A Handstamp interview with Pond: skateboarding, acid, Beyonce and Prince shows
The second interview is with the delightful Nick Allbrook of Australian band Pond
To those who read the first Handstamp written interview with Cassandra Jenkins, I am eternally grateful. If you are inexplicably yet to read that, please be sure to subscribe and give it a once-over.
In this instalment, we head down under. Just over three years ago, I spoke to Nick Allbrook of Australian psych band Pond. He connected to my call from the UK seaside town of Hastings, where the frontman ‘moved for love’ at the tail end of the ‘panny-D’.
Allbrook signalled his intent to speak openly early in the call; “I’m not here to fuck spiders” he exclaimed. I appreciated the clear absence of word-mincing and within a couple of minutes, we were discussing the desired level of ‘fucked’ his band had achieved on ‘9’ – the 2021 record he was promoting at the time.
Nick Allbrook: “Recording was normal in the sense that it was in Freemantle, but with some subtle but very significant changes. We sort of had limitless amount of time and no deadline because of the pandemic. Usually, we write a bunch of songs in our spare time, everybody is living all over the place, we’re touring but then we find a particularly large chunk of time off tour, smash out an album real quick. But this time, there was none of that, we just had a big horizon. So, we could stuff about, entertain really stupid ideas, do really fun things like.. actually improvise, which we hadn’t done since we were 21 or something. We would make hours and hours of the most godawful noise we could and sift through it.”
Handstamp: Glad you were able to return to your early jam roots. You mentioned your Freemantle base, but that’s not where you grew up, is that right?
Nick Allbrook: “I grew up in a town called Derby until I was 13, which is way up north. We kind of built the Pond, Tame, Spinning Top universe in a shared house that we lived at in Daglish, which is in Perth.”
Handstamp: Did you have access to live music during your formative years?
Nick Allbrook: “No, absolutely not. My experience of live music when I was little in Derby, was a few corroborees – very traditional dance and song ceremonies. They have a sort of muster thing, where they play country, desert reggae and everybody would absolutely lose their shit once a year. After that I didn’t have a lot really, until I was 19, 20, when I started to find all the other weirdos in Perth, playing in little shitty pubs or house parties. It was a really weird scene, not bonded by genre, just being ‘odd’ or whatever.”
Handstamp: Would you hear much music around the house?
Nick Allbrook: “Your classic regional Baby Boomer CD collection. People my age could pretty much imagine it. That one Dire Straits album, with the flying guitar on the front. Best of Bob Marley. Also, a lot of local music like the ‘Brand New Day’ soundtrack. I remember my parents had this beautiful East-African guitar thing that I guess they got given for Christmas one year from a very cultured friend, which was bad ass. Then I got into my own stuff when I was little. I got into Silverchair and The Offspring. Then Michael Jackson – who am I to deny the hits?”
Handstamp: Well, you didn’t know anything but the hits at the time.
Nick Allbrook: “Exactly.”
Handstamp: Music had to contend with skateboarding and football though, didn’t it?
Nick Allbrook: “I guess I was just doing that teenage thing of trying something and seeing what stuck. I’d get really, really, desperately into something just to see if it would stick. Skating was everything, I was so obsessed with it, I did it every day. It was the same as football – ‘soccer’ football – I was just obsessed. But I tried skating again years later and I had actually gotten better because I was a bit bigger, but I’d become enfeebled from life on the road and when I fell off, I thought ‘fuck that’. But yeah, both football and skating gave way to music eventually and that stuck.”
Handstamp: Any thoughts on skateboarding’s inclusion in the Olympics, I know there was some blowback on that?
Nick Allbrook: “Yeah, I have thought about that. I don’t think it will fuck up that TYPE of skateboarding. It might divide it but I think there’s enough room for those who want to get the pads on and go for gold, and there’s also plenty of room for those who want to work on their own creativity in the streets and run away from security guards. It’s like the pop charts and Grammys, it doesn’t mean that underground music just disappears in a puff of smoke.”
Handstamp: Speaking of underground music. You must have one or two stories from early Pond shows that stand out?
Nick Allbrook: “Well, this is the beginning of every good story; so, we all took acid.
“We went around doing trippy stuff all day, being childish. Then we had a show at The Swan Basement. It’s an Aussie pub, where ‘tradies’ in high-vis go for their schooners when work finishes at 2pm or whatever and there’s a basement where they started to have interesting shows for a while. Kev (Parker, Tame Impala) was playing and he was the only one ‘straight’, he was the drummer and was driving, so was like “what fuck are you guys doing?!
“It quickly became obvious we weren’t going to be able to play the songs. So, we thought we’d have to improvise and fulfil our Hendrix dreams. But we were SO bad, because nobody tells you when they’re selling you a Jimi Hendrix poster and spinning all the psychedelic tales of inspiration that you can’t even just.. do stuff.
“I just remember looking down between my legs as I was screaming into the microphone, my friend was lying on the floor looking up at me, I looked behind and Kev was looking at me, shaking his head while holding a continual beat for like 40 minutes.
“We got off, glad that it was over. Then somebody said “your parents were here, they just left”, so they’d come down to watch. I was pretty young too! So, that scared the shit out of me. I went home a few hours later and they were just sat there waiting for me, like “that was an interesting gig, Nick.”
Handstamp: Did they have some stern words for you?
Nick Allbrook: “No, in classic Australian/English form, we have NEVER spoken about it. But maybe they will after they see this.”
Handstamp: On the other end of the spectrum, are there any shows you’ve experienced as a punter that stick with you?
Nick Allbrook: “Beyonce was incredible, in Scotland at T in the Park. It was the white-clad female band. It started with the horns playing ‘Crazy In Love’ to this huge crescendo and then when it dropped, I couldn’t believe it, it was fucking amazing.
“But then there’s insane local ones, like seeing a two-piece drone, doom band. They played in this house at the back of a tattoo parlour – where all good things ‘drone’ happen. They would use homemade amps on huge stacks with one guitar. They would improvise every show, sometimes it would be a train wreck and other times it would be absolute magic. They were always fucked up and that was part of the gonzo beauty of it. They inebriated themselves to a point where it was like rolling the dice if it would be good or not.
“But I remember one time, Andrew from this band was wearing a fishnet bodysuit, standing on an amp and sort of driving the headstock of his guitar into the amplifier in a sort of Excalibur way, bending the subby feedback and detuning the whole thing. It was incredible.”
Handstamp: Sounds quite similar to the Beyonce show.
Nick Allbrook: “Yes, very.”
Handstamp: Any shows you wish you’d have seen at this point?
Nick Allbrook: “I wish I’d seen Prince more. I saw him in Hamburg and I feel like it wasn’t a good show by his standards. He took like forty minutes to come out, then he played a bit of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ with the whole gospel introduction, but he dropped his guitar and walked off, didn’t come back on for another forty minutes. We were fine, because we were just so giddy to see him, but still. So, he was pissed about something. But then he came back and fucking shredded for another forty minutes, ended with Purple Rain, it was sick.”
Pond released their tenth studio album ‘Stung!’ on the 21st of June 2024 via Spinning Top. Check where you can catch them on the road here. Follow the Handstamp Substack for future interviews, follow @poundcoyne on social media and listen to Chief Springs on your chosen platform. Illustrations by the brilliant Alice Bowsher.