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Shooting At Unarmed Men
So, here's the story in a nutshell: in very early 2005, Jon Chapple "put a spanner in the works" of Welsh three piece Mclusky by hanging up his bass and calling it quits. The band had released three albums, numerous singles and had toured the world a few times over before tensions came to a head, and the group dissolved - or imploded, depending on which way you look at it.
"The drummer - Jack Egglestone - me and him still keep in touch," Chapple says. "And Falco [guitarist and vocalist Andy Falkous]... no, not so much. I could say that not a syllable has passed between us since I left his house after quitting the band. In fact, I will say that. In fact," he laughs, "I just did. Not so much good on the relationship there."
That's kind of old news now, though, as Chapple has since released two albums as guitarist and vocalist with Shooting At Unarmed Men, though the band has actually been around in one form or another since 1999, with Chapple recording songs on his own into a four track tape recorder.
It wasn't until September of 2005 that the first recording was released, however: The Pink Ink, a hand numbered 7" released just before the album 'Soon There Will Be...' with Chapple joined by Simon Alexander and Steve Morgan. In turn, that album was followed around nine months later by another hand numbered 7", Girl's Music (which, incredibly, featured one of 500 individually written notes inside each copy) and another album, 'Yes! Tinnitus!', this time with Simon Jarvis replacing Alexander.
And then, just to throw another spanner in the works, Chapple moved from Cardiff to Melbourne. "That was the fault of a girl, and she had to come back here because her two year Visa had run out, by which time we'd been living together for a year and a half," he explains. "I sold all my worldly possessions, and got enough money to get a one way plane ticket, and got my one way plane ticket. After six months, she decided it wasn't such a good idea, so I moved out of her house and I've been living around and about in Fitzroy ever since. I really love it here. I don't want to go home."
Shooting at Unarmed Men began anew, then, with bassist Julian Tovey and drummer Thomas Cooper taking over from their Welsh counterparts. And now the band are perched on the release of their third album, 'Triptych' which, Chapple explains, is so named because "everything was sort of becoming threes": it's the third album, and the third inception of the group. Appropriately, it's also a three-disc set - though, far from any kind of prog rock-esque extravagance, each disc features only four songs.
"There's a trick to it that Steve Albini taught us when I was in Mclusky," Chapple says when asked how he structured the album, "and that's to think of all the songs you've got as a vinyl and get Side A and Side B. That way you're thinking in two parts, rather than one long part. For this, actually splitting it up into three discs helped a lot, because it was like putting together three sleeves - it helped a lot just having four songs on each disc. I wish I could have kept it to just three songs, to keep with the whole three thing, but I don't like songs that are that long. Three songs per disc, people might feel a little ripped off."
Of course, before that comes out, there's the 7", Sometimes The Best Thing You Can Do Is Die, which the band will be launching in Adelaide - even though the records aren't actually in the country yet. "It's just the 500, and I'm only actually getting 100 into Australia, and they're still not fucking here," chuckles Chapple. "I've hand numbered them, and I've slipped a little bit of a handwritten thing inside, though they're not as fancy as the last ones, because the last ones took me two and a half weeks: I put a different sentence on 500 pieces of paper. This time I wrote a little handwritten 7" sleeve," he says, "and then I just fucking photocopied it."
Alistair Wallis
Shooting At Unarmed Men play Fri 10 Aug at Urtext with Batrider and No Through Road. 'Triptych' is out 11 Aug on Too Pure/Remote Control through Inertia.
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