Maple are officially the crappest band in Perth. They are also high up on my list of favourites (possibly at the top - I’m in that kinda mood.) Here’s why:

1) All they play is a drum machine and a guitar.

2) They can’t play either of them very well.

3) They break everything.

4) They make up most of the lyrics as they go.

5) and their jokes are only funny if you’re drunk or stoned.

So yep:

Crap is the new black

Seeing Paul and Heartbreaker carry on a pointless, pornographic, half-sung conversation in ‘How’s the sex life, buddy?’ for about ten minutes (while Michael noodled annoyingly in the background) is making me think about music. Where Tomas and I have tried to mix superficial stage antics with a bit of conceptual complexity, these guys are running with superficiality pure and simple. They are almost, but not quite, the ultimate hollow statement in music - there is very little point to their act other than the fact that it is an act.

For a while I’ve been thinking that if I were to go and write a song, then I would not bother singing it. Much of what I’ve written in the past has either not been understood, or has fallen short of my intention. I also think that I have picked up many bad habits over the years - fear of coming to the point, and courting universal appeal by unnecessary abstraction are some examples.

I can feel what I’ve done becoming one more brick in the wall and I don’t think it’s any good. I’m happy with the work, of course, but it will go down in history as being not very unusual - a minor reaction against rock and roll music’s poetic stasis ending in a repetition of the underlying structures of that stasis. (The blatantly obsessive concern with girls and relationships is unconscionable)

So something has to happen. I like the bands that I play in, but when I go home at the end of the night, I’m not satisfied, and I don’t think I’ll find satisfaction by following the music industry path. If, in the end, songwriting is a tangle of arbitrary fashions and repeated ideas, Maple will have the last laugh, and I don’t think I can let that happen.