More about: Psychedelic Porn Crumpets

First of all: a warning. Anyone in the damp, chilly and perpetually locked down environs of what Morrissey would call ‘dear old Blighty’, prepare to be jealous. Very jealous indeed. 

It’s bad enough, for those with an avaricious streak, to discover that when we catch up with Psychedelic Porn Crumpets mainman Jack McEwan he’s been forced to temporarily abandon his house in Perth, Australia for the slightly cooler surroundings of his garden, because it’s 92 degrees in there. Bearing in mind that it’s mid to late evening in Australia when we chat to him, suddenly the currently cold and wet spell we seem to have been enduing for months rather than weeks seems distinctly unfair.

But that’s only the half of it. Having traded the usual pleasantries of the Covid era, enquiring about each others’ lockdown experiences, we discover that Jack found his a rather intense time. That’s intense for the whole of the two week period it lasted. TWO WEEKS??!!! Indeed, it seems a combination of quickly shutting the borders down and banning – in a fairly militant way, it has to be said – all travel between the different states within Australia, resulted in a death toll that, at the time of our conversation anyway, remained under a thousand. 

So – and this is the hardest bit to swallow – Jack cheerfully informs us, that Perth’s live music scene, which still involves some social distancing, is firing on all cylinders. “We’re so lucky,” he says, “It’s been absolute godsend. You can line up in a minute and get a beer and watch the band without getting a beer spilt down the back of your neck. “

The restrictions, while meaning big festivals fall foul of the 3,000 capacity upper limit, have given an unintended boost to smaller bands.  “It’s actually really great, because bands that would normally play to 200 people are playing in a 400 capacity venue and the 400 capacity bands have gone up to 800 capacity venues, so you get to see them with much better lights and a bigger PA than you would have done.”

Even while contending with the matter of glowing green with envy, however, it’s hard not to warm to Jack. The band’s lynchpin – he actually writes the material and records it at home (“playing the drums very badly” he sniggers) before handing parts out to the rest of the four piece – he is convivial and quick to laugh. Certainly, he is not one to take himself too seriously, as perhaps you might imagine from someone in charge of a band with a name like Psychedelic Porn Crumpets.

As anyone who has caught the band on their pre-lockdown jaunts to the UK might well attest, the business of having a laugh is one they take very seriously. At least, their rise from an implausibly heaving Shacklewell Arms in Dalston to Camden’s Dingwalls – “the most lovely setting for a gig, right by the lock there” he recalls – and then on to the bigger Electric Ballroom has been seemingly effortless. Their unique sound - informed in equal measures by prog, 60s psychedelia, metal and punk – is not the kind of concoction to seduce the hipper elements of the hipster press. But their ability to weave catchy earworms into their complex tapestry of sounds, and the fact their gigs are invariably as funny as they are captivating, has made them a true word of mouth sensation.

It's the kind of snowballing popularity that the release of their fourth album to date, SHYGA! The Sunlight Mound, due out on 5 February, only looks set to intensify.  

“It’s the first full kind of concept album that I’ve recorded,” McEwan admits, or rather a “narrative album”, in that each of its 14 songs contributes to an ongoing story.  “It’s about this character called Norton Gavin,” he explains, “He’s this rock star from the 70s and the idea was that he’d died but he’s made his way into the folklore of the Perth music scene.”

Is he real, we’re keen to find out? “Oh no, he’s fictional!” laughs Jack gently.

Inkeeping with the invention of this fictional hero from the depths of the 1970s, Jack went back to explore music from the era. Some critics have remarked on the influence of Queen on the occasional guitar twiddle – see next single ‘Pukebox’ and ‘Glitter Bug’ for more evidence - but it goes deeper than just Brian May and co. 

“I’d heard Queen when I was about eight or nine, my uncle played them to me, but I’d never  listened to them properly. I thought I didn’t like it,” he says, but exposure to their early music rather than the chart friendly 80s version revealed a different band. “The riffs were so heavy,” he laughs, “I was like ‘what the hell?’ I found them in this old CD collection. I remember playing it and thinking ‘this is amazing!’ Queen’s hits and ELO, and the way T-Rex structure their songs, even Elton John, I went back into that 70s style.

“They made psychedelic rock – that was why we called the band that. Well, the Porn Crumpets was a pisstake of what was going on in Perth at the time. You had all these bands like Tame Impala and King Gizzard making this psych-rock music.”  Initially they wanted to stand out but “we slowly got morphed into it.”

Even with the band’s fourth album about to hit the metaphorical – if not, over here, real – record store shelves, McEwan still seems to barely believe his luck at the success of PPC. 

“It’s such a strange thing to do,” he laughs. “It’s a hobby. It’s so obviously a hobby. You just wouldn’t do it as a job – unless you want to record people or work on the technical side. You get so lucky. There’s obviously a million better people than you at playing guitar, singing, making music, whatever it is. But you were lucky, you were there at the right time at the right place, and it spirals until…..sweet, you get that one little lucky break.”

As for what it is that he and PPC actually does, after a few years – not to mention those two long weeks of lockdown - to really consider it seriously, Jack thinks he’s finally got a handle on it.  “We make nostalgia,” he grins, “so that one day people can remember going to that gig or hearing that album, and feel nostalgic about it. Yeah, we make nostalgia -  nostalgia for the future!”

SHYGA! The Sunlight Mound arrives 5 February via Marathon artists. Read our review. 

More about: Psychedelic Porn Crumpets