What’s My Scene: Any Young Mechanic bring Adelaide’s ‘freak corner’ to the world
In our regular Q&A column, InReview speaks to emerging and established local artists to get their take on the South Australian creative scene and their place within it. This week, Any Young Mechanic check in from their European tour to talk songwriting, Camus, and the current wave of ‘off-kilter’ Adelaide bands.
Where was your first Adelaide gig, and how did it go?
Sam Wilson: We’ve all been playing shows in so many different configurations over the last five to six years that it’s difficult to remember. We had to change our name late 2024 so that complicated things as well (we used to be called Wake In Fright).
The first gig we played in Adelaide with the lineup you hear on The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot was probably at The Grace Emily or Low Life Basement bar sometime in 2023, or it could have even been in Interim Studios for a Movie Juice film festival. If it was Low Life there probably weren’t many people there, but we always felt good about playing the material live. Movie Juice events are always a blast and The Grace was where we played the most when we were workshopping this album (shoutout Ryan on sound). It’s always been a good spot for us.
What is your artist origin story?
Jay Eliot Mee: Sam and I met at Uni in 2019 and have been making music together ever since. Sam and Thea met in a creative writing class in 2020, and following that Thea did some session violin work with Sam on occasion before joining the band in 2022. At that time, Thea played with Luka in a band called War Room and with Allan in the bands Eyrie and Cagefly, which were all making really engaging, interesting music. So Sam poached them both for recording The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot in 2023. So the interconnectedness of the local Adelaide scene was crucial to how we all got together in the same room making music.
What was your impression of the Adelaide creative scene when you first started, and how has that changed?
Luka Kilgariff-Johnson: I can’t really testify on other mediums, but in terms of the live music scene, I was definitely intimidated. Fresh out of high school I could sense it was something I wanted to be involved in and contribute to, but was apprehensive to start. And then you get up on a pub stage a few times and suddenly it’s not so scary anymore. There were a few slightly older bands and artists I looked up to but the real inspiration came from my peers who were parallel in their discovery of the pub circuit.
I think what sets us and our friends apart from bands that came before us is that we didn’t have a real point of reference for what being a local band should sound or feel like. A lot us were in our gig attending-primes during lockdown, so live music consumption was mostly via the computer. We were all citing music we found via YouTube and Rate Your Music as a blueprint. A couple years later you end up with an eclectic bunch of musicians and bands that don’t necessarily sound alike but share a similar ethos and fervour for resisting the confines of a small music scene. I think I started calling it the ‘freak corner’. At risk of serious back-patting, I believe there is now a lot more room and support for young people who want to make music that’s off-kilter or too quiet to be played in a pub.
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How has your own work evolved since you first started?
Sam Wilson: My aims as a writer have gotten much clearer over nine years of songwriting. I think it has a lot to do with understanding which details of a story or experience are interesting to me. I don’t think my subject matter has changed drastically, it’s just that I know what elements of a scene I want to foreground or remove entirely. Jay was talking to me about this Camus quote that’s on the back of Scott 4 the other day:
“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
I haven’t read much of Al’s work but I think he’s right about this.
I’m also very lucky to trust completely the intentions and instincts of the musicians in this band. Their ideas, and our growth as individual and collective players, will always make things sound and feel different with each record. I’m looking forward to experiencing those shifts.
What is it about your next release/project/body of work that you’re most excited/nervous to share with the world?
Jay Eliot Mee: Now that our debut album The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot is out, I’m excited to share how much we can change and evolve as a band. We recorded that record a while ago with several constraints (no electric instruments, no edits, no overdubs), however the next music we release will have different constraints. I don’t want to give too much away but I’m looking forward to showcasing that we can be more than a folk band – we can be a folk band and we love playing folk music, but also that we can branch out into additional textures, forms, etc. If you catch us live you’ll probably see us busting out a few of the newer tunes already.
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Who are the artists around you that inspire or challenge you?
Allan McBean: There are a whole lot of artists in the local scene that I think inspire us, mostly our friends. It’s difficult to talk for anyone else with a question like this, because we’ve all had slightly different paths in our musical lives. But I personally feel inspired every time I see Perfect 50, the writing is so good and full of surprises and the band rocks. You can’t lose, and the EP is very good.
To quickly plug the caps lock compilations that Thea helped put out this year and last, you can basically go there and take your pick. Mainly what I’m inspired about by a lot of that stuff is the way the music has triumphed, could only have been made, by the sheer desire to create something and get involved, which is nearly always inspiring. A lot of it is either self-produced or made very quickly in local studios, come about from collaborations and friendships.
When I started playing music, I learned a lot about what goes into constructing a song from Clara and Miranda (Gilly and Bede) when I was their bass player for Eyrie. I’d never thought that much about it before, but when you see your friends doing something, it (perhaps naively) encourages you to think you can do the same. Then there are, for me, the members of this band, because 1) I spend a lot of time with them these days, 2) are all excellent musicians and 3) fascinating, empathetic people. But inspiration can strike at strange times, you might be having a conversation and suddenly think, “I feel like I want to make something right now.” I often get that from the Ebop crew, or the Swapmeeters.
Favourite Adelaide venue to play?
Luka Kilgariff-Johnson: I think most would agree with me in saying that I have a tumultuous relationship with most venues in the city. Having a good sound person helps. We played in a boxing ring once, that was fun. Backyards are the past, present and future.
Dream artist to perform alongside?
Thea Martin: Because we’ve just seen her play and it’s fresh on the brain – Aldous Harding. We all love her new record and previous discography. Her set we caught in the Netherlands totally floored me, the arrangements are so precise, she exhibits such incredible restraint and a completely singular free expression of her performance character.
Favourite artist to collaborate with?
Thea Martin: For me personally, my friend Gabrielle Stoddard from Auckland, Aotearoa. She’s a creative arts therapist and is my favourite person to talk to about arts access and to facilitate participatory art alongside. As a band, we’ve loved collaborating with Lucinda Corin on our music videos. She gave so much care and weight to our ideas, which she translated with such confidence into fully realised videos. The video we made for ‘Write You Wrong’ is a real standout, I’m so glad we got to make it.
Where is your next Adelaide performance, and how do you hope it will go?
Thea Martin: Well, our caps lock records programming will continue at Goodwood Books on August 15 with Resting Mind Flowers headlining and my project short snarl supporting. We’re all involved with putting on these shows, so I can’t wait to be back in that little pocket of community. We’re also hoping to do something similar to the show we put on with Moviejuice earlier this year, where we screened Altman’s Brewster McCloud alongside 3 of our music videos. We’d love to play in a theatre…
We’re playing some festivals back in Australia from September: Big Sound, Yours and Owls and one to be announced, but the rest of the year is pretty open right now. I think we’d like to do some house shows. There will be a hometown show though for sure in July or August, but at present we don’t have a plane ticket back to Australia so the threads are all hanging loose.
Any Young Mechanic’s debut album The Modern Shoe is Ruining the Foot is out now
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