Laneous & The Family Yah: Interview

Written by The Matchstick

Dux Of West End

Mr Laneous certainly ain’t a beacon of secondary and tertiary education success; rather the West End musician harks back to that long lost coming of age rite - the high school dropout. But rather than finding his way into a slow decline of deviant behaviour, the ‘Lovable Tramp’ has tapped into his inner creative juices, unleashing a slew of artist driven projects that have spawned The Family Yah.

“I’m so glad that I dropped out of school, it’s allowed me to create the group of friends that I have now. I probably wouldn’t of met the people who are in the band now, if it weren’t for jumping straight into that scene when I left school. I think a lot of the guys in the band are of a similar nature as well.”

The band is The Family Yah, and Mr Laneous is the easily excited, always experimenting conductor, leading a gargantuan ensemble of musicians, singers and rappers on a musical journey that even he at times, has no idea where it’s headed.

“It’s hard to know what’s going to come out on the outside, it’s hard to know how people are going to take (the music). But I guess, we wanted to stay eclectic so that we didn’t have too, how do you say it? We didn’t want to be boxed in too much, so I guess without being too eclectic, we made the album fairly loose in terms of genre so we had more room to move in the future. It just kinda happened y’know, we recorded whatever we were doing at the time and hoped for the best, really.”

The record Mr Laneous refers to is ‘St. Ill Regal’, a project that was written, scraped, put back together and jammed on for close on two years. Whilst the bones of the album took time to align, the soulful, hip hop, underground pop flesh of the record occurred quite organically once the band took to the studio.

“When we were tracking the album, we had a handful of songs that were actually written but then half of the album just happened in the studio y’know, it just kinda came out randomly and we improvised a lot of the music.”

Integrating the character of West End, along with the many weird and wonderful souls that inhabit the inner city suburb, into the recording was another important element that Mr Laneous made sure was included on ‘St. Ill Regal’.

“There was a mixture of that happening naturally and also intentionally as well. I mean, we had to have Pesto (West End emcee) on it; it wouldn’t be a Mr Laneous & The Family Yah album without those West End elements in it, and I think we’ll always have West End in our blood.”

With a two week stint touring Sydney and Melbourne just completed, and with the album recently hitting record store shelves, the band are already well advanced on a follow-up release, which looks like being another longplayer.

“We drove down (to Melbourne) straight after Sydney and we hired this pretty cool pad and set up a bit of of a studio in this apartment. It’s kinda funny, we had to keep it down, keep it as quiet as possible because the apartments were close together, but we did some pre-production for the next album.”

And what sorta sounds is Laneous & The Family Yah currently percolating?

“We want to, we’re trying to go a little bit easy on... we don’t want to go too far out to soon. So it does follow on from the album pretty nicely, but we are trying to be a little more crazier. Basically, because it has taken so long to release this last album, in that time, we’ve been writing non-stop because we didn’t want the experience to be stale for us. So we’ve been writing heaps and heaps and the songs have been basically burning a hole in my pocket and I’m just so keen to get those tunes out there.”

You can catch Laneous & The Family Yah at the Hi-Fi Friday August 28. They also play the QUT Spiegeltent Sunday September 13. ‘St. Ill Regal’ is available now through Bird Fire Records.