You're playing Rodeo Rockfest at the end of the month in Ipswich, are you looking forward to it?

Yeah it sounds like a good festival. We’re not really playing much at the moment so when we get asked to play we got to work out if we can do it. Generally these days were pretty happy to play we just have to put ourselves together again each time.

Ipswich is well known as the bogan capital of Queensland, do you think your bogan enough for Ipswich?

I don’t know, I don’t really know much about Ipswich so I’ll leave that up to you to decide. We don’t care who we play to as long as it’s a good vibe.

Last time I saw you guys play was Festival of the Sun in Port Macquarie. There is definitely a different vibe at that festival - what did you think of it?

I loved that festival! I’d like to see a lot more festivals like that in country areas that maybe don’t get a lot of shows, particularly the south coast. When you go south past Wollongong there’s nothing really until Melbourne. It’s a whole region and there are a lot of music fans that would like to see some live music. We had a really great vibe that night I thought we played a great gig and we were stocked so I’m glad you were there man.

I know what you mean. Being from a country town myself I noticed when we did have a big band come through it was a really big deal, I think we take music for granted in the city…

It’s one of those things about the festival scene in Australia - it’s very strong, particularly in summer people are more likely to come out and go to something in an area like that compared to bands playing at your local pub. I’ve seen that before when bands have been touring and they have a lot of trouble getting punters to come see them at a local venue. I don’t think people in country areas are in the habit of going to gigs. If you arrange a big outdoor show and put all those acts on most people will show up and put in all the resources and everyone has a great time. If you look at Grooving the Moo, which is a pretty big in Queensland now and different parts of Australia, it all started from very small festival way down in Narrandera in southern New South Wales. They built it up to be such a big thing, you can’t really compete with your Big Day Outs and your Homebakes and Splendours and stuff like that. There are a lot of areas in the country with people, it’s probably better to organise a festival than it is to do a pub show.

It seems as though Spiderbait have become more of a live band. Can we expect more studio albums?

I’ve been asked this a lot lately in the media. I am preoccupied with my solo thing I’m doing a new record this year. We're always talking about doing a new record, it’s just difficult for us to get the planets to align. We have families and people doing their own thing, when we play live it’s very easy - we just get together and we seem to gel really easily, particularly on a big stage when it’s a really big show we tend to live for it, whether it’s for Splendour or other big festivals we’ve done in recent years.

We're doing big international sort of shows every now and again with very little rehearsal or headspace, we don’t try build ourselves up for it. Making a record is different, it’s hard to get us in the same place for a regular enough time to write. We’re pretty determined to do a new record next year. I feel pretty confident it won’t take us very long to get some tracks down. With the band the word is 'metal' - we all just want to make a metal record, the heaviest album we have ever made. I’d like to make something that is really heavy and is built for festival rock.

When Tonight Alright  came out in '04 it was such a massive album, I was just wondering why you never followed up your wave of success?

Janet just had a baby just after that record. A lot of guys in bands I know have kids and they go off and mum stays at home, but when mum is in a band she’s not going away from her bubby. She’s kind of got a headspace where she is like 'I’m going to do this for awhile' and she would have done it regardless of whether the album was successful or not. In a way that album was a real celebration for us for all the things we’ve managed to do over the years. We did a lot of work for that record and I think we just all wanted to chill after that. All of a sudden it’s like five or six years have gone by it doesn’t feel that long to us. "Black Betty" is still a big song on radio and our shows still sell out wherever we go. It’s funny you should remind me, it’s like 'ahh yeah shit we should get our ass into gear and do a record'. It’s certainly not because we didn’t want to, it’s just that it was difficult for the planets to align in the right place. We’ve never recorded just for work, fuck that - we do it because we love to do it and we want to. I feel that’s one of the reasons were still a relevant band after all these years.

It seems like every few years we have different bands that represent the Australian music scene, if you look back 10 years bands like Grinspoon and The Living End were massive and now bands like Wolfmother and Jet have taken over. What do you think of the scene at the moment? What bands stand out to you?

I actually really like British India. I’ve been paying a bit of attention to them lately and I like there DIY mentality. They fuck shit up and there’s a lot of energy on stage. I like a lot of the electro stuff that’s coming out. Music is so varied now, anything goes. If you’re a good band and you have a good sound you can become successful. I think the scene is really strong but I tend to find careers seem to be very short in recent years. Were really lucky to be in a band that’s been around a long long time and I know there’s a lot of other bands that started when we started  and there long gone now, dead and buried. We sort of managed to keep going. When we have stuff out we still get airplay on triple J and on big commercial stations. We feel lucky to be here, I see a lot of bands coming out doing stuff then disappearing pretty fast.

The pressure is a lot greater now to sell records and be successful, indie music now has become really mainstream and I’m glad we managed to avoid that and be our own band. We didn’t become successful until after the first five or six years. We had to work our ass off, there’s no two ways about that.

We played a lot of shows, we basically wrote down every show we played for the first four or five years of our life and it was hundreds and hundreds of gigs. The more you play the better you get, you just don’t want to play to much like what happened with Wolfmother  where the guys played so much it really fatigued them and that’s one of the reasons the two guys left and Andrew had to keep going. That’s what you have to do to become a huge international band - you’re not just playing in Melbourne and Sydney anymore, you’re playing all over the world all the time. You can be on the road for five years without a break.

I felt like we did do a lot of work especially in the early days when we were playing to no one. When you play to no one everyone around you says 'What are you doing? Go out and get a real job'. Believe in yourself and keep playing because you like it and its fun. The pressure for a lot of bands to get the numbers is harder, and it makes it hard for the bands to make ends meet. Australia is a much more expensive place to live now it’s more expensive to rent a house, its more expensive to buy equipment, its more expensive to buy food. Bands coming up have to work jobs to sustain themselves. When we started we were all on the dole or at uni living on a shoestring where you could get by. These days the way the economic situation is in Australia makes it a lot harder to do that. To be an artist and do your thing you shouldn’t have to worry about working three jobs, but people still do it even though it’s harder and I think it’s awesome.