It’s that 50/50 chance you take when heading into a casino, really. You either win big or lose big. So when Sid O’Neil, lead singer of Melbourne outfit THE VASCO ERA decided to chance his luck and head down to the Crown, he managed to stumble upon the theme of their next album in the characters of Lucille and Sam. “We’d been rehearsing for about ten months and were starting to feel a bit unsure about things,” says bassist Ted O’Neil. “It just happened that one night Sid went to the casino as a complete departure of what he normally does and ended up meeting this couple.”
“He only talked to them for about an hour, but their story really stuck with him. This guy and girl were so in love with each other; he was devoutly religious, but she had to strip to make money for them. Thinking about the emotions and anxieties that it would lead to and being in the situation of watching your girlfriend having to do that, and him trying to save her from that was something we were all into and something that Sid felt really interested in.”
And so from the brief encounter, Lucille and Sam were born. The characters play through the entire album (titled simply Lucille), tracking each other through all the emotions one could ever experience in a wayward relationship. “There’s a lot of things you can find when you’re on the outside,” says O’Neil. “We were looking into a fictional relationship and imagining what could happen. There wasn’t an exact moment where we decided that we’d make an album about it. It started with a couple of songs, and started to unfold, and as we saw it, it just gradually became an album of songs and something we decided to make whole. It was so different to our first album that it was really good for us to do something so different.”
The Vasco Era’s debut album, 2007’s Oh We Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside saw the trio slammed onto the nationwide scene, tour the country relentlessly on several occasions, leave their hometown and head across the Atlantic. “It was a really huge jump for us, once the first album was out,” O’Neil explains. “But that’s what we’d been working for and that’s what we wanted. It’s what all musicians want I think.” However, the unmistakable differences between the albums which resonate for listeners of old and new are not lost to the band. “The first album was pretty personal, it felt like we had strict parameters. With this one it felt like we could explore more and go anywhere we wanted to, really. I feel like we’ve matured a bit. While it sounds stupid to say you never stop learning, I think that it’s true and it will be true for the next album we make,” O’Neil quips wisely.
The Vasco Era will play the ANU Bar on Wednesday April 14. Tickets through Ticketek.
