PERTH pop-rock favourite sons Eskimo Joe's latest hit single Love is a Drug has made quite an assault - and not just on the ears of radio listeners.
Chatting to Community from the family car with his three-and-a-half-year-old twin boy and girl safely strapped in the back seat, guitarist Stuart MacLeod seemed to be already tiring of the band's fifth album, Ghosts of the Past, right on the eve of their national tour.
“(The kids) ask to put it on everytime we're in the car…I'm getting a bit sick of my own album, actually,” he laughed.
“You know how kids are; they just flog something to death.”
Having formed in 1997 after playing their first gig at UWA in a local heat for the National Campus Band Competition (which they won), MacLeod, frontman and bass guitarist Kav Temperley and Joel Quartermain (guitar, drums) are now old-hands of the Aussie music scene.
Not to mention all grown-up, with MacLeod and Temperley settled down with families.
But one thing has remained constant: staying true to their Fremantle roots.
“Kav lives five minutes from me down here around Freo and Joel has just moved up the road as well, so we're all pretty central to the studio now,” MacLeod said.
The studio and their fledgling label Dirt Diamonds - dedicated to “sadly overlooked local artists” - symbolise a new chapter in songwriting and production for the band.
The recording space, dubbed The Wastelands, harks back to an old teenage hangout that MacLeod and Temperley frequented.
“The Wastelands was a patch off to the side of our old high school, John Curtin, where kids would go to wag school and generally get up to mischief,” he shared.
Evidently, the Eskies' home turf holds a special place in the trio's hearts, and MacLeod is convinced staying put has done them good.
“We missed out on a lot of opportunities because we were 3500km away, but we've kept a lot of sanity and our friends are here to tell us to stop being rock stars if we ever get big heads.”
Eskimo Joe play the Astor Theatre, Mt Lawley, on October 13 and 14.
Emilia Vranjes