Big Red Tractor

IF IT’S bedrock is open-cut funk, its bedfellows are frank about it! Big Red Tractor is three wheels set in steamroller formation. A careening machine that crushes pose and pretence in its path, with a bottom end lower than a worm’s belly and twice as earthy. Exposed-wire guitar, visceral percussion, all trussed up in snaky bass, coiled, ready to strike. Dangerous. Dance at risk.

Which is probably why tonight’s victims choose to sit. On the floor, out of harm’s way — for this is a big, daunting noise, stabbing at the midriff, defying indifference. Dance, die, or get the hell out.

You want sweet melody? Forget it. You want friendly tunes you can hum on the way home? You’ll be left with a hum in your ears. You want to cherish the memory? Put it in a cage and regard from a safe distance.

…Fresh Meat (Terry Chellappah)

Terry Chellappah is dark, thick-set and looks pretty fierce from a distance. He wields a stick bass like some offensive weapon — he doesn’t so much play the thing as beat it into submission. Behind him sits Neville Anderson, a drummer with a similar fine line in battery, though he’s as deft with a club as he is with the subtle touch. If these two were any tighter, they’d snap under their own high-tensility. There’s a guitar player here too, but Kirke Godfrey’s as much a part of the rhythm section. This band is a rhythm section. They get syncopation on the brain, and even passive reaction could find you under their wheels.

Big Red Tractor first came to active attention in Sydney and Melbourne via a clutch of supports with Hunters & Collectors, and surprised more than a few people with their brash rising to the occasion. True to the Hunters’ admirable ethic of engaging complementary acts rather than safe supports, Big Red Tractor didn’t so much warm up audiences for the headliners as pre-cook them. A hot wind that blew into town from native Perth, where it took some time to gather.

“This project has been one and a half years in the making — people were in and out of the band over the first six months; it was getting ludicrous.”

We’re backstage at a soundcheck, and Terry Chellappah is tracing the origins of the Tractor. His manner, though slightly road-weary, is forthright and positive, belying the frustrations involved in putting what’s largely his vehicle on the road in the first place. Though now a streamlined three-wheeler, it first saw life as a five-piece — standard bass/drums/guitar format augmented by a percussionist and keyboardist. They’ve since been ousted in favour of machines, triggered at various points by strategic footswitches and drum computer ’voices’. Contrary to expectations, this is no exercise in hi-tech. The synths are rudimentary, non-programmable, and so require hurried resetting between numbers onstage — handled with a minimum of fuss by Terry and Kirke. The overall effect is a steaming, rhythmic onslaught tempered by the occasional keyboard flourish and staccato punctuation of synthesised percussion effects.

“With cheap gear, it’s down to common sense,” Terry explains. “You become more aware of your limitations, and it becomes a case of knowing the gear and how far it can be taken.”

“With expensive machines, there’s so much freedom it’s almost boundless,” adds Kirke. “It gets bewildering, like ‘Where do I start?’ When it’s simple, it’s a lot more exploitable.”

TERRY: “Because the synths aren’t programmable, the sounds they make tend to be different every night. Which is good and bad, ’cos there’s a lot of variety and uncertainty attached to a performance.”

Ah yes, the ‘brink’ factor, that uneasy, queasy feeling of skirting potential disaster. Any band that employs machines knows it well — a drum machine breakdown, a synth drifting out of tune on a power surge — it’s a constant, bracing possibility. Where most would fall apart in a shutdown/turnoff situation, Big Red Tractor roll forward with fresh intensity. Frustration turns to anger, becomes aggression — like when you’re dealing with hired or borrowed crew unendowed with a sympathetic ear, or ill-equipped to deal with a minor crisis.

So who’s lazed? When a footswitch sticks, Terry Chellappah is just as likely to get down and dislodge it by hand, then take a swig of beer on the way back up, hammering the bass all the while with the other. At given moments he’ll seize a bugle, pan it across the mike, leap sideways to punch in a synth line and cock his mouth in time to sing the next line. This guy is busy. To his left, Kirke Godfrey sways from the knees up like some animated bookend, both feet planted unless stabbing at an array of pedal effects. Neville Anderson sits in his rhythm dugout, stoic, immovable, battering out iron-clad morse.

Trance vocals are the main medium. Futurist mantras repeated continually, meshing with the rhythms, messing with the mind. Fresh Meat. Dance For Sanity. Forgotten Pleasure. More Air. No Time To Wait… song titles stick like signposts on a much-travelled highway.

Big Red Tractor are on that road right now. After a week in Melbourne and a hometown stint (including four more dates with Hunters & Collectors), the wheels roll back to Sydney. Be under them.

Big Red Tractor currently comprises Terry (bass, keyboards, vocals), Kirke (trumpet, guitar, synthesiser, vocals) and Neville on drums. Over the past year the band has suffered a series of line-up changes, mainly because of unreliability on some peoples’ part. “That’s all in the past, however, and we’d prefer to forget it,” said Terry, the last original Big Red Tractor left. Several times the band has decided to give up, only to be persuaded to continue by positive audience response.

