Melbourne jazz-funk quintet Surprise Chef have just released Superb, their fourth album. Ahead of an expansive tour taking in Australia, North America and Europe, we chatted with Lachlan Stuckey, who plays a gritty mean guitar, about what drives him and the band to create the music that they do.
Surprise Chef have been together since 2017. What brought you all together? What was it a shared love of music, or that sort of thing?
Oh, yeah, something like that. We’d all been playing music for a few years, up to that point, with each other in different configurations. Most of us met at music school, and we had a few years of doing gigs together in different bands and sessional capacities and things like that. In 2017, Jethro, who plays keyboards, and I wanted to start making some kind of instrumental music influenced by David Axelrod and that kind of stuff. We just called the fellas in and started a band.
Superb is album number four. How long does it take you to put an album together? I mean, I was reading that you did each song in one take, but how long to get that one take?
When we say we record stuff in one take, it’s because we record to a tape machine. So, there’s not really an opportunity to do edits or anything like that. But one thing was different to the previous records, in that in the previous records, we’d sort of play a song 20 or 30 times until we’re happy with the take. On this one, we tried to get it in a shorter number of takes. If we could kind of capture the energy of the tunes being more spontaneous, rather than laboured after many, many takes. We will generally set up in the studio and record in a period of a week or so. We try to do it all at the same time. So, yeah, this one week started on Monday morning and finished on Friday evening.
When you play a live show, you don’t get a second chance, you just play as it goes. So, I guess, it captures that spontaneity of the live show.
Yeah, absolutely. It also just communicates who we are as musicians and what we sound like when we play together. That’s something really fundamental to the band. It’s not to criticise people who might put their music together track by track on a computer, but what we want to capture is the thing that was captured on all the records that we love to listen to, which is the sound of a band playing together.
Looking through your Instagram page, I can see you’ve got a range of instruments, like synthesisers, keys and all that sort of thing. So obviously, you are musicians in the sense that you’ll make anything into an instrument, or you’ll take unconventional instruments, is the way I’m thinking.
Well, I don’t think we necessarily use unconventional instruments too much. I mean, we definitely use old stuff. There is some unconventional stuff on this Superb record. I mean, there’s one track where we miked the sound of a Timpani drum that was being reverberated by the bass amp. There’s some pots and pans on there. Yeah, actually now that I think of it, there’s some unorthodox kind of instrumentation on there.
How did you pick “Bully Ball” as the single?
To be honest, the label kind of picks the singles. But that’s a good question, because when we started the band, we’d started a label to release our own music. We still have a lot of projects where we do it that way, where we’re making the music, and then we’re doing the label side of things too. It’s kind of luxurious that Surprise Chef found ourselves in a position where we don’t have to be doing all of the jobs. We love the kind of DIY mentality and being involved in everything. Thing I love most is making music. And email. People send us emails. I think that there’s a real value to just being able to focus on making the music without having to think about, “Is this a single?” Should we work just being able to make the music and let the let the people with lanyards around their necks decide what’s a single and what’s not.
I also see that you guys do a lot of touring. You’ve just come from a tour, but then you’re about to tour Australia, USA, and Europe. Obviously, you enjoy the touring side of it all.
Touring is a real gift. It’s a real blessing to be able to do it. I mean, we get to go around the world and play our music that’s speaks for itself. It’s not necessarily easy, far be it for me to complain about getting to live my dreams on tour overseas. I think we find it very meaningful. There’s really, really awesome times, but it certainly is arduous. It comes at the cost of routine, nutrition, exercise, personal space, all the things sacrificed to go on tour. It’s not necessarily a matter of it being fun all the time, but it definitely feels meaningful. Touring is something we’re really grateful to be able to do.
You’ll be performing at the Sydney Opera House. Is that this is going to be your first time playing there?
We actually played at Sydney Opera House at the end of 2023 with the great living legend, Lee Fields. It is wonderful to play at Sydney Opera House. It’s wonderful to play music anywhere, anytime. Sydney Opera House is just a venue that your parents have heard of.
You’ve also a range of other things like a live music score for the movie “Wake in Fright”.
Yeah, it’s an AWESOME film. I’d say, somehow, despite the fact that I’ve watched it just ad nauseam, that it’s still my favourite film. That was a very, all consuming kind of project, just watching that film all the time, talking about it, writing music, listening to the music, watching the film again, talking about it more.
It’s roughly a two-hour film. We did a full run through, and then the audience came in. We played it. Yeah, then everyone left. We had enough time to, you know, go back and splash some water on our face. Then we came out and had to play the whole thing again. Twice in a night, and then never again.
You’ve also recorded with artists such as Rich Brian and Ghostface Killah and contributed to a Pepsi, Super Bowl, half time ad. How do you get these opportunities? Is someone actively looking for them or are they looking for you?
Both of those things kind of came to us. For the Ghostface joint, we had this tune called “Spiky Boi”, which was on an EP we did, called Friendship. And it just got sampled. A producer working with this label called 88 Rising kind of sampled it and put it on a beat. And, yeah, same with that Super Bowl thing. We had played a gig in Brooklyn, and a music supervisor was at the gig, heard the music and ended up putting it in a little Pepsi commercial.
Again, I’m looking at the list of shout outs on BBC Radio, FBI radio; you’ve got fans in Europe, and you’ve managed to capture an audience there. How did you grow your audience? Is it an organic thing or was it something that you went after?
