Hold tight for the return of ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER. The Melbourne romantics reveal the secrets of their splendid new album, Sideways To New Italy. Tom Pinnock hears tales involving crocodiles, table tennis and The Clash. “We can do whatever the hell we want!”

DARWIN is a frontier town. Located so far north it has a monsoon season, it’s the capital of the Northern Territory - an area as vast as Mongolia but with the population of Derby. The place holds a certain fascination for Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, who grew up in a rather different environment, 3000km away.

“It’s a magical place,” says Tom Russo. “It’s like a different country to Melbourne. Everything’s more brilliant. The sea is bright greenish blue, it looks so beautiful, but it’s like a cruel joke because it’s full of all of the poisonous things. So you can’t swim, because there are sharks… and crocodiles. Mostly crocodiles.”

“THE SONGS FELT AT HOME IN THIS MYSTICAL, HAZY LANDSCAPE”
FRAN KEANEY

“It’s a mystical place, the Northern Territory,” says Fran Keaney, the band’s biggest enthusiast for the area known as Australia’s Top End. “It has this orange haze and the smell of burning eucalyptus. The spectre of nature looms so large. It felt like the songs were at home in this mystical, hazy, scorched landscape.”

Last year, the group played Darwin for the first time and stayed on for a few days. During a day trip, they decided to test new demos for the follow-up to their debut, 2018’s HopeDowns - blasting them out as they drove down a red dirt highway.

“If the songs aren’t hitting you when you’re driving down the desert highway, then they’re not any good,” says Russo sagely. “But they all had this energy to them. We thought, ‘OK, we’re onto something here.’”

“We have roots here”: RBCF in their home town of Melbourne, January 2020

Photo by PETER RYLE

Those songs make up their new LP, Sideways To New Italy, its 10 tracks combining the band’s melodic lyricism and duelling, chiming guitars with some of their finest material to date. These are conventional songs that feel constantly surprising: “Cameo” spirals into blissful melodic detours and “Falling Thunder” blossoms into new euphorias as it nears its end. “The Cool Change”, meanwhile, combines the stoned psychedelia of “Rain”-era Beatles with a spiteful slice of mid-’60s Dylan.

“Yes, we have different singers,” says Keaney, “but we’re all cultivating this vision together. I think we all seem to move in similar circles, creatively, because we talk a lot about the songs - lines from the lyrics get brought up and they inform other songs.”

When they came off more than a year of intense touring in support of their debut, Rolling Blackouts had an album of songs ready to go. But they scrapped some and exhaustively reworked others from August to October last year in a quest for something headier and more intangible, for an accessible but completely unique sound.

“We had this rough ungraspable idea of what we wanted this album to be,” explains Keaney, “something we were trying to deliberately bottle. And I think we bottled it.”

“They even have similar voices!” says Burke Reid, who produced the album, of the group’s synchronicity. “Having a sound is quite hard these days, and they have a sound and a world to go into, but because the reins are pulled in three different directions, it always keeps it interesting.”

The result is something the group are delighted with, an infectious, whip-smart examination of the meaning of home and the beauty of fleeting moments. As they take Uncut through the two turbulent years that fed into the new album, we hear stories of abandoned outback towns, competitive table tennis, Americans with lizard eyes, the perfect Italian shade of blue and, of course, the rollercoaster ride of bringing these songs to life.