mecha mecha hysteria
Jul
04
12.25pm

Mecha Mecha // Homegrown Heroes


ICYMI, Brisbane boys Mecha Mecha recently dropped their latest single Greedy Boys and are set to give it a hometown launch this month. Before they tear up the Wooly Mammoth, Hysteria caught up with frontman Walter Webb to chat about the track and the bands’ plans for 2019.

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Hysteria: Let us know a bit about the band’s history and how this all got started.

Walter: I’ve been basically playing music since I was a kid, my brother (Angelo Webb, Drums) he and I are the core of the band and our dad was a musician so we never had a choice. I actually started the band without my brother, he ended up jumping in when I was on tour in 2015. He wasn’t necessarily the default option, it’s actually quite funny, a lot of people are surprised to hear that because we have that performers chemistry together but we didn’t necessarily have it right away.

That’s definitely surprising to hear!

Yeah, I was quite attached to the idea of being in a band with your high school mates and I had to get over that, I had some friends in school and some just weren’t as into it as I was. When you work with friends it’s great if it’s going well but it’s disastrous if it isn’t. You’ve got the potential to lose friends if you’re working with them.

Your high school mates aren’t necessarily the best bandmates. It’s much better being in a band with Angelo because we can be mean to each other if we need to be [laughs]. Even Isaac (Vincent, Bass/Violin), our third member, has been in the band for a few years now so he’s able to be just as forward to us.

Yeah, I was quite attached to the idea of being in a band with your high school mates and I had to get over that, I had some friends in school and some just weren’t as into it as I was.
[ Walter Webb ]

We’d love to know if there’s a story behind the band name.

The actual word Mecha Mecha is a Japanese word for something that’s chaotic or out of place. I liked the sound of it when I first heard it as a kid. It’s funny, it’s only really become Japanese colloquial in the last 18 months or so. A friend of mine who’s teaching in Japan has actually told me that a lot of the kids that she’s teaching are using that word and she was really confused at first because she’d only ever heard it in the context of my band.

The shortest way to answer this question would just be that it looks good on a poster because it’s the same word twice [laughs].

Could you explain the lyrical inspiration behind your new single Greedy Boys?

We as young men are given more freedom than women in our culture to chase these childish, artistic dreams. There’s more pressure on women to grow up and get their shit together. Isaac, Angelo and I only really allowed to do what we do at the expense of the women in our lives. We’re spoiled in that sense.

Tell us a bit about the process of creating this track and how it differed from your past singles.

This track was really hard and we did struggle to write it. We wanted to keep this one quite simple and focused and we didn’t necessarily even achieve that, there’s still some displays of technicality and we still could’ve simplified it. Even trying to get a song to come in at under three minutes … normally we wouldn’t even bother. Usually, if we have an idea we just throw it in but this time we really restricted ourselves in trying to make things more conventional. That was quite challenging for us, normally if our song was six minutes long we’d just leave it be. It was definitely a new approach for us.

This was also the first time I really focused on the lyrics. Normally the lyrics are thrown in last but this time we wrote the song around the words. That’s sort of how Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys writes, to him it’s all about the lyrics. 

This time around we also got rid of the guitar in this song, all of the electric sounds are from the violin, that’s taken the role of the lead guitar.

We love the 90’s influence on this track, did you draw inspiration from any particular artists?

For this track, my brother actually had a go at helping me with the lyrics. He’s never really done that before and he listens to a lot of rap, more than I ever have. We have conflicting music tastes, I’m really into melodic rock whether it’s the Arctic Monkeys or Royal Blood or even Avenged Sevenfold, any of that early noughties crap. We took a very vague inspiration from MF Doom, Angelo has been getting into how he shapes his songs. His songs are so slick because it’s really just storytelling. What he does is really impressive and it’s not something that I necessarily appreciated before. 

With the single out now, what’s next for the band?

We’re planning to put out a new single in the near future and it’ll be a little heavier. We’ll also be announcing a tour shortly, it’ll be a small east coast one. We’re launching this single on the 19th July at the Wooly Mammoth. That’ll be with Tesla Cøils, they’re a Gold Coast award winning act, the two of them make us look at lot less experimental it’s great [laughs]. 

Catch Mecha Mecha on tour this July:

BRISBANE // Friday, 19th July // Wooly Mammoth (18+)

Tickets available from Moshtix





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