So, you kids still haven’t been exposed to the addictive, deep, dirty, electro-pop synth-rock stylings of Melbourne duo the Midnight Juggernauts? Well, let me be the one to introduce you to it’s two co-pilots Vincent (Noriega) and Andy (Gadaffi), whom I were kind enough to let me hold them up on the poorly-lit, smelly stairs out the back of Spectrum, during their recent Sydney assault. Giving me the goods to bring you the story of their rapid catapult on the scene, without the usual fluff.
The MJs (as they are affectionately known by their fans) came about in late 2003, after it’s founders Noriega and Gadaffi, who’d been playing together in various bands since high school, decided to jam and experiment with synths, vocoders to craft a sound that was to stand out as their very own.
Brought up on a wide spectrum of influences passed down from older siblings and parents, it’s not difficult to find that the MJs are mixing what others hadn’t previously thought to mix and blowing crowds away by the thousands with their genre defying live assaults “When I was younger, my brother played lots of Pink Floyd and Bowie and a lot of that wore off on me” enlightens Gadaffi, before Noriega leans in to the mic and shyly adds “I didn’t have any siblings with good taste, I had an older sister who was into all of the hits of 86. Like Transvition Vamp and Bananarama. But when I was 6 or 7 my parents started me learning the violin, so when I was a little kid, I was playing a lot of classical music. And then a few years after that, I picked up the guitar and started jamming with Andy in rock/punk outfits. Back in early high school Andy was into Slayer and the whole metal sound that was going on back then.”
“Yeah, I was very much into the guitar, technically, I was into finger tapping and harmonies and all of this kind of stuff, I was pretty obsessed with it. But it did disappear for a while, as I started growing out of metal, but then about 3 or 4 years ago, I started hearing a bit of Slayer again and found myself thinking that it would be pretty cool to bring that heavy, shred guitar sound in with the synths” Gadaffi elaborates.
After a few jam sessions, the duo began playing their first shows, in people’s backyards at house parties around Melbourne “We’d just bring instruments and there’d be no PA and it’d often sound really bad, but the crowd would really be into it” laughs Noriega. With a growing party crowd, it wasn’t too long before the Juggernauts began gracing the stages of some of Melbourne’s well known rock venues, playing The Espy, Ding Dong and The Tote. The boys didn’t quite know what to expect of their early rock crowds. “We were doing this weird electro set up act with synthesizers and no drums. So we just turned up basically expecting to have chairs thrown at us” laughs Noriega, before continuing “And even now when we play on line ups with more purist rock acts like The Drones or Riff Random, where we just jump on the bill for a bit of fun” Gadaffi jumps in and finishes the thought “We don’t really expect the audience to really get what we’re doing, but somehow they do.”
Their ability to adapt to these different ‘mixed-bag’ line-ups, helped them stand out and command the attention they rightfully deserved from both the rock and dance circles. “We were definitely something different from the other acts on these bills. Even though there were probably a few people that couldn’t stand us on those line ups, there were others who definitely got into our sound and thought ‘okay, here’s something different’ and they ended up following our shows, so I guess our following has just continued to grow that way and of course from word of mouth” Noriega explains.
2004 saw the band move on to wooing Sydney crowds, as they made the regular monthly trip up to Sin City, playing to a rapidly growing following, before releasing their debut EP (which is already in it’s third pressing) and jumping on tour with fellow Melbourne electric dreamers Cut Copy and Wolfmother to wreak havoc on the nation. “That tour was at an interesting time, cause Wolfmother had only just started out and to think of the 3 bands being such different kinds of bands being on tour like that, it was pretty special. It’s pretty cool looking back and thinking, that there really aren’t too many line-ups as special as that one was” explains Gadaffi, “I think those kind of tours and shows are fun, where audiences are exposed to a variety of flavours through the evening” adds Noriega.
This year has seen the boys survive many more successful trips to Sydney and causing some synth rock mayhem as they headlined the Spectrum stage at the Come Together festival. As their EP continues to sell and travel, so does the word of the MJs, as their tracks get flogged regularly on the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones’ radio show in the states and regular airings on college radio in the US. The band have even managed to licensed a track to v2 (home to the likes of Buffalo Daughter, Bloc Party, Chromeo, Cut Copy, Kid 606 et al) and have secured a plan to release a 12” teaser in the UK come July. “Good things have been surfacing, we’ve been contacted a lot from obscure sources in the US and the UK, so our music seems to be travelling around the US college radio circuit. Since we’ve always been a DIY kind of band from small origins, it’s really nice just to watch it grow as more people contact us and it’s amazing to see how fast music can spread around the world” Noriega gushes.
If taking the world by storm at a pace that could make your head spin, not once but twice, isn’t enough for these two. They also revealed that they’ve began working on demos for an upcoming debut album, which they’re hoping will see the light of day, later this year. “We’ve laid down a lot of new songs which we’re still getting together, so sometime this year hopefully we’ll get this album together and a lot of that is still very dancey. When we first started, we were a lot more straight electro and now a lot of our new songs and often when we play live, we’ll bring drums into the mix as well.
So, the set up might be more of a traditional rock set up, but we’re still focused on getting people to dance around and we still want to be the band that crosses over and can play in dance clubs as well. I mean, at the moment we still get asked to play on more house orientated line ups, cause they know that we’ve got a few tracks that sound like Daft Punk, so there’s nothing wrong with that and we enjoy that, as long as the crowd are open minded about what they expect to hear” illustrates Noriega.
Be on the look out for the Midnight Juggernauts recently re-launched debut EP ‘Version 2.0’ out now through Reverberation, featuring remixes by Wolfdog (Wolfmother) and Spodemonic (Spod).
