A Word With King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard

Images by Dougal Gorman

You only have to get halfway through saying King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard’s name out loud before most people’s eyes glow up.

hey know who you’re talking about. Maybe you know them as the Melbourne outfit that’ve released 24 albums in just over a decade, with five in the last year alone, spanning every genre you know. They know who you’re talking about. Maybe you came across them like I did when you were that particular kind of zoned out that only happens when you come in from a long surf and someone hands you something that’s small, lit and goes in your left hand before saying, ‘Hey, have you heard of King Gizz?’ and they fire up one of their older Turkish psych rock style records (or is it psychedelic garage rock?), you get one listen and go: Oh, I get it now. Or, maybe you’re just here and reading this and now you’re interested. Either way, they’re hitting the Splendour stage on Saturday after a huge USA tour, and we talked with bassist Lucas Harwood to see just how he, and the rest of the band, do it all.

Lucas! Hello, how are we? I know you just got back from quite the USA tour. I was able to catch your last show at the Hollywood Bowl, that was such an experience. That was your biggest show in America to date, no? 

Yeah, that was… that was wild (laughs). And I loved it. It's crazy just to be at that place, let alone play it. I mean, the whole tour was wild and just beyond expectations, but that was like the perfect cherry on top. It was definitely the biggest headline show for us.

Were there any other standouts throughout the whole US tour or any of, like, off-the-beaten-path locales that you weren't really expecting to be as great as they were?

Well, I mean, going back to Red Rocks was really cool. We like to try not to repeat ourselves too much when mapping out our tour, and I felt that going back to the same venue so soon would feel a little weird. But, it felt just as good as the first time. It's just an incredible venue and you really feel the atmosphere of that place. And I think mostly it’s because a lot of people travel just to go to shows there. It’s a bit of a destination venue. When you play a show it feels almost like a bit more of a festival. People have made a trip to come out there and it's not like it's just a weeknight show and someone's just come out for the night. They've really like made a big thing of it, and you can just feel that energy. We also did two shows in basically one day there as well, which was wild. Like, two two-hour sets. We did one in the afternoon and four-and-a-half thousand people had tickets to both and they had stayed in the venue!

So, is there a secret to keeping sanity and setlist intact? You famously never repeat one on back-to-back nights or when you return to a venue.

We don't plan before the whole tour, but I guess usually each show a few days before or, like, with these shows, we would plan a few days ahead and write three or four set lists. Like, we’ll go three nights somewhere or four nights somewhere, so we would write those all together because we don’t want to repeat any songs in those batches of shows. So, we will write all the setlists in a batch. And there are always a few edits within like a few hours of the show. We’ll sound check something and it may not quite be working how we wanted it to so we’ll swap it out for something else we're more confident with.

And now you get a silly Saturday show at Splendour! No breaks.

Yeah! Well, we’re home for a few weeks now and we're doing a whole week of rehearsal soon, which is kind of unlike us. We don't rehearse a lot at home. As I said, we kind of treat the sound checks like rehearsal and the time at home is usually spent working on new material. But we're working pretty hard just to try to bring more songs into the live catalogue. You probably noticed at the Hollywood Bowl set, but we've got this almost operating table with all these new kind of electronics going on and modular synthesizer and a sequencer. And, yeah, we're still learning how to work all that and working out how it's going to work live. Hopefully, seamlessly. But we’re just kind of like dipping our toe into that world. As we start to take baby steps with that, it'll all hopefully open up some new doors to the parts in our discography that we just never thought would be possible to play live. To the punter and it might seem like we have this big set-up, and it may have been under-utilized, but it's just because we're still learning (laughs).

Nice, so you do your new music and writing and recording when you’re at home? I’ll be honest it always seems like you’re on the road. 

I mean we definitely do some stuff on the road as well. Like, Stu travels with a small recording rig that fits in a little pelican case and it’s some monitors, a microphone, a little interface and a keyboard. There's a lot you can do with that. The nuts and bolts and all the drums and kind of the arrangement and the main bulk of the song is recorded at home. But, you know, that still leaves a lot to do on the road at any time. You can record that stuff anyway and anywhere. I guess vocals are the only thing that's kind of a little bit limiting, you know, because you need to be in a quiet environment. But yeah, I mean, we’re definitely still recording a lot on the road. And, you know, even for a record, even if all the overdubs are finished, Stu just pretty much mixes it all on his laptop. He's constantly, constantly doing that. So, yeah, there's definitely a lot that's done on the road as well. It's nice when we have the luxury to do all that stuff at home in the studio, though. It's nice to spread out and use all the gear and stuff like that. But you know, on the opposite extreme, it's also good to be limited as well and not have as many choices and options. With PetroDragonic Apocalypse, I think most of the initial tracking was done over about two weeks at home. That was just Stu, Cavs and Joe. There're a lot of overdubs done at home, but then like final overdubs and most of the mixing was done on the last leg of the European tour last year. Literally just like, you know, rolling the spare amps into the green room and doing guitar dubs, singing overdubs, and stuff like that.