BLACK DOG CAT BAND

Words: Keeley Thompson

The first time I heard Black Dog Cat Band, (which, admittedly and shamefully wasn’t that long ago) I was sitting on a small back porch of an inner-city Brisbane share house, watching the few trees in the distance waving good afternoon to me underneath a sunburnt sky. 

Having lost my job a few weeks earlier, I was facing the harsh reality of unemployment - my weekly “treat” of a 25g Winfield Blue pouch swiftly replaced with the untaxed sting of $20 chop chop. Yet, despite the anaemic wallet, I was also experiencing my first taste of freedom from the corporate rat-race since the dawn of my working life, which was an albeit momentary, delightful drop. If climbing the corporate ladder meant more to me, I probably would’ve struggled with my job loss more, but in honesty, I think my semi-apathy toward the situation was what saved me from becoming completely jaded. 

At the minute-and-a-half mark of Black Dog Cat Band’s song “Giants Blood”, the resident (and my current love-interest) of said share house appears from the back door to hand me a cold V.B. Two weeks ago I lost my job, but I also met a guy. 

Perhaps best put by Alexander Graham Bell, “when one door closes, another door opens”. Gently grappling with the fear of allowing another person in only to be hurt (my dating history wasn’t exactly prosperous) but the innocence, hopefulness and excitement of new romance, Black Dog Cat Band provided a relatable score to my life in that moment, and their music met me where I was. 

A collective of creatives, Black Dog Cat Band is composed of Clancy, Paco, Matt, Glenzy and Nell. Like a cup of strong tea brewed from a vintage whistling kettle, the group are a combination of garage, country-folk and Australian rock. A blend of light and dark, the band provides a relatable soundtrack for the innocence of running towards joy and freedom, all while the “black dog” is on your tail. 

KEELEY: Hey guys! How’s your day been?

CLANCY: Great! I’ve got my clam scarf on so I’m feeling good. I’m basically just a clam guy. 

KEELEY: Should we refer to you as Clamsy today?

CLAMSY: Yes please. 

NELL: It’s been good! We’re going to finish the first album tonight so we’re all super excited for that.

We've just got a handful of overdubs to get done and that's signed off on finally. It’s been a long time coming so we can’t wait to finish it off and get it out there. We’ve got a pretty big backlog so getting this done also means we can work on even more new stuff. 

KEELEY: Oh lovely! Tell me more about that?

NELL:  Well, we’re going to release one more single in a couple of weeks and the album will come out late April.

KEELEY: What’s the theme for the album? Have you got a name? 

CLANCY: It's called “Second Place at the Murwillumbah Agricultural Show”

KEELEY: Is that name based on a true story? 

CLANCY: It’s just a cool idea. We’ve got this next single called Pumpkin Song and we love Murwillumbah so it just made sense. 

NELL: We all went to the Murwillumbah Agricultural Show and made a film clip there. Clancy stole second place, basically. 

CLANCY: Yeah, so we took a very small pumpkin and carried it around the show, and it was pretty funny.

GLENZY: We even took it on the Ferris wheel. 

CLANCY: We got permission to do it, though. I think it was good we had the camera, because otherwise, I probably would have got beaten up.

GLENZY: Clancy hijacked a tractor at one point. 

NELL: Oh, yeah, we got in trouble for that. One of the other songs is called Tractor's Toes, it's about tractors, so he got on a tractor and the organiser dude was not impressed. 

CLANCY: It was a while ago that we filmed that, so it will be good to get it out there! It was a fun one to do because we had to pay to go on all the rides so there was no doing heaps of takes. Basically we just got drunk and walked around. Jess Sherlock did the film clip for us. She’s done a few for us now and she’s great at what she does. 

KEELEY: What was the highlight ride? 

NELL: The dodgem cars. 

CLANCY: I liked the Tea Cup ride. 

GLENZY: The big slide! 

PACO: The dodgem cars were pretty good. We had the cops on our tail. We had beef with this one kid. 

NELL: Yeah the boys were bullying some kids that were in a cop dodgem car.

CLANCH: No, that's not what happened. It was a classic revenge story. We bullied a grown man and then his kid came for revenge. The fact that the kid was in a cop car really adds to the whole thing. 

PACO: You see it in the film clip too. This kid's like hunting us down. We won though, he ended up getting out of his car halfway through. 

KEELEY: How did Black Dog Cat Band form? 

CLANCY: Well, I had a bunch of songs that weren't really Belligerent Goat songs. They were a bit childlike, I guess. More mellow. And sad. And folky. So, it was a bit of a healing thing. It was a bit of a medicine thing. 

I went to the Beardo once, and Nell was working there and she's like, “what's this black dog cat band?”.

