AREA 7

By Joe Matera

Rising from the ashes of the now defunct Madness tribute band called "Mad Not Madness" and taking their name from a line in a song from ska-sters The Specials, Melbourne band 'Area-7' released their debut album "Bitter & Twisted" and saw it debut at #6 on the ARIA charts before reaching Gold status in sales. The band had long been one of the most popular live acts in the country, but the album’s success saw them take the quantum leap to being accredited as one of the country’s biggest rock acts full stop.

Importantly, major radio jumped on board and the listeners liked what they heard - so much so, that the album’s three singles "Second Class Citizen", "Start Making Sense" and "Bitter Words" were voted into both the Triple J Hottest 100 and MMM Top 105 Songs of 2000, highlighting the band’s appeal to an increasingly wider audience. Meanwhile, the 7’s continued to enhance their live reputation touring nationally with the likes of the Living End, Jebediah and American act No Doubt in the following 15 months. Now the much anticipated second album has finally arrived. Titled "Say It To My Face", the album will see them solidify their success even further. Already first single "Individuality" is soaring up the charts and the band have hit the road in support of its release. Guitarist Chucky T spoke to Joe Matera about the new album.

Joe Matera: The lyrics to "Individuality" is very much a representation of the whole theme of the album.

Chucky T: We’ve always had a thing about social issues as opposed to politics, and trying to build people’s self-esteem, which we don’t think there are, really any other bands out there who have that sort of mission statement I guess. That’s just something that we basically go into as the main songwriters, me and Dugald our keyboardist, and we just kind of go into it knowing that's the underlying message. So the epitomy of it is the song "Individuality".

JM: How much input did producer Kalju Tonuma (28 Days, Bodyjar, Superheist) bring to the album?

CT: When we get someone in like Kalju, we like to bring him in as an 8th member, so they’re not dictating to us and we’re not dictating to them. We kind of just throw ideas around. Obviously he’s very good at pulling great sounds across the board in terms of drums, guitars, vocals and stuff, so that was a plus to start off with. But then he’s also good with some ideas, things like reversed vocals and stuff like that. If you listen to the bridge to the song "Now I Know", there’s a lot of backward vocals.

JM: Did you have the songs already written before production on the album began?

CT: We pretty much came into this album with no songs ready, so we had about a month or so before we went into the studio and we really had to write pretty quickly. We spent a couple of weeks writing, which Dugald, Stevo and myself went away for. Then we brought in the songs, had a week of solid rehearsal and a week of solid demoing and we were happy with the result, then went into the studio and did the album. It was pretty intense and we recorded the album within two months.

JM: You have utilized a fair bit of overdubbing on several tracks?

CT: It depended on what the songs were. If its more a bit of a clean reggae type of thing then its usually a very sparse guitar arrangement but wherever there's that punk rock type thing, we tried to layer it. I’m particularly keen on really buffing up a lot of layers of guitar in there to make a wall of sound that Phil Spector was on about.

JM: Did you use some of the Pro Tools plug-ins like Amp Farm?

CT: We used a little bit of Amp Farm. As I said, the core sounds were amps and stuff but if we wanted to add, like layering or boosting a guitar part or wanted to get a different sound to kind of make it stick out or even to make it sit back, then we’d use Amp Farm.

JM: What sparked your interest in picking up the guitar?

CT: I was into the Beatles when I was young and still am. I’d get like the music books with lyrics and then I wanted to play them. So I started to learn guitar more as a thing of being able to understand melodies and things like that. I’ve never really approached it though, from a way that people who idolise the Joe Satriani’s and Steve Vai’s do.

JM: What’s your sound chain like?

CT: I’ve got a couple of Maton Mastersounds which have been wound a little hotter for me because I used to play a Telecaster, so I like that really bright sort of crisp sound. I’ve also got two Framus amps. The company are historically known more for their guitars than their amps, but they used to distribute Matchless through out Europe then when Matchless went under they started making their own logs. Live, basically I split the signal across two amps cause these are like 30Watt class A amps so its kind of like virtually having two Vox AC 30’s, so I split the signal between the two of them so I can get a bit of spread. I use no effects apart from the distortion from the amps themselves.