Hi, Davey Dreamnation here, aka Les Fauves. 

In 1990 the British post-punk four-piece Wire became a three piece, dropping the ‘e’ from their name to form Wir after their drummer, Robert Gotobed, left the band. Wir went on to release just one album, 1991’s The First Letter, which (perhaps unsurprisingly) relied heavily on drum machines and loops and was, to all intents and purposes, a pretty heavy slog. Wire would not perform again as a four-piece until the year 2000. 

What’s this got to do with the Fauves? Were Coxy and co. even aware of Wir? Who cares? The UK was half a world away from Mornington. And the fact is that while the 1980s saw relatively few “quirky” three-piece acts make it big (apart from the obvious examples like The Police or Crowded House), a slew of trios hit the airwaves in the 1990s, especially in Australia. It was the decade when the three-piece phenomenon came into its own. 

From big-name acts such as Ratcat, You Am I, Spiderbait, Regurgitator and the Dirty Three to indie darlings like Snout, Not From There, Gerling, Sandit, Something For Kate, The Living End, Even and Smudge, Australian music listeners were spoilt for choice when it came to bands composed of “guitar, bass and drums” – or upright bass, guitar and drums, or else guitar, guitar and drums. Or synth, synth and drums. Or even synth, synth and synth.

You get the idea. 

“Everybody’s Getting a 3-piece Together” [which the Fauves released as a single in October 1995] doesn’t really sound like any of these bands.

Nevertheless, by the time “Everybody’s Getting a 3-piece Together” came out in 1995, Australia’s new wave of three-piece acts was on the brink of its imperial phase. And yet the song itself was not a celebration of musical trios per se; rather, it was a thinly-veiled stab at the temporary three-piece, the threesome of convenience, the hastily-cobbled-together sham of power-pop supergroups masquerading as creative innovation. 

But who were all these people getting a three-piece together? It’s hard to tell, from this distance, whether it even really matters. “Three Piece” begins with a series of cacophonous drum fills, and a gigantic, reverb-soaked guitar line that moves restlessly, eternally, between three notes. And what we hear in this song originally destined to be a b-side is the sound of an alternative, d-tuned band finally getting its shit together and opting instead for rock. 

“Everybody’s Getting a 3-piece Together” also sums up a playful side of the Fauves’ music that was strangely absent from their recorded outputs at the time. The Young Need Discipline LP was torturous enough; but the b-sides accompanying the album’s two singles, “Dwarf On Dwarf” and “Caesar’s Surrender”, were anything but easy listening. It’s no wonder Polydor picked up on the straight-ahead, four-on-the-floor, give-a-fuck energy of “Three Piece”. 

I mean, it was already a staple of the Fauves’ live gigs in 1994 and 1995. The band often ended its shows with an extended version of the song, Coxy ad-libbing his lyrics, Doctor and Jack thrashing away at a single chord, and Doug exploiting every square inch of his kit. It was a glorious, shambolic song then and it remains so now. Ironic, then, that it took a four-piece to come up with the greatest put-down of the three-piece in Australian musical history. 

Les Fauves, out. 

This is the text version of my cameo contribution to Episode 80 of Fauves Are the Best People, which you can listen to on Spotify (see below) or wherever you get your podcasts.

Alternatively, you can read my extended Substack rant about the song, which is probably only 2000 words too long.