The Casanovas are often aligned with AC/DC as a pub rock band but Damo Campbell and Tommy Boyce think otherwise.
With the release of the fourth album for The Casanovas, lead singer Tommy Boyce and bass player Damo Campbell talked about their influences to Noise11.
About the song ‘Red Hot’ Tommy said, “I remember writing that one just remembering wanting to get back on the chord with a song that has space in between the way Free did it in ‘All Right Now’ and ‘Fire and Water’. A bit of space instead of going for it. In the first verse we have that piece where the bass drops out, very ‘King of the Night Time World’, the Kiss song. As a kid when I first heard ‘Kiss Alive II’, I think its second on the record after ‘Detroit Rock City’. It was so cool as the bass guitar drops out and it is just drums, guitar and vocals. Then the bass kicks in in the chorus. That’s what we were going for there”.
Of their influences Damo Campbell says that he and Tommy cross over in tastes. “We share a lot of similarities,” he says. “Growing up in Tassie there was that influence with punk rock bands that came through there like Fridge and Tumbleweed. That’s what I grew up with as well as AC/DC, Motorhead and The Ramones. I probably have more straight-ahead punk rock bands as well that I grew up with. A band like Turbonegro captured that quite well. They have that classic punk rock with classic rock as well. I like all sorts of stuff. You still explore bands that you don’t know as you get older, but its still in the classic rock style.
Tommy distances the band from the AC/DC category. “We have never tried to fit into a category and we fall between the cracks of the genres,” he says. “I like the way The Dictators were too punk rock for rock and too rock for punk. They don’t get the same accolades as a band like The Ramones who are pure punk rock. We love obscure punk rock through to classic rock and everything inbetween. When we write music there is never a contrived attempt to try and fit in with those styles. We write music we’d like to hear as the audience.”
Damo says, “The Casanovas have always had this AC/DCism thing and that’s cool because we like AC/DC. But when we make an album we don’t try and work out how to AC/DCism it. We don’t work like that at all. We have long broken hat mould. Listen to us. There are some songs that sound like Cheap Trick, some like Kiss, some like Motorhead. There is nothing purposeful about writing that way. Its just songs we tried to write at the time”.
The Casanovas ‘Reptilian Overlord’ is out now. Grab it or listen here.
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