The Datsuns on their seventh album: ‘This has been a frustrating record to make’ – Stuff.co.nz

The deep snows of Stockholm have thankfully retreated.

You can go outside now without so many layers, into the lengthening days, and wander beside the Baltic Sea in one of Scandinavias most beautiful cities.

Stockholm is somewhere between the megalopolis of London and the New Zealand outdoor vibe, says The Datsuns lead singer and bassist Dolf de Borst, who has lived in Sweden for the past 10 years.

My wife was born in Sweden. We were living in London for a long while then suddenly got a bit overwhelmed. Actually, underwhelmed. So we came here.

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The Datsuns are a long way away from their beginnings in Cambridge.

Its a long way from the self-anointed Town of Trees and Champions- Cambridge, Waikato, population 20,500 where de Borst grew up.

Colin Meads. Kylie Bax. Billy T. James. Joel Tobeck. Sir Mark Todd. To the list of famous past or present residents of the region we must add de Borst and three 15-year-old schoolmates who used to convene in a disused movie theatre above Cambridge Town Hall and make an unholy ruckus that went on to conquer the world.

Ha! Yes, that old rehearsal space only cost $60 a month, split between three bands, and (lead guitarist) Christian (Livingstone) was always, like - when are you guys gonna give me the money? We could never quite get it together, even though coming up with $60 between so many people should have been easy.

Twenty-something years later, The Datsuns are about to release their seventh album, Eye To Eye. It has had a difficult gestation: the tyranny of distance and all that jazz, plus Covid, and other aspects of members personal lives young kids, other jobs getting in the way.

Initial sessions took place at Aucklands Roundhead Studios way back in 2016, then they scattered to the four winds. Now you have de Borst in Sweden, Livingstone in London, second guitarist Phil Somervell in Thames and Ben Cole their drummer since 2006 in Wellington.

Its been a frustrating way to make a record, admits de Borst. You need to be in the same room and the same headspace to make this kind of music. But we managed it somehow, adding ideas and sounds to those initial recordings over many years from our own home studios.

Mixed and mastered by the end of 2019, the finished album was then further delayed by matters both joyous (the birth of de Borsts second child) and grim (the global pandemic).

I am so happy its finally gonna get out into the world. People sometimes suggest The Datsuns are still making the same music we were making 20 years ago, but Eye To Eye proves thats simply not true.

Their earliest records were fast and wild, he says, to emulate their hectic live sound.

But we use the studio differently now, with more background harmonies and experimental structures, and more mid-tempo songs that get different moods going on.

Those fast and wild early records made quite an impact overseas.

British music critic John Mulvey attended a London showcase gig in 2002, describing The Datsuns as four stick-thin, long-haired, fresh-faced, sinful-souled boys from Cambridge, New Zealand, and the latest genius rock n roll band to swarm on London in this astonishing year for music.

Everyone in possession of a cheque-book in the British music industry is clustered round the front of the stage, drooling, Mulvey wrote. One major label boss has just flown in from New York on Concord to check out the action.

Soon after the release of the bands self-titled 2002 debut album, The Datsuns appeared on the front cover of New Musical Express, the feature story a froth of superlatives, the lead singer rendered thus: Knicker-wettingly good-looking, lithe like a young sapling, and crowned with a mane of arrow-straight jet-black hair, Dolf de Datsun sets a new standard in cool.

In the years that followed, The Datsuns toured the US supporting the White Stripes and The Pixies, recorded a John Peel session for the BBC, opened shows for Metallica, rampaged through Europe and Japan. They were proclaimed the greatest live band in the world in Kerrang! Magazine. Their second album was produced by John Paul Jones from Led freakin Zeppelin.

But the British music press is notoriously fickle. First you are lauded as The Next Big Thing, then youre disparaged as The Last Old Thing.

I talked to de Borst about this in 2006, when he was in Amsterdam on tour. Magazines that love you one day will decide youre crap overnight, he told me at the time. Sometimes they only loved you in the first place because your music happened to go well with someones haircut and their shoes, you know?.