But that’s very much in the nature of Big Red Tractor — spontaneity is their key word. For example, Kirke didn’t know about the band’s recent Tuesday night performance at the Cat until a friend rang him on the night and told him to check the entertainment advertisements in the Daily News. He also didn’t know that Big Red Tractor’s sax player had left the band only a few hours earlier. Still, the band was “ecstatic” after the gig, and so, I believe, was the audience.

Big Red Tractor’s set comprises ten songs, but the time it takes to perform the set can vary from fifty minutes to an hour and a quarter. “Our arrangements are very flexible,” said Kirke. “A song like ‘The Mask’ varies in length depending on the cues I get from Terry.”

“And the cues depend very much on the audience,” said Terry. “Certain sections of ‘The Mask’ can last three minutes or eight, depending on how the audience reacts to the first thirty seconds of them.” Arrangements thus can vary significantly from week to week, developing with each performance or rehearsal of the song, which, all the members of the band agree, is a healthy thing.

“Some degree of organisation is important, however,” Neville contended. “At a place like Blazes, for example, you can get an audience full of piss and bad manners and you have to take that into account.”

“I think you should shake them up,” said Kirke. “I started at Blazes just blowing the trumpet, with Terry playing a bit of synth, and I really enjoyed it. I could have gone on all night.”

“We’re conscious of good or bad vibes from the audience,” said Neville.

“But sometimes you can forget that they’re there,” asserted Terry. “Sometimes we seem to play to and for ourselves, and then suddenly realise that there’s an audience there as well.”

Big Red Tractor work hard on their sound. “We can spend all afternoon working on a sound check,” Kirke told me.

“We want the sound perfect from the first note,” added Terry.

“You see, we’re not into spending thousands of dollars on equipment,” Kirke continued. “Terry’s got a ridiculously small bass amp, probably the smallest ever used on stage. We don’t want a big sound on stage. It’s unnecessary. The up-front sound, where it counts, is produced through our mixer.”

“And we’ve got the best sound man there is,” said Terry. “Evan is an integral part of the band’s sound, he understands what we are aiming at.”

“We also work hard to get the visual set-up right,” Terry continued. “We consider ourselves a visual band — Kirke and I move a lot. The physical set-up of the stage is also very important in enabling us to hear what we are playing. It must be conducive to our enjoyment of the music.”

But it’s not a contrived or arty thing,” Kirke is quick to add. “It’s part of feeling the music — delivery is very important.”

Big Red Tractor have only played six times publicly, but that doesn’t bother them. “We don’t want to play regularly,” said Terry. “We’re aiming at two gigs a week, so that we can be selective. That way we can give our best to each performance, and also have time to be developing new material.”

“We can be certain of a good crowd that way — sparse gigs well advertised,” said Kirke.

“We want to be able to play a couple of really good gigs each week, without being over-exposed, to attract an enthusiastic audience,” Neville added. “at the moment we’re trying to sieve through gigs to find what suits the band best.”

“The important thing is to always feel the music. If we don’t feel it then it doesn’t work,” said Terry, and Neville and Kirke agreed.

Big Red Tractor could be accused of jumping on the Funk bandwagon, but they deny this emphatically. “I’ve been interested in Disco music for a while,” said Terry. “And Disco with feel is how we work, we’re after energy; it’s definitely dance music.”

“Our influences vary,” added Kirke. “Mine include alcohol and Weather Report, as well as some current funk stuff.”

The original band was a six-piece line-up with a kind of big-band, funk feel,” said Terry. “There’s a lot more pressure to work hard now, with only three members.”

“Ideally, we’d like a multi-instrumentalist as a fourth member,” said Neville.

“Yeah,” Kirke agreed, “someone who could play sax, percussion, trombone, whatever.”

“We’d like a big sound with only a few people, so it doesn’t get cluttered,” said Terry.

“What we want is an orchestrated sound, but with lots of space, room to breathe,” added Neville. “We want lots of different voices, different tone colours, used sparingly. In that sense, another member would be good.”

“We also want to expand our use of foot-switched synths and things,” said Kirke.

“That way Kirke and I can play guitar and synth,”continued Terry. “And that allows for greater spontaneity in the arrangements.”

“It would be good to have a small brass section,” said Kirke. “They would work sometimes as a section, and sometimes as individuals. But it can be hard to organise larger amounts of people on stage. As it is now, the three of us are too busy doing things on stage to worry about anything else, so we all pull our weight.”

And as to recording? “There’s things we’d like to do, but nothing is definite,” said Terry. “One idea we have had is to use the three core members of the band in conjunction with other musicians as necessary, but we don’t as yet, have anyone in particular in mind.”

“We want to work with things we have confidence in, however,” added Neville. Confidence is one thing Big Red Tractor don’t lack.

The next series of rare gigs by the Big Red Tractor is their ‘Month of Sundays’ at the Cat, beginning on October 24th. They’ll also be playing support to Hunters and Collectors. Catch at least one of these performances. Who knows when (or where or how) Big Red Tractor will play again?