It’s only taken 18 months since it was made, but the Drones’ third album Gala Mill has finally seen release. The band were busy touring the world, and indeed Gala Mill was made before the band’s breakthrough Wait Long By the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By had even been released.

“That got delayed,” he says of the release Wait Long By the River…, “and we had all this time off before that was released. We’d got the new drummer and we wanted to entertain him, so we figured that I had a bunch of half-finished songs so let’s go and make a record.”

Hailing from Tasmania, it was Mike Noga’s idea to head south to the farm where Gala Mill was brought together. “We all really enjoy recording, so it was our favourite holiday,” Gareth explains. “Then we toured and toured and toured, so it was always going to come out about a year after it was made, but the touring delayed it by an extra 8 months. We’ve only got ourselves to blame in that sense.”

Given that it’s been so long since it was made, the Drones already have tentative plans to start penning the follow-up to Gala Mill after touring the album, and then make a record so that they can catch up to themselves. “We haven’t been able to play anything from Gala Mill because we didn’t want to ruin it for ourselves, and play the songs to death before the record was even out,” he says of the band holding off performing new material. “Next time we want to make a new record and put it out pretty much as soon as we’ve made it.”

Gala Mill, for the most part, was recorded before being road-tested, meaning that what is heard is most of the time the second time the band ever played the song. “We went down there and played the song, banged it out to see what it was like, then banged it out again and did it in two takes,” Gareth surmises. “It suited that record because the songs are all fairly slow and easy to play with simple arrangements, so it didn’t need that much work to get them right. It’s all slow-tempo stuff because we were in the country and it was all relaxing, and the whole thing was made sitting down.”

It was a very different experience to making Wait Long By the River..., which was made very much like it sounds – it was made at full-volume and pretty much live, with a much more intense focus. “We only had 2 days to record it and 2 days to mix it, whereas for this [Gala Mill] we had a whole week to record. We didn’t have the clock ticking on the wall as we spent a lot of money in the studio, so it was an awesome experience to record.”

The Drones deliberately decamped to a farm to record Gala Mill because they were sick of the tedium that being in a recording studio can bring. “They’re like hospitals,” he sniffs derisively. “We just threw all our gear into a van and drove it down to Tassie, and that was way better. We’re not looking forward to going back into a recording studio again.”

Forming out of Perth, it was more like what the band that preceded the Drones did – they used to go and hire a Scout hall in the country, or church, and record in them. “We’ll do a studio again,” he guesses, “but the Gala Mill experience is good for when you’re not ready to record and you can go and figure it out when you’re there because you’re not paying for it as much as you would be if you were in a recording studio. We’ll go and do it in a studio again if we can walk into it and play live, set up, play the set in two days and pick the best bits.”

Recording straight away, and giving the songs less of a chance to develop and change since the band started playing them, worked well as several of the songs are quite old. “There’s one on there that’s eight years old, and there’s a bunch that were half-finished like “Sixteen Straws”, but most of it I’d been playing in solo shows, so I’d suss out the arrangements and my guitar playing, and they’re such open songs that you don’t need a tightly thought-out rhythm section.”

As a result, Gala Mill has a loose feel to it. “We’re a pretty loose band,” he agrees, “so it’ll be good to see where they go – we’ll change things around, and there’s things like a string section on there, so we can’t have a 40-piece string section on tour with us, so some parts will be different and they’ll change in an organic way.”

The closing “Sixteen Straws” takes the traditional convict ode “Moreton Bay” as its basis, with Liddiard expanding upon it to weave a great story full of character, leaving a question for each person to interpret what happens. It’s something that crops up throughout Gala Mill, with fictional songs made from a bunch of facts. “I’d read about that sort of behaviour where those guys tried to kill a guy so they’d get hung, and I’d read it in a few books about Australian history, and a particular one was about a Jewish bloke who was with all the Catholic guys and when it came to the crunch he was the guy chosen to get killed. All the little details in the song, like Commandant Logan, he’s a real guy. I piled a bunch of facts into a big fiction,” Gareth explains.

The Drones are heading back overseas after their current Australian tour, heading once more for western Europe and England, then Canada and the US, before returning home to play the festival season over summer – the first time in two years that the band will see the summer, having followed winter around. Gala Mill is out now. Dates:
Thursday September 14 – National Hotel, Geelong
Friday September 15 – Karova Lounge, Ballarat
Saturday September 16 – HiFi Bar, Melbourne
Friday September 22 – Jive Bar, Adelaide
Saturday September 23 – Ruby’s Lounge, Belgrave
Friday September 29 – The Rev, Brisbane
Saturday September 30 – Gaelic Club, Sydney
Friday October 6 – Republic Bar, Hobart
Saturday October 7 – James Hotel, Launceston