ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 23 AUGUST 2022
Every time someone declares that rock is dead, another band comes along to hang that fool out to dry. Fronted by former Horsehead vocalist Andy McLean and with Dave Leslie of Baby Animals on guitar, Truck has been laying them low with a traditional hard rocking style for a while now. For the past few months they have been switching between opening for Rose Tattoo and Leslie’s other band as both complete Australian tours. They’ve also just released third single Unconventionally Rising which they’ll be launching in Sydney and Melbourne in September. Catching up with Dave Leslie recently, we started out by taking him back through the mists of time…
The first time I ever saw you in a band was in the 80s, probably at an RSL club, playing in a band called Swingshift.
That was a fun time. Swingshift were an original band, and we couldn’t get gigs and we had no money and we had no girls, nothing like that. So we said, it’s time to kill the sacred cow. We went and did this Chisel tribute, and then it got pretty busy. It got really busy!
That was probably one of the first bands of its kind going around Sydney.
There was a Beatnix, and there was a ZZ Top show going around, as well, maybe an AC/DC one as well. But we were one of the first to coin the phrase ‘concept band’, I guess! Tribute! Tribute band.
The next time I saw you was when you opened for Jimmy Barnes with Baby Animals at Bankstown Sports Club. It was just before Early Warning came out, so it must have been early 1991, and I remember thinking afterwards that you sounded like a cross between Led Zeppelin and The Pretenders.
Great! Hey, that’s a good reference! They were both probably equally influential, in their own way.
Let’s talk a little bit about the history of Truck now.
Truck existed before I got there. The sound guy Ricky was recording them in his studio and came on the road one summer and was raving about them. “Lezzo! You’d love this! You’d love these guys. They’re just an unashamedly old-school rock and roll band.” Evidently, they had a falling out their guitar player, or whatever, and I got a call to help them out with some gigs. I told them that they were already on my radar, so I jumped in to help them with the gigs and they’re still trying to get rid of me!
It’s been good. Through the back end of COVID and everything, it gave me a bit of a focus and it’s a great songwriting vehicle. There’s always new ideas and we’re under no false impressions about what to expect from it. It’s like being in your first band again. We load our own gear, we don’t get paid. We do “band practice” every Thursday night. We don’t call it rehearsal, we call in band practice, like the old days! So, we get together every week and we look through songs and bang and few songs into shape, and that’s the essence of it. That’s where it lives for me. I love that process! Then we go out and we play them live, and one live run-through is worth ten rehearsals as far as what works and what doesn’t. We’re very grateful to have this Baby Animals run, that’s for sure! And I’m happy, because I just get to play guitar all night!
When you go on stage with two different bands on the same night, from Truck to Baby Animals, how much of a change is it when you change over?
It’s a little bit different, because they are completely different bands. What I do in Baby Animals approach-wise is completely different to what I bring to Truck. Truck having an organ player… in Baby Animals, as far as guitar goes, I’m doing most of the heavy lifting: there’s guitar, bass, drums and you’ve got to fill out a certain amount of sonic space. Whereas in Truck, there’s another guy doing it. So I can embellish upon what they’re doing… you approach it from a different place. It’s kind of refreshing! It’s good!
You have some great shows coming up very soon including Fistful of Rock at the Enmore.
That’s not a Truck show, that’s just Baby Animals. But what a night – The Angels, the Tatts, The Poor and us! Far out! Baby Animals has enough scope in its material to be able its set to a certain crowd, as well. We wouldn’t play… say, at Fistful of Rock, we wouldn’t play that set at a festival where Icehouse is headlining. We’d skew it a bit and aim it a bit differently. But this one’s going to be bum-crack and black t-shirts! It’s going to be awesome. It’ll be a lot of fun.
Is there a crossover between the crowd you play to with Baby Animals and what you play to with Truck?
I think there is. Truck is not trying to re-invent the wheel. We’re unashamedly classic rock, so Baby Animals’ audience fits right into that demographic. Five guys going for it, it’s completely honest, it speeds up, it slows down. Sometimes we skid into the corner in a song and crash into the dirt. What you see is what you get. I think that kind of honesty really appeals to people. We’ve been going along pretty well. We’ve done Baby Animals gigs, we’ve done Rose Tattoo supports. We did a Rose Tattoo support in suburban Melbourne… that was tough room, but we won them in the end. I was expecting it was going to be a bit of a tough sell, but we got there.
You’ve done a lot of really big shows for a long time now, does Truck feel like you’re going back to those pub days where you started?
Back to why you did it in the first place! Yeah man, it is like that. My friends and loved ones think I’m crazy. You’re starting again? That’s a different way to look at it. To win a crowd over – that’s where the shit lives, for me. It’s the uncomfortability of it. We did a Rose Tattoo support over in Adelaide a couple of months ago, and we drove over – and we camped on the way! One of the guys in Truck’s a camping enthusiast, and let me tell you, it’s a lot better camping when you’re with someone who knows what they’re doing! We camped in Horsham on the way over and stayed in a caravan park after the gig, in tents and things. It’s a completely different way to do it! I really like it.
It’s given me a new sense of appreciation for the whole thing, which is good, and that comes out in the Baby Animals set, as well.
Truck is really only just getting started when it comes to releasing songs. Unconventionally Rising is only the third single so far.
There’s a fair bit more to hear. We’ve got enough [material] for probably another two albums unrecorded, at this point. We’re looking at recording again this year sometime. Album number two, is the plan. It’s a songwriting machine, this band!
Does that make it complicated to whittle down songs for albums, when you’ve got so much material coming out all the time?
It’s a nice problem to have! Even in the set list: What are we NOT going to play? What don’t we play? What sort of crowd is it? Well, for the Rose Tattoo crowd we can do this, this, and this, but we won’t do that and that. With Baby Animals, we might drop some of those ones out and put the won’ts in there. It’s good to have a pool of material to choose from, and it keeps it fresh. When we’re playing this Baby Animals run we’ll put a couple in the set every night, just to road test them. Get them off the bench, and put them in the team and give them a hit and see how they’re going and how the parts are working together. It’s always good to road test stuff before you record it.
