It’s just getting dark outside on a Thursday evening in late 2004, and in a dank, well-known Sydney haunt stand two Melbourne boys. Trying to sip away their nerves with their first schooner of the evening, tonight is their first Sydney show and their doubts are starting to emerge faster than government road workers at the sight of a ‘free beer’ sign. ‘Will anybody show up? Will the Sydney kids get it?’, and that was just the beginning. Then as 8pm ticks over the venue slowly starts to fill with the evening’s first trickle of punters, the boys quickly start to swallow any remaining nerves with a smile. Looking at the crowd, one of the most noticeable things is the perfectly varied mix. First, you have the cool indie kids dressed in black jeans, stripy tops and polka dot headbands; then you have the uber-fresh club kids looking like they’ve just stepped out of a Vogue shoot. With an equal amount of punters filling the room from each scene, it was almost as though everyone’s hopes were pinned on these boys, being the next big thing, to take both scenes to another level, joining the likes of Cut Copy, Gerling, The Presets et al.
Fast forward to 2006 and those two same shy Melbourne lads have been quite busy, bludgeoning the Australian scene with a lengthy list of mouth-watering headline live shows, warming the stage for a drool-worthy cast of national and international acts. Their debut EP can be found in any self-respecting indie/club kid’s collection, and their remixes are dropped to packed dancefloors with thrilling results. If this wasn’t already enough for the boys, then the unexpected attention from Video Hits (who’ve been known to drop the ‘Shadows’ clip between the likes of Nelly Furtado and Mariah Carey), might aid in driving the point home. This is an exciting time to be part of a change in musical trends, as they take their tracks to a much wider global audience. However, the attention still doesn’t fail to baffle Vincent Juggernaut, who’s still laughing about that Saturday morning he decided to get up and treat his heavy post-Friday head with some pop-pap, wondering if the sight of his band’s latest clip on Video Hits was an accident or carefully-staged prank.
Fresh from their second tour of New Zealand as I catch up with him early on a Tuesday morning, Vincent is in high spirits, and why shouldn’t he be? The last few weeks have seen the boys clocking up frequent flyer points with Annie, The Presets, playing Splendour in the Grass, and now getting set to take the stage in support of the Scissor Sisters for their on Australian solo show. Not to mention their first UK release on Cut Copy’s UK vinyl imprint ‘Cutters Records’, and the Australian release of their second EP ‘Secrets of The Universe’, which hasn’t wasted any time, getting the attention it deserves. But why was it that the boys decided to make us all antsy with anticipation between the first pressing of ‘Raised By Wolves’ and ‘Secrets of The Universe’? “We’ve been busy working on our debut album for the last few months and hadn’t realised how much time had passed by,” laughs Vincent innocently from his Melbourne home. “When we thought about it, we decided that we better put out another EP in the meantime, to maintain momentum with the audience. Plus we had a hell of a lot of tracks kicking around in demo form for the album, which of course not all of them are going to end up on, so we chose a few to finish up and put on the EP. It all took just less than a month to put together.”
The EP clearly shows that the band, who have been perched ever so comfortably upon the fence separating the rock and dance scene, still haven’t picked one side. But rather, they’ve chosen to take a step further into both, resulting in a heavier guitar drive with a deeper, darker and more adventurous electro leaning. It seems that the Midnight Juggernauts have succeeded in bridging the gap between he two, and all with effortless ease, something that bands and artists have been desperate to achieve of late. “We’ve been trying out different areas and ideas for the new album, before settling on a direction. We love both the rock scene and the dance world, so we don’t want to have to deny either, or be a band who limits themselves by being pigeonholed early on,” offers Vincent of the band’s change in pace from their first EP.
Although it may sound as though the boys have their hands well and truly full already, with touring, demoing and talking to likely UK producers about helming the album, they still managed to find enough spare time to follow in the footsteps of heroes like Giorgio Moroder and John Carpenter, by trying their hand at filmscoring for an Australian feature. “It’s funny what you say in interviews,” Vincent laughs. “It all came about after we’d said in an interview that we’d like to get into filmscoring, and soon after we got the offer” he concludes. It was an exciting new adventure for the Juggers, as they explored the relationship between music and moving images. “It was an interesting approach, to be guided by visuals, we had to restrain ourselves a bit, we couldn’t be as avant garde as we would have liked with the project, because we had to make sure to keep them happy as well,” he explains of the experience.
2006 is indeed the year of the Juggernaut, and their schedule shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon with the guys keeping their eye firmly trained on the UK market. “We had our first UK release a month or two ago and are now preparing for our second one as we speak, so all seems to be going well over there for us right now.”
‘Secrets of the Universe’ is out now on Siberia, through Inertia Distribution.
