Interview by Kris Peters,
Despite the fact the COVID period is a part of our lives most would rather forget, there were a number of people who spent their time more productively due to the enforced lockdowns and regulations.
Refusing to be defeated by an unseen adversary, Tim Coutts-Smith - vocalist for Melbourne fuzz rock outfit Jack Harlon & The Dead Crows - channelled his frustrations on an area that he knew would always provide hope.
Music.
Rather than using the time to create his own sonic landscape, Coutts-Smith instead looked deeper within to a musical time that quite possibly played a subliminal role in shaping his craft as a musician.
He began listening to some of his personal favourites with a view to spicing them up considerably, before opening the process up to the public when he asked fans to suggest songs that could benefit from being he termed as Harlon-ified.
A massive influx of material cluttered his social media with the main selection criteria being the chosen few would be from less mainstream artists that were not yet household names.
He wittled the list down to eight tracks and sprinkled his own DNA over the new recordings with sensational results.
This fuzz-drenched, genre-crossing love letter includes songs by under-the-radar icons like Bauhaus, God, Butthole Surfers, Joy Division, The Melvins, and more has hit the airwaves today, February 17 under the title of Hail To The Underground, with Coutts-Smith offering up some of his spare time to chat with HEAVY earlier today.
"I'm pretty stoked man," he smiled. "It's been a long time coming. I recorded this and finished it well over a year ago, so it's been a long year of waiting for it to finally come out."
Even the concept behind tackling a project like this is enough to put most people off, but Coutts-Smith argues it actually provided him distraction from the world wide horrors that surrounded him at the time.
"It really started in lockdown when I was recording our second album Magnetic Ridge," he explained, "and towards the end of that process it was slowly disintegrating on my computer. There was one point where I nearly lost the whole hard drive and the whole album so I thought okay, I've got to get a new computer and new audio. Naturally when you get a new audio set up you wanna test it out, so I just started going through songs that I love and trying to make them as heavy as possible. Then I thought there's enough here that I should put an album out. I did a few carbon copy covers at the start just to test it out but I was finding the more I'd record, the more I would wanna add all these bits in so eventually I'm adding all of these parts that aren't in the original songs. I thought half of this record is now original so I might as well continue (laughs)."
In the full interview, Tim talks more about how he chose the initial list of songs, what criteria he used to narrow it down, changing the structure of the music to put his stamp on it, which one he enjoyed covering the most, the recent 1000mods tour postponement, upcoming shows and more.