Tangled Magazine

“We almost died out there!” - An interview with Jack from The Dukes of Windsor

Interviewed and Written By Laura Hartley

Tangled Magazine talked to lead singer Jack Weaving from the Dukes of Windsor about their new song, It’s A War, Sweden and their forthcoming album, Minus.

“IT’S A WAR was meant to be a metaphor about general conflicts we deal with, not a war theme but the video clip ended up matching up to the war theme. The concept was put together by Murray Bell, who started Semi Permanent [Design Event]. We got him over from Australia to film in the forest, about 10 hours north of Stockholm in Sweden.

“The video clip depicts a young guy who comes back from war and is a bit damaged. He’s being followed by what he thinks are people coming back from war but they are actually fragments of his memories, and he is trying to escape from them, until he realises in the end that they are figments of his imagination, so I guess its got an element of psychiatry to it. We filmed it over about 4-5 days way up north in Sweden.

“We almost died out there at one point! The temperature was minus 36 degrees. I can’t believe armies out there survive more than 1 day because we spent two hours in the snow and we didn’t know whether to laugh or cry it was that cold. We hired this bus to take us around, which we had to film on, and we asked him to do a u-turn up this snow path and he never came back! So we were stuck out there for God knows how long. The bus driver had driven into a ditch and had to go through the forest to find a farm where he hotwired a tractor to get the bus out of the ditch. You only have 2 ½ hours a day of daylight and I honestly thought it was all over. It was one of those situations where if you make a run for it you die, and if you stay where you are you’re going to die without trying.

“I don’t think anything ever ends up exactly the way you wanted it but it has elements of what we wanted [in the video]. When you have more than one creative mind you have to compromise and that’s where you get the magic. [The clip is] certainly not what I expected but I am very happy with the result.

“[This album is] worlds apart, it’s the most confident album we’ve done. Their was less fiddling about, it just gets to the point, it’s something you can really move to. It [involved] a lot more sweat than any previous work we’ve done. It’s something I’d actually buy which is a huge cork. There is a lot of diversity within the album, and I don’t think any two songs are in the same area but they certainly complement each other. It seems like a solid body of work compared to anything we have done before and we are all very proud of it.

“There were two producers we wanted to work with, Pelle Henriccson and Eskil Lovstrom, who created one of the seminal albums of the last 10 years, called The Shape of Punk To Come by The Refuse. We all love the hardcore bands from the north of Sweden, we just love the sound and the tone and the imagination in the recording of the album. We somehow just by shear coincidence ended up meeting up with these producers and becoming friends. Sweden was just our next port of call.

“I wasn’t disappointed, that’s for sure [working with Pelle Henriccson and Eskil Lovstrom]. I was expecting the unexpected. The whole time you are recording you are getting more comments like, ‘give it more Marvin’ or give it more ‘Gaye’ which is ‘give it a bit more Marvin Gaye’, so we have been adding elements we would never have sought after ourselves. With The Refused album, which we all love, they took the same approach, and wanted to give it a real groove. No matter what genre they [Pelle Henriccson and Eskil Lovstrom] work with they want to give it more body, which is what we were looking for.

“All of the music (we write) is collaborative. It is a democratic process, if someone comes up with an idea in the band it doesn’t matter who it is, it works the same way it would with anyone else. It’s about the song, not about the egos in the band.

“The album was recorded on this beautiful old piece of land which used to be a mental asylum. They did 6000 lobotomies a year there, it was just a harrowing place to be. It only closed down maybe 10 years ago, it’s all changed though, now there’s a sculpted park and an art school there. It’s a shock because underneath it there are all these catacombs kilometres long. It’s kind of got these eerie elements but they have sort of polished it up to look like a small village. It’s very cool. Inspiring place to be, beautiful, but still with a sort of harshness to it.

“This album took 2 months [to record]. We had to go in pretty prepared, I think gone are the days with bands spending a year in the studio just fumbling about. With the budgets you are working with you try and keep the costs down, you try to be more efficient about it, you have to be smart about it or you are not going to survive.

“I don’t think we really knew when we walked in what we wanted it to be about. More than in album form I wanted the songs to stand alone, and be able to stand on their own two feet without having the album to fall back on, the idea was to be smarter about each song, giving each song a chance. We didn’t want any filler on the album. We wanted to project a bit of sweat, we like to be energetic when we play live so I don’t think we’ve ever created anything in the past that has really translated on stage. We’re a very different band to recorded format, or we were until now. It’s an extraordinary place to be, being able to get on stage and really smash knowing that the album sounds exactly like it does on stage.

“Sweden is actually a second home for me. I grew up there, my mother is Swedish, so I lived there until age 6, Dad is Australian of course. They lived on the road over there, they’re both opera singers, and this is where we ended up. It was awesome going back, as much as I missed Australia, the [Swedish] people are incredible. They are so inviting and the surroundings are hugely inspiring.

“We all missed Australia but we were on to much of a journey to really get a chance to think about it. We were far to busy to get a chance to sit back and think about what we were missing out on at home.

“[We met when] Oscar the guitarist and I were working at the local pool, in a café, which we both got sacked from. Oscar was studying music at Uni with Joe, our bass player, and so he called him in. The drummer Corey and keyboardist Scott and I had played before, so we fiddled about… there was no real focus, we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into to be honest; we just wanted to see what we could come up with. We didn’t want to be a punk band, we didn’t want to be an electro band, we didn’t want to be anything - we just wanted to play music.

“We all lived around Windsor [in Sydney], it was a central point to where we lived. There is a Duke St in Windsor, and there was a dukes of Windsor pub [so our name just came from that].

“[We clash] constantly. We’re all level headed though. It’s kind of sad but we’re far too polite to just be angry and then shoot off the handle at someone. We have our arguments but the perpetrator always comes back with an apology - it’s like Metallica without the therapist (laughs). It’s a little bit lame.

“We’re all from such different backgrounds. I love my looser sort of music; I’m a big fan of the punk world, especially British punk and the darker side of music. Oscar is a big Led Zeppelin fan, that’s the beauty of what we do, we bring such variety to the table.

“I’m just glad that we get an opportunity to get our stuff out there, it’s such a relief to have a product [Minus] that we’re so proud of.”

The Dukes of Windsor’s new album, Minus, is out in July.
A free MP3 download of their new single, It’s a War, is available at their website