Aside from being the frontwoman of one of Australia’s most entertaining live bands, Patience Hodgson from The Grates is the kind of incredibly fascinating person you wish you could interview all day. As we got her at the tail-end of a day of full of chatting about boring stuff like her band’s move to New York, losing a drummer to cooking and making a kick-ass new album, we decided to eschew the normal line of questioning and find out what really makes the divine Ms Hodgson tick:
1. Food
You can win me over with any kind of food. The record label bought me lunch and it was amazing. I had a glass of white wine, and this entree – because it was a lunch special – of smoked fish with this curry rice and then the main of…a steak (laughs). It’s one of those things where I don’t actually eat a lot of meat, well I don’t cook it at home anyway, so you know that new thing when there are people who only eat meat when they’re out? When you’re unorganised like I am, the worst thing to do is throw meat away. I mean, I’m not a vegetarian but I definitely feel for the animals. So when I go out, if somebody else is buying, I will steak it up!
2. Grunge
That’s definitely an era of music that really speaks to me. I love The Breeders, I mean, Kim Deal is my most favourite musician ever. We just got the bass that she played on [The Pixies] ‘Doolittle’, which is like some ’60s bass that was remade in the ’80s. So we found it and bought one and just gave it to the whoever was playing bass and said ‘This is what you’re playing on.’ But John and I had never really opened up about the music we liked; he never knew about The Breeders and I never knew about Sparklehorse. I guess having three people there before we’d wouldn’t have to worry about it because we’d say ‘Hey, that’s the beauty of the band, all three of us like different kinds of music and then we get together to create this fourth kind of music.’ But this time around it wasn’t that I wanted to create a fourth kind of music, I just wanted to build on the kind of music that I love.
3. Being a ‘Young Prick’
It was intimidating just having to do vocals sitting in a room by yourself. I mean this comes from the fact that we started out just being really DIY in Brisbane and making our own CDs, doing our own recordings and priding ourselves on how we weren’t fancy musicians. And then when we started getting radio play it was even better because it was all ‘Wow, now we’re getting played on the radio – and we’re still shit!’ (laughs) We have friends that are much better singers and guitarist than we were who had been working in bands for years and then we just came along like young pricks and somehow got a bit of success playing powerchords…the record label really wanted us to call the album ‘Young Pricks’ and I really wanted to do it but somebody kiboshed it somewhere, I don’t know…
4. Growing Up
God those reviews [which talk about The Grates ‘growing up’ or ‘getting sexy’] are funny. It’s like I’ve just discovered that I have a vagina – how amazing! (laughs)….I hate it – no, hate is a strong word – but it really annoys me when people talk about that. I mean, it started happening on the last album [Teeth Lost, Hearts Won] and I let it slide but now it’s carrying over to this album and I’m like ‘No, enough with this growing up shit.’ Nobody wants a fucking grown-up band. Who wants to listen to a grown-up band – you’re in a band! That’s not a grown-up thing to do! I didn’t hear the last Foo Fighters song and think ‘Oh, Dave Grohl has grown up’, I thought ‘Wow, Dave Grohl is such a badass.’ With that long hair and his guns playing guitar…I’ve got it for Dave Grohl I’ve had the biggest crush on him for years…
Being in New York what was fun about it was the freedom… there’s no such thing as growing up. There are women who aren’t having children until they’re 42. I mean, people that just aren’t in relationships. I mean, you can live a very interesting life without necessarily ‘growing up’. Not that I don’t want to have a baby, I do think that squeezing a human out of your vagina is just an amazing thing. I’m going to make a human being in my body and then I’m going to push it out. I can’t wait to experience that, but I’m not in any rush to…
Yeah, I prefer what you called it, ‘songwriting adolescence’. I saw a Muscles EP today [Younger and Immature] and I just fell in love with the title. I’ve never been ageist. I think what I’m most interested in is people moving forward and having a good life.
Photo by Dan Boud.
The Grates’ new album, Secret Rituals, is out June 17.