NELL: He had an Instagram account and a name before he had anything. Clancy asked if I wanted to play bass and I said yes. 

CLANCY: Pax and Glenzy came in a bit later. 

We had another friend, Liz. She played piano and sang in it, but she's a surgeon and moved to WA for work so we had to sort of fill in the gaps when she left. We had Glenzy playing some slide and then we got Pax to play some piano and guitar.

We also had a different drummer for the first year or two.

When Matt came in the sound changed quite a lot, we got a little bit heavier and a little bit faster - a bit more rock and roll. After that we kind of just started again with Matt and we got a bit better at writing the songs I think.

NELL: Yeah they were pretty simple little ditties, those first ones and more “poppy”.

KEELEY: So where did the name come from?

CLANCY: I just made it up. Black Dog's a bit of a reference to depression and that sort of thing, but dogs are also just awesome. And cats are cool too.

KEELEY: What’s the history with the band logo (Crate Head Man)? 

NELL: Crate Head Man was a guy at our first gig that was dancing around with an upside down crate on his head. We didn't know him at the time, but we’ve seen him around since. 

PACO: His name is Jeff, I think. But when we first saw him we thought it might’ve been Clancy from the future.

CLANCY:  It was special, it was iconic. At that gig I thought “we are on the right path here”. Our photographer, El got a photo of him and then sketched him from that and we were like “that's our fucking logo. That guy, whoever he is.”

KEELEY: You're all creatives and in other bands, how do you manage the schedules?

NELL: It can be hard but it tends to be that whichever band is doing stuff at that moment gets priority. Matt and Glenzy play in Fat Dog & The Tits, Clancy and Paco are in Belligerent Goat and I’m in Cassowarys so when one of the other bands is doing stuff we pull back on the other things a bit. 

CLANCY: It’s a bit of a first in best dressed situation.

Last year we did a tour and that worked because we just went with Fat Dog and Black Dog and so we could all sort of kill two birds with one stone. It was only three extra people to take to have both bands play. 

KEELEY: How was that tour? 

NELL: Wild. Totally wild. Really fun. We all went in a mini bus. A 12-seater and it was 12 of us and Django the dog, in the bus. 

CLANCY: Yeah, that was fun.

We left Brisbane at about 9 in the morning, and we drove for about 17 hours to Wollongong. It shouldn’t take 17 hours, but we stopped at about a thousand pubs, and everyone was sort of getting in the groove of getting along with each other. 

There was a bit of a mental breakdown in Western Sydney, and we ended up at a birthday party in Wollongong at about 2 in the morning. We were there for a few hours, and then went on and we played at a festival called Weaselstock. Made it with about half an hour to spare. We'd all slept for maybe an hour, so that was an adventure. 

PACO: There was a particular highlight of comedy when Matt’s carton of beers fell out the back, and he ran back to try to find them. We’d stopped beside this creepy abandoned car and Robbo was like “I think we should move away from the weird murder car”. So Clancy's driving with the trailer on and he’s trying to reverse that, but he’s just kooking it for about 15 minutes and only made it about 10 metres back. 

We pull up and open the door and are just immediately hit with this smell, which we quickly discovered was a dead wombat. Keisha spewed up from the smell and in the end, Matt only managed to save two beers from the whole carton because the others had all exploded. 

KEELEY: How many shows/tours has Django been on?

GLENZY: He's been on a couple of tours now in his time. He went on a Bricklayers tour to Melbourne, and he also did a tour to Sydney with our old band, Swamp Jenson.

CLANCY: He's good, he just hangs around. He'll sit out the front of the pub if he's not allowed in. But if he is, he comes down and watches the show.

KEELEY: If you could learn to play anything that is not technically an instrument, what would you play? 

CLANCY: The spoons. 

GLENZY: I’ve always wanted to make a drum kit out of buckets.

PACO: I think you can train birds to sing for you, so maybe I’d be a little bird choir conductor. 

NELL: I reckon it’d be cool to play the whip. 

KEELEY: Tell me about the show with Peter Bibby! How did that come about? 

NELL:  We've been around him a few times when he's been in town. I've mixed him a few times at Beardo.

But, also Glenzy's known Peter Bibby for years.

GLENZY: Yeah, we flew him over for Django's birthday party seven years ago, actually. My housemate at the time just asked him if he wanted to come and play and he said yes. He didn’t even know us at the time. But yeah, we flew him over and we played the party and we’ve been mates ever since. 

KEELEY: So what's on the horizon for Black Dog?

CLANCY: Well we’ve got the single and film clip, then the album. We’ve got the Bibby show March 13th which we’re all super keen for and we’re also going to do a little album launch show at the new Junk Bar on Easter Saturday. All good things.

PETER BIBBY 13TH MARCH | INSTAGRAM | BANDCAMP