DAN AND PETE LUSCOMBE REVEAL THAT STARDUST FIVE HAS BEEN INFLUENCED BY EVERYTHING FROM VINTAGE HIP HOP TO VINTAGE SURF MUSIC.

BY MARTIN JONES

Music made by or associated with surfers these days seems to be either of the mindless punk pop variety or of the innocuous new soul movement of Jack Johnson and Donovan Frankenreiter. What happened to Dick Dale and The Del-Tones, The Atlantics, The Sandals and Santo and Johnny?

Stardust Five have decided to remind us just how beguiling the classic surf instrumental can be. A project for Paul Kelly’s Boon Companions group – featuring Kelly, his nephew Dan Kelly, Dan and Pete Luscombe and Bill McDonald – Stardust Five has little to do with Ziggy and The Spiders From Mars, probably more influenced by the Hoagy Charmicheal song and more specifically, to hazard a guess, the Jack Jenney Orchestra version.

Though there are vocal tracks on the band’s new self-titled album, the texture and tones of the instruments are dominant in a way that harkens back to a bygone era. Indeed, as I get up and prepare to go and interview the Luscombes, my old valve radio resonates with the glorious tones of Santo and Johnny’s ‘Sleep Walk’, thrusting the comparison in my face.

There’s an open nod to Santo and Johnny in ‘Last Orders’, the opening track on the Stardust Five album, and Both Pete and Dan Luscombe become immediately animated when I announce that our first topic of discussion will be surf music. They admit that they don’t surf, but that their brother does, and conclude that surf music should be enjoyed by surfers, but not played by them. “They don’t know what they’re doing,” Dan smirks.

“The Santo and Johnny thing though…” he continues, “I’m a huge fan of those guys. I spent, I’ve been doing something slightly dodgy, but I’ve been trying to find as many songs as I can on file-sharing kind of software – but you can’t buy it so it’s okay. It’s all out of print.

“And they wouldn’t be getting the money anyway,” adds Pete.

“All their records went out of print a long time ago and there’s a gold-mine out there. It’s just a wonderful sound,” Dan concludes.

From there, we’re off reminiscing, searching our minds for overlooked surf-instrumental gems. The Friends Of Dean Martinez, Midnight Oil’s ‘Wedding Cake Island’, The Atlantics and the Cruel Sea are all thrown on the table.

“There is a real Australian surf sound,” Dan concludes.

“Ross Hannaford too,” suggests Pete. “There’s a track on a Diana Kiss album, did you ever hear that first Diana Kiss album? There’s a song called ‘Waves’. It’s great, it’s just a slow surf instrumental that’s one of the great Australian undiscovered surf instrumentals. So there’s one to go looking for.”

Though it might seem otherwise at this point in the interview, the classic surf-instrumental is but one of many facets of the music of Stardust Five. Through years on the road together with Paul, recording soundchecks and being asked to submit soundtracks and scores to various film and television projects, the quintet discovered that their various and sundry tastes and skills coalesced in an inspiring fashion.

“They just had to all get along, basically,” Dan says of the band’s many facets. “Because we’ve spent a long time, well now it’s been four years playing as a group with Paul, and we, there’s four members of the group who are all related to at least one other member, so there’s an onus to all get along and to accept what everyone brings in. But we’re all music lovers and we all try to take in as much as possible. And as much music as we can from bygone eras too.”

“There’s also the great thing that the first day this band got together and rehearsed, we ended up with about five instrumentals just out of that session,” adds Pete. “So it’s a pretty fertile environment musically anyway and it’s always going to continue to be that, I think we just feed off each other really well.

“It’s also the first band I’ve been in with two guitar players that get along with each other,” Pete smiles. “In the past every other guitar player - apart from the main singer-songwriter we’ve got who’s playing guitar, we should leave that out - but usually guitar players compete with each other. In this instance, they’re very complimentary, they step out of each other’s way and there’s a lot of ‘after you’-ing goes on. And of course Dan also plays keyboards too, so there’s that tendency, you can always step onto a keyboard part if the other Dan’s got a part that’s kind of dominant.”

Dan Luscombe recalls that he and Dan Kelly joined Paul’s band at the same time, making for a double Dan attack. For those not familiar with either Dan’s previous work, Luscombe has been a quiet achiever in the Australian music scene since his early teens and is probably best known as guitarist of The Blackeyed Susans. Dan Kelly has his own band, The Alpha Males, of which Dan Luscombe is also currently a member, and has released an incredible rock album Dan Kelly And The Alpha Males Sing The Tabloid Blues, with another to follow any minute now.

Of course, the more ‘senior’ members, drummer Peter Luscombe and bass player Bill McDonald, have between them contributed to an enormous number of great Australian live and recorded performances over the last couple of decades.

And as for Paul – his creativity just seems to gather more momentum with each new year, his recent triumphs branching out into dub (Professor Ratbaggy) and bluegrass (Smoke and Foggy Highway) alongside his consistently incredible singer-songwriter fare. Indeed, besides the obvious Professor Ratbaggy links, the roots of Stardust Five can be seen in 2003’s Ways And Means which opened with a surf instrumental, ‘Gunnamatta’.

“I think that’s what Paul’s enjoying about the band too,” says Dan, “you know when you talk about the instrumental thing, I think he’s enjoying just being a guitar player. He’s having a lot of fun with that instrument. There’s a song on the album called ‘Road To North’ where he plays his first lead guitar solo.”

And here Dan raises two crucial secrets to the success of Paul’s recent undertakings: ‘firsts’ and ‘fun’.

“You need to keep stretching yourself if you want to keep having fun,” says Dan. “Paul’s not one to rest on his laurels. And no one should.”

“It goes back along way too,” Pete reveals of Paul’s openness to different ideas. “I remember bonding with Paul over The Chronic by Dr Dre. This was in 1993, we were in LA doing some recording, we went to South by South West and we did some demos some of which ended up on the Wanted Man album. And we’d been in the studio and we’d had a really good day and we were off to go and eat afterwards and The Chronic was on and we were both going ‘this is great’. And I’m thinking ‘I love this’ but I had no idea Paul liked hip hop so much – well at that particular point in time; that was when hip hop was good. I’ll underline that. So that’s always been an element that crept in… even in things like the Roll On Summer EP, the song that was really our blueprint was California Love by Tupac!”

With such diverse influences and musical personalities, Stardust Five encompasses a broad spectrum of styles, its 11 tracks ranging from rootsy vocal pop that would not be out of place on one of Paul’s own albums to spaced-out specials more reminiscent Professor Ratbaggy. It’s a credit to the band that they managed to organically house such diversity in the one release.

Production-wise, they were lucky enough to secure the services of renowned producer Tchad Blake to help bind the sonic diversity. Blake enjoyed producing Ways And Means so much, he immediately agreed to mix Stardust Five, sending finished songs back for the band’s approval via broadband.

Though Paul Kelly’s lyrics and vocals are prominent on the album, promotion for the Stardust Five has been noticeably aiming for a degree of band-member anonymity. Stressing that it’s neither Professor Ratbaggy nor the Boon Companion, the Luscombes assert that the Stardust Five would prefer to be taken on its own merits. 

“That’s the least we could do to give the album a chance at a fresh start,” Dan explains the “dampening down” of the Paul Kelly association. “But obviously we’re not keeping it up, we’re not TISM.”

Stardust Five is available through EMI.