It definitely started very organically. We never thought that we’d have the opportunity to kind of, you know, have people in places that we’d never been buy the record or music. Once we started to generate that audience overseas, then it’s gradually grown as we’ve released more music and gone over to tour. When it started, we were really just making records in the comfort of our own home and intended to distribute them to the small number of preoccupied freaks that like the same music that we like. It’s just been a totally unintended and very, very happy consequence that we’ve managed to garner some kind of meaningful audience, for sure.
I think that in this modern world, it’s easier to find an audience, because you can go via the internet and find very specific genres and music that you like. Or cult classic movies. Once upon time, you’d have to wait till it came to the cinema. Now you can just go online and find them.
Absolutely. We live in a world of more, that’s for sure, and the immediacy that everybody has to anything, by and large, is a really wonderful thing. I mean, there’s a part of me that would have loved to have been around when, you know, you didn’t know what the record sounded like, because you went to the shop and bought the record.
I grew up in the kind of Lime Wire generation which was a super cool time for finding music. Prior to that, because I didn’t have any money, I’d have to wait for my birthday, and I’d get a gift voucher for Sanity or a CD Shop. I’d go in there, and I’d have to really decide what I wanted. I’d pick one thing and take it home, and that’d be my one thing. Then I got Lime Wire, and my sister’s boyfriend said something about Black Sabbath, so now I’m going to download every single album. That kind of access is extremely cool. Now those file sharing things have been replaced with streaming services. And yes, there’s all kinds of disgusting, terrible ways that that plays out. It is really cool that an intrigued, inquisitive, curious listener can just open up their laptop and find this wonderful world of music and it’s just accessible.
What sort of audience do you attract? Do you have pretty much similar audiences around the world, or do they vary from country to country?
I don’t think I could necessarily discern whether there’s a certain kind of person that listens to our music in America versus a certain kind of person who may listen to our music in England, for example, but broadly, we’ve been quite taken aback and ultimately quite pleased with how diverse the audience is. Specifically, to age. There’s young crew and older crew at our shows. I think a lot of it comes to what your point of reference is. You know, someone who’s sort of younger may sort of be primed to enjoy our music because they like bands like Khruangbin or something like that, whereas old crew might hear the influence of James Brown. It’s reductive to suggest that young people like us because they know new young hit bands and old people like us because they like old bands. But you take my point, I think there’s sort of across the generations, and it’s just really cool that doesn’t feel like there’s one kind of person who likes our music.
From what I’ve heard, your music transcends a few different genres. It’s not just the one thing. You’ve got Timberland and The Neptunes and they’re quite different, but you can see where the connection would be. What about yourself or your band? Where do you get your inspiration and what do you listen to yourself?
I mean, to be honest, a lot of the inspiration for the music that we make has come from the music that we all make in different kind of projects. For example, Hudson (Whitlock), who plays vibraphone in the band, has always been making really cool music in a similar vein to Surprise Chef, in different projects. He plays in a band called The Pro-Teens that some of us also play in. He has a band called Karate Boogaloo. He’s also got his own solo project called Brenda. He’s Herculean. Henry Jenkins, who’s the guy responsible for recording and mixing all the music is an absolute force of nature and an extremely incredible musical mind in his own right.
There’s plenty of music I like to listen to and learned from and plenty of music that influences Surprise Chef in a really active way, but none as much as the music that I am closest to, which is the music that my friends make. When I hear the music that a band like Karate Boogaloo makes, when they’re making a new album and they’ve just done a recording, and they show me what they did the week before in the studio, there’s nothing more inspiring than the thing that’s closest to you and you have the most perspective on.
Henry and Hudson have a project with Karate Boogaloo guitar player David Thor, called the Frollen Music Library. They make sample library music that they put on the internet. You download it and use it to make your own music. Some of the stuff that they make is so tasteful and compositionally articulate. The nature of what they do is they make these 60 to 70 second songs. They’ll make like, twenty 60 second songs. So, people can cut them up and sample them in however they see fit. They do more in 60 seconds than, you know, most people do in any in any amount of time. They recorded that stuff at our studio at home in COVID, and getting a perspective on what they do is probably the most inspiring thing for me.
When you go and see a band live, do you sort of dissect how’s it going, or can you let yourself go and just be immersed in the music?
Look, unfortunately, I think I’ve lost the ability to not kind of be a grumpy chin-stroker. You know, I kind of lust after the times earlier in my life where I was like a newborn babe walking through the world experiencing everything, just being wowed by gigs and going “Oh, my God, this is so cool”. Now I feel like, unfortunately, I’ve just become too preoccupied and cynical that I can’t hear anything without being critical of it.
You’re gearing up for Vivid, touring Australia, then heading off around the world. So, it’s quite a journey ahead of you.
Yes, indeed. I’m just trying to load up on sleep and rest before it all starts so that I’ve got some energy to get through it all. Having to share rooms is the thing I’m least looking forward to. We take it for granted, that whatever happens in your day, in your normal life, you can go into your bedroom and shut the door and have some solitude, but that’s something that you sacrifice on tour. But the sacrifice is certainly worthwhile, but it’s intimidating, nonetheless.
Surprise Chef have released their album Superb on Bandcamp
Surprise Chef are scheduled to play 32 concerts across 7 countries in 2025-2026. They’ll be performing in Australia on the following dates:
24th May: “Vivid” Sydney Opera House, NSW
31st May: “Porch and Recreation” Burnside Ballroom, SA
6th June: The Night Cat Fitzroy, Vic
7th June: Night Cat, Melbourne, Vic
19th June: Princess Theatre, Brisbane, Qld
Tickets and more information via Songkick
Image supplied by the artist
