STACK Magazine April 2015 Issue 126

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086 APRIL 2015 JB Hi-Fi
visit COVER FEATURE MUSIC
it’s a hardcore female fan, holding –
you guessed it – a furry toy Wombat.
"That girl was definitely a character,”
remembers frontman Matt Murphy,
speaking from the UK. “She had a
reversible Superman costume on, which
was quite impressive. She was basically
doing costume changes during the gig.
It was very, very bizarre. Especially with
that level of jetlag, that happening in
front of you – is very bizarre.”
While a girl in a reversible Superman
costume holding a wombat is perhaps a
little offbeat, it’s nothing to the uberfan/
T here are few Wombats in the
English city of Liverpool. STACK
would be betting on about… three.
One might conceivably exist in a zoo –
the other two being in a band. Truth be
told, there are three members of The
Wombats, but their bassist is Norwegian
(you have to hand it him: he is the
world’s first – and only – Norwegian
wombat). But mere minutes in their
company will swiftly convince you that
they could hail from nowhere else on
this planet but the north-western English
port city of Liverpool.
Crammed into the bunker-like confines
of an underground venue in Melbourne’s
inner city after dark, one quiet weekday
evening in February, The Wombats had
the crowd in the palm of their hands in
no time at all. They were knock-skipping
through Australia for a promotional
visit on the eve of their new album
Glitterbug's release , and even the jaded
cynics in the crowd had to admit that
seeing a band who graduated to larger
venues some years ago, fly their colours
long and loud in a sweaty club, was
pretty impressive.
But, perhaps not unexpectedly, it’s The
Wombats who get the fanatics up front
for that something special. This evening
stalker depicted in the rip-roaringly
funny (and very dark) clip for the album’s
lead single GreekTragedy, wherein The
Wombats are killed off one by one by a
fan who appears initially to be sweetly
normal and dedicated to her favourite
band, but by the final frames has proved
to be the exact opposite. See the clip
yourself to view the end result of her
murderous rampage: it’s wonderful proof
that young pop bands can still carry
off a black (very, very black) sense of
humour. “We’ve all got fairly dark senses
of humour, yes,” Murph concurs. “It was
just the perfect way to start the whole
thing. The prosthetic guy, the legend,
looks like a bit of a diva on set. It was a
lot of fun to film; I just think we should
do more videos like that. We should just
be dying in weirder ways!”
If wombats are thin on the ground
in Liverpool these days, they’ve been
sighted quite often in Los Angeles,
California recently. Murph took an
extended sojourn to the City of Angels
(and in fact is considering a move back),
and the inspiration he took from the
legendarily surreal town fuelled much of
Glitterbug; the city is a larger background
character in the story of a relationship
Murph insists is purely fictional. “It’s
I’m twisting my life up
to get these songs out...
I found the need to create
something slightly more
tumultuous, a bit weirder than
the reality of my life.
Fame, lust, the paparazzi, love and destiny:TheWombats tackle
all this and more on new album Glitterbug. By Jonathan Alley