These days, The Datsuns feel the glow of the media spotlight less often, but de Borst seems happy with that.

Weve always just made music we love, music that excites us. And that music grew directly from the records we thrashed growing up in the mid-90s in small-town New Zealand.

Dark, po-faced, self-consciously maladjusted, Grunge was in full swing at that time. Fun was shunned. It was very uncool to appear energetic on stage.

Thats why earlier hard rock really appealed, because those bands went wild when they played live. We were like - Yeah! We wanna do that! We checked out classic rock, British glam, Devo anything decent that had sold enough copies to turn up in a small-town record store. We would have discovered key bands like The Stooges or The Dead Boys years earlier if wed lived up in Auckland.

Raw 60s garage and psych-rock singles, late 70s punk, New Wave keyboards, souped-up 70s hard rock- all of these musical strands still twine through the new Eye To Eye album.

Lawrence Smith/Stuff

Weve always just made music we love, music that excites us. And that music grew directly from the records we thrashed growing up in the mid-90s in small-town New Zealand, said de Borst.

Its a scream. There are big hairy scuzz-rock riffs and sci-fi synths bolted to machine-gun snare rolls, the whole shebang then strafed with squiggles of lead-guitar squeal. There are songs that sound like Hawkwind playing Deep Purple covers, or Kiss jamming with Motorhead. Hats are doffed to The Ramones, MC5, David Bowie, The Who. The pachouli-scented spirit of T. Rexs Marc Bolan hovers over one mutant electric-boogie shuffle.

But there are also slightly less manic tempos now, richer textures and darker lyrics, the latter partly due to de Borst reading a lot of weird dystopian science fiction, finding strong parallels with whats happening now, both in wider society and in peoples personal relationships.

(Recent single) Brain to Brain is about trying to avoid being so voyeuristic of other people's dramas, which social media technology really encourages. And Suspicion is about post-truth conspiracy theorising, which sounds very topical even though I wrote it five years ago. I guess some themes just reflect human nature, so they never get old.

Elsewhere, de Borst particularly loves Brainwaves, due to the mad push and pull between the two guitarists.

Christian is all over the fretboard like Jimmy Page, while Phil's more unorthodox and comes up weirder and wilder stuff. Im lucky to be in a band with such great players, and to have known those guys since we were just kids.

Back here in New Zealand, Windmill Phil Somervell is also thankful that the bands early teenage bond still endures.

Yeah, we couldn't be closer, even though we all live so far apart these days, he tells me from his home in Thames. Me and Dolf started an earlier band when we were 14, then Christian came along a couple of years later. Weve been through a hell of a lot since then.

Somervell has had two kids since 2014s Deep Sleep album. In those intervening years, different members had totally given up on this new record ever getting finished. He seems amazed its finally here despite the odds, soon to be blowing minds and speakers around the globe.

And like de Borst, Somervell reckons Eye To Eye has taken The Datsuns somewhere new, while still pledging allegiance to the bands they once listened to as spotty adolescents, learning their chops in Cambridge.

Deep Purple, AC/DC, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin theyre just huge fun, you know? Youve got mighty riffs, big warm grooves, cool lead breaks and lyrics with some twisted wit. Its music that makes you want to laugh and dance at the same time.

Dad rock? Perhaps, but in the best possible way. Several songs on Eye To Eye revolve around demo instrumentals Somervell cobbled together as a new father in Thames when his kids were really young.

I didn't have much time to just sit around playing guitar, so I would blast out a few ideas then go back to looking after my little ones again. But Id be writing songs in my head the whole time, you know? I'd be running around trying to get my kids to sleep and thered be this Da-Da-Dah- DAARGHGGG! riff going around and around in my brain until I got another 10 minutes to pick up the guitar again.

The Datsuns seventh album Eye To Eye is released on Friday, May 28.

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The Datsuns on their seventh album: 'This has been a frustrating record to make' - Stuff.co.nz