six or seven times now. Fat Controller was an interesting one as well, it went off at that one.

Bloody hell. You’ve played around Adelaide more than me!

We’ve played Adelaide a lot hey! Usually people are pretty quick on some music over in Adelaide and they'll go to the gigs. If the bands they like are coming, they make sure they get onto it.

Funny you mention that, because we actually just got Hindley Street Music Hall which is around 1800 capacity. So you’ve pretty much ticked all the boxes [in Adelaide]. The next step up is Hindley Street Music Hall, and then Thebarton Theatre.

[laughs] Man, I’d be happy with filling out Lion Arts Factory any day. I’ll be happy with that – but if we get to play bigger places in Adelaide, that’d be so sick.

How is the Perth [music] scene now? Especially over the past few years?

Oh, man, does it ever stop? Man, there's so many f***ing good Perth bands. I don't know if it's just because I'm amongst it, but I just hear so much about Perth bands doing really well and selling out shows over east, getting on Triple J – boxes that you try tick as a band. And I feel like I just hear about it all the time. The east coast people must get annoyed sometimes. There must be something we get right over here, I suppose.

Let’s talk about the tour package. You guys, DICE and Velvet Bloom. This is such a well-rounded tour package.

I'm glad to hear it man. I worked with the guitarist from DICE for a while at the same pub with Jack from Psychedelic Porn Crumpets. I do the odd shifts here and there still. I checked out a couple of sets because this was a year ago, maybe two years ago, and then over the last year, they've just been getting bigger and bigger.  

They're really nice guys and they're getting some good play on Triple J. They've done a couple of tours, maybe over east by themselves. That's a big step, so we thought it would be cool to take them on the road. I feel like people that listen to us will definitely be able to open areas and check out DICE. And DICE will bring some numbers themselves I reckon as well.

You’ve got your second album now. What would you say are some notable differences from your first one?

I reckon with the first one, obviously it was our first crack of writing an album, so writing an extra six songs off [an EP], trying to get an extra six songs together for a young band can be harder, especially when we’re younger. It was tough getting the first album together song-wise. But with this album, we would have had like 30 or 40 songs because we overcompensated, because we remember what it was like last time. We were struggling for songs just to get like ten or twelve together.

With ‘Tracing Faces’ and then this one with ‘On The Wall In The Morning Light’, we had so many songs to pick from and also we're writing for [the next one]. We made sure that we were writing throughout the whole lockdowns and all that sort of s***.

And with this album, we already knew Matt Corby really well. The first album we did with him, we just met him, so there was a bit of tiptoeing around and stuff like that. Whereas this album, we knew what we wanted a bit more and we also spent a lot more time jamming the songs alive before going into record them.

I feel like we still have heaps of work to do with song-writing and always trying to write new songs and work out how to get better, but I feel like it's definitely a step up from ‘Tracing Faces’ to this one, which is cool. Now that we come back to play the songs, it's so much easier to play these songs because we remember all the parts, and we wrote them so we can play them well live.

Sweet. I've been smashing it over the last couple of days.

You got a favourite?

I do - the drummer in me kind of kicks in here. ‘The Lookout’. It was giving me a real Tears For Fears kind of feel!

That's a good shout hey! I hadn't even thought of that. But, yeah, it could go that sort of way. That's one of my favourites as well. I think it's just like, it's got cool beats, strong melodies, and yeah, it's just moves well.

Another few favourites of mine were ‘Hazy’, ‘If You & I’ and ‘Dancing Shoes’. Really well-rounded album.

Thank you. We did spend some time on it. I’m not going to lie – we played those songs to f***ing death!

In another interview, you guys described your own sound as ‘indie, alternative, coastal, oat flat-white nature rock’. Dude, that blew my mind. I didn't even know that you could describe music and coffee together!

[laughs] I think that would have been our guitarist Preeny (Matt Preen). He would have said that. He used to make the bio back in the day when we first started, before we had management and all that sort of jazz, and he was like the manager and he just put in our description on Spotify “alternative indie, coastal rock” and then kind of just kept going. And we always used to tease him about that. So, I think that's what he was doing, like he was trying to have a dig at us as well!

[laughs] That's amazing.

Yeah, he's pretty funny when he wants to be. He's got some good jokes up his sleeve. Obviously, it would be interesting to know what kind of coffee matches every sort of every band, you know?

It's like, I'm seeing you guys at Lion Arts and I'm not even grabbing a beer. I'm just going “Oat flat-white, thanks.”

[laughs] Yes! Look at him. He’s already had four today!

Yep. I’m going hard tonight.

Yeah man literally, he lives off the s***!

Want to give a shout out to anyone who would read the blog?

I’d just say come to our gig and check out DICE! Anyone who’s into our music will probably like DICE, well worth checking out!

Great Gable, DICE & Velvet Bloom play live at Lion Arts Factory on Friday, October 7th. Get tickets here.

Find Great Gable on their website, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube & Spotify.

Words by Brad Rankin.