“Lazy Highways, that was our Australiana record, I suppose.”
–Andrew Cox, The Fauves

My contribution to this episode of Fauves Are the Best People was recorded in February 2025, in the depths of Dutch winter. I may have been experiencing some kind of down-vibe during the recording process. So, I thought I’d harness yet again the power of digital transcription services and include some of my most relevant (edited) ‘insights’ here.

DP: I’ve listened to ‘Sunbury 97’ a few times in the lead-up to this episode, and every time I’ve listened to it, I’ve probably amped up the volume a little bit. I think it’s a really interesting slice of retro chugging rock. You mentioned that the single came out in the year before the album came out. I think it occupies a funny position in the Fauves discography, a little bit like ‘Three Piece’ in that it stands on its own as a single. But it also came out as part of an Oz rock EP, and then was tacked on to the very end of the album. So it’s a funny song. It doesn’t seem to fit anywhere, but it fits a little bit in the Future Spa retro phase. And it also fits, obviously, in the Lazy Highways Australiana phase. So I think there’s a lot that we can talk about about this song. I like it. It’s not as catchy or perhaps as sharp as some of their other songs, but I love the lyrical content and I really would be keen also to hear what you think of it. Is this in your Fauves top ten by any chance?

JB: I think it might just slip in there. This is a great thumping rock song. I don’t like the adjective you’ve chosen–chuggy–but hey, you’re entitled to it. This was on Channel V a lot, this clip, when I was just becoming a fan. Like, I saw it much more than I did ‘Surf City Limits’ or ‘The Charles Atlas Way’. See, we had Foxtel on and off in the late 90s. You know, we’d get rid of it or mum would go, you’re not watching this and she’d get rid of it. But this video clip was on quite a lot when I was just becoming a fan. So I’ve heard this song a lot. I love it.

DP: I will be very cautious about my use of adjectives, given that you love this song so much. Why don’t you think chugging is any good, just out of curiosity?

JB: I don’t know. I think I’m a bit shy because in Future Spa, Redmond was talking about a few songs being dirgy or dirty. And I’m like, I guess there’s nothing wrong with those adjectives.

DP: It seems to me very much a song that’s part of Coxy’s oeuvre of songs about the music industry and musical culture. I was thinking back to ‘Orgamosarion’, Doctor’s song ‘Brotherhood Bin’. You know, bands playing gigs and hanging out in the van. Obviously, you’ve got ‘Three Piece’ and then you’ve got ‘Understanding Kyuss’ off Future Spa. This is taking it a step further: Coxy telling the kids today, who obviously don’t remember, about this crazy event that happened in the early 70s. You know: shut up and listen you might learn something. I’ve been reading up a bit on the Sunbury festival and there was a lot of comparisons to Woodstock. It doesn’t really wash for me. I mean, they’re completely different vibes.

And what I find most interesting is that Coxy is putting himself in this song in a position of being a child of Sunbury. Obviously, it’s fictional, but it seems like he’s having a lot of fun with this idea of early 70s retro pub rock. You know, sometimes people talk about a band’s imperial phase, right? For me, this is the Fauves’ imperial pub rock phase, if you look at the tracks that come after it, the whole album that comes after it, and the number of cover songs that they recorded during this period as well. I believe that they were doing a pub rock series of gigs at this time as well. This is a really interesting phase in the Fauves career for that reason. The touchstone songs that they choose to cover, the style in which they cover them, the way they kind of reinvent their older songs as well, you know, like ‘Rising Blow’ on this EP as well.

Maybe we can talk about the music in a minute because it’s all meta at the moment. But just like Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Woodstock’ was a song about a festival by someone who wasn’t there, I would say Coxy is writing a song about a festival that he never went to. But there’s something interesting about this idea, inherent in the title, of a revival of the Sunbury Festival. You know, this imaginary festival that Coxy may have curated in 1997, that would be held at Sunbury. It makes me wonder who would be at that festival. Was Billy Thorpe still alive in 1997 and would he have been one of the headline acts? Would it have been possible to find some of the obscure acts who performed at Sunbury in the early seventies to see if they could get back together for one last gig?

But when we think of Sunbury, you know, it’s not exactly the same as what we would think of as the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus or Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder review. The picture I have of the Sunbury festival is pretty much straight ahead, four to the floor Oz Rock. You know, there’s no kind of performance aspect to this. I don’t think there’d be anything on anyone’s rider except cans of beer. And I have a feeling that Peter Brock would have been invited to attend in some kind of capacity.

I love Dougie’s drumming in this, as always. There’s these little flourishes like a machine gun going off. I just love the energy that he brings to the kit.

JB: Davey, I want to throw on you a contention, a theory, maybe an allegation. Are you generally happy with the singles on Lazy Highways, or is it always coulda, shoulda, woulda?

DP: I suppose it depends what you think of the album as a whole. That’s the key question for me. As I may have alluded to in a couple of previous episodes, with ‘Surf City Limits’ I reached the limits of my Fauves fandom. There was something about the irony slipping over into parody in that song in particular that led me to pay less attention to this album than I had to Future Spa. But to come back to what I was talking about previously in terms of ‘Sunbury 97’ as a standalone single or as part of an EP preceding the album, I don’t see it as an essential part of the album. In the same way that ‘Three Piece’ was an unlisted track on Future Spa, these are songs that kind of exist outside of the album. If we look at the Lazy Highways album as a whole, I can’t think of many other songs that I would suggest as singles. If I was a record company executive and I was faced with this smorgasbord of songs, I would have immediately chosen ‘Surf City Limits’ just because it’s the most catchy, Custard-y song on the album. I don’t know if I would have chosen ‘Kicking On’ at all. But that’s just my kind of personal bias.

I wonder how many Sandman panel vans in Sunbury would have had surfboards on the roof. Sunbury’s a fair way from the coast, but I’ll let that one slide. But I just love this idea of renaming a town in every state Sunbury. I’m assuming that Coxy hasn’t actually succeeded in renaming them yet. I think that there are more parts to this song lyrically and structurally than there are in some of the other songs that they’ve recorded and released. There is a a backstory, this idea of returning to the festival to see the tree where his parents conceived him. You know, there’s a whole skit in just that one line.

This is an extract from my contribution to Episode 114 of Fauves Are the Best People, which you can listen to on Spotify (see below) or wherever you get your podcasts.