Vision Festival is coming up in October, and Melbourne’s Kettlespider will be one of the exciting bands to be taking control of the stage. The musos are Scott Ashburn (guitar), Simon Wood (drums), Haris Boyd-Gerny (guitar), Geoffrey Fyfe (keys) and Colin Andrews (bass) and they create progressive rock tunes that are reminiscent of the greats back in the ’70s.
Kettlespider’s drummer, Simon, had a convo with TEO about their music, band name and projects ahead of their anticipated road trip to Adelaide.
TEO: I have to ask: how did you happen on Kettlespider for your band name?
Simon: Well, the story goes that we were rehearsing and I went to put the kettle on to make some coffee for the guys. I prepped everyone’s cups with the right amount of sugar and just as the kettle was boiling, a spider crawled out of the spout! So I ran out, told everyone, and the term ‘kettlespider’ was coined. ‘The Kettlespider’ became one of our first songs that we recorded, and back then we were going under a different band name: The Mirror’s Truth. But eventually a good friend of mine suggested calling the band Kettlespider, and we changed our name!
You guys have been working on a project called Building A Spider; can you tell us a bit about it?
That’s a new release incentive we’ve started this year, just to get our heads back in the game and put out some more music on a regular basis. So what we decided to do with Building A Spider is to take the eight legs of a spider, and over an eight month period this year we’ve worked on recording and releasing a new song every month, so we can continue to be actively making music and releasing it. So each song is a leg of the spider, and by October we will have successfully built our spider! So far we’ve finished six legs, and the last one will come out just before Vision Festival. So we’ll be playing a few songs when we come over and we’re really excited to unveil them live for the first time.
The best sort of rock is progressive rock, when were you introduced to the genre?
We’ve definitely all been very much into it since we were young; the five of us have known each other since we were about 13 years old, and I’m not sure what the tipping point was. When I started getting more serious about learning drums I went looking for music that was inspiring. The guys and I would meet at school and introduce each other to different bands. It started out with the metal bands, where we started learning of the technicality of music, like Iron Maiden and Metallica. From there, we moved into the progressive rock style where we got into Pink Floyd and even Led Zeppelin at their most progressive. As years went on, it was all about Dream Theatre, Rush, Genesis, King Crimson and lots of progressive metal as well.
Which prog band of the ’70s would you most liked to have seen live?
I think all of us would’ve loved to see Camel, and I know they’ve done a reunion of late, so maybe there’s still hope for that to happen!
You can’t really look past the idea of seeing bands like Genesis, Camel, Yes, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer in their prime live. But at the end of the day, we still have things to look forward to in the current music scene. We’ve just bought tickets to see Opeth at the Sydney Opera House, so maybe that will be the closest thing we’ll get to a classic progressive rock show.
You’ve got Vision Festival coming up, but what’s happening with Kettlespider for the rest of the year?
Hopefully we can get back into the gig circuit in Melbourne—we’ve got a few bands that we’re quite tight with and we’d like to do a few shows with. Then we’re going to be putting our focus towards doing another album, so stay tuned.
Catch the guys live at Vision Festival this October! Tickets are available from Moshtix.
Find out more about Vision Festival here.
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