WHO THE FUCK IS… CAL KRAMER, SOUTHERN RIVER BAND? August 2024

WHO THE FUCK IS… CAL KRAMER, SOUTHERN RIVER BAND? August 2024
By Shane Pinnegar

It’s a wet, overcast morning in Perth and I’m talking with the frontman and charismatically loose mastermind behind what is arguably Australia’s hottest band in the land: CALLUM – or CAL – KRAMER of The Southern River Band, all the way from the bogan hinterland of, well… Southern River – or Thornlie, if you like [Perth folks will understand].

Having known Cal through more than a few years and more than a few bands, our conversation is relaxed and casual and – no surprises – as down to earth as it’s always been, punctuated by a few laughs and digressions – just like any mate you’re enjoying a chat and a pint with. SRB may be a hot ticket now, with multiple sold-out laps of Australia plus a hugely successful two-month stint in the UK and Europe earlier this year under their collective belt, but Cal is the same old disarmingly charismatic, straight-shooting dude he’s always been.

Southern River Band’s third studio album D.I.Y. drops TODAY, and it sounds BIG. HUGE. MEATY, if that’s a term we can apply to a collection of hard-edged boogie sounds (it is). It gathers a handful of tracks that first appeared on second album Rumours & Innuendo, released in 2019, and some more recent singles, and they’ve been re-recorded to great effect by the band, who are riding high and match fit after extensive touring and honing of their act,

D.I.Y. is as vibrant a rock n’ roll banger as you’ll find this side of The Darkness – and I use that band as a marker point for good reason, given their long camaraderie with Cal & Co.

To celebrate the release of their best album yet, SRB embark on yet another Australian tour this month, and if you’re unsure what to expect, the answer is a good time rock n’ roll party. It’s what Cal and the band do best, after all.

G’day mate.

How are you buddy?

Oh shit… Hang on. Fucken technology, mate…

Every time it gets me. You’re a young gun – you’re meant to be a wizard at this sort of shit!

Can you hear me now?

I can hear you.

Beautiful. Sorry, mate. I don’t have the camera on – I’m doing a bit of shit, it’s free-range interviewing here, I’ve got a bunch of shit to do while I’m doing all this stuff. How are you, mate?

Oh, good man. Yeah. Good. It’s been a while. How you doing?

Going well, busy as fuck – which is, you know, the best way to be, really.

Well, that’s a fucken understatement. Look at you go – we’re very proud of you.

Ohh, thanks man. I appreciate all the support. You know, you’ve been there from day dot, haven’t you?

You know, that’s my first question – I wanna get to the heart of ‘who the fuck is Cal Kramer’ now, and the first time I remember meeting you was, I think, the Gasoline Inc launch show back in probably 2010.

Fuckin’ hell – at the Rosemount!

Yeah, that’s the one.

Christ – was that Thrust or Centrefold?

That was Thrust. I don’t recall seeing Centrefold. That might have come just beforehand.

Same band, different name.

Yeah. And you were the drummer back then.

Yeah, yeah, Actually, I’m still doing a bit of drumming. I played with my other band Red Engine Caves in the week, and we had a couple of shows, good to be back on the kit.

That’s you, is it? Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Very cool. So, you know, Thrust had that sleazy glammy sort of sound. And then we also saw you playing, I think, with Blue Shaddy on drums. And you backed Lightning Jack on drums. So, you’ve got the blues side of things going on as well. How do the blues and that sleazy glam sort of rock feed into who Southern River Band is today?

Yep. I guess it’s just an amalgam of all the shit I like, really, isn’t it? And, like, I mean, my earliest – I’ve probably told you this before – but my earliest living memory is watching Steve Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble Live at the El Mocambo. That’s like the first thing I can remember being alive doing, and I still [watch] it all the time, so I haven’t really ventured too far from that I guess. But there’s so much out there. We’ve got such a world to draw on now – if you like you can go back and fucken listen to so much great shit, whether it be country, blues, rock ‘n’ roll, you know, all the way up. I sort of get to a level of heaviness and then go, ‘Nah, it’s not for me.’ But yeah, I guess it’s all just a fucken mix, man. Good music is good music, I guess.

That’s exactly what I think too, and I remember we’ve talked in the past about the influence of Daddy Cool. I think you grew up listening to your Mum and Dad’s records.

Fucken oath!

Yeah, and it all goes into this big stew, doesn’t it? I remember saying to a couple of bands we were working with years ago that if all you listen to is AC/DC or Guns n’ Roses, then all you’re gonna sound like is AC/DC or Guns n’ Roses.

100% man, and with, you know, the rock’n’roll side of things now, because, I mean, I’m pretty sure nearly fucken everything’s been done, right? So, you’ve got to try to take those left and right turns. And I think the best way to do that is to, you know, draw influence from other areas.

Yes, absolutely. And create something that’s unique – and on that note, your songwriting in the last five or six years has just come leaps and bounds.

Aw, thanks, man, I appreciate that. I was talking about that with me mate yesterday. He was saying, you know, a similar sort of thing. And I think it’s just drawing on, whether it be the country shit, or really diving into [different] songwriters… I’m just trying to write shit that interests me and stuff that’s not sort of repetitive or the same or been done or whatever. I mean, obviously, vibe wise, what we’re doing is fucken nothing mega original. But we’re just trying to draw from those different influences and, you know, learn from the best, essentially.

But it’s bringing this sort of mixture of sounds that no-one is really doing today. I mean, you’re bringing that to kids. My daughter has best mates who love SRB – they’re 17/18 years old. I can’t name a lot of rock bands reaching seventeen and eighteen year olds… you know, this sort of music’s not really getting played on the radio. Not unless it’s one Guns n’ Roses song from nearly forty years ago. So, you’re bringing that to an audience who don’t get to naturally listen to rock ‘n’ roll music so much like we did when we grew up. So that in itself is pretty amazing…

Yes, yes, yes. Ohh yeah, and it’s weird that radio thing, and obviously in the modern world, trying to find a way to be discovered, you know. Thankfully, when Justin [Hawkins of The Darkness] put us on his podcast that just opened us out. You know, I used to make a joke to my mates when we were talking about it. I was like, how many people in Perth do you know that listen to Van Halen? Because I think I know probably all five or six of them, I said. But there’s millions of people out there – it’s just not, you know, it’s not around here. I suppose that’s where the internet does come in handy. We’re finding people, you know, discovering them pretty rapidly now, but it’s not through the traditional channels, that’s for sure.

Yeah, I mean, that’s why the album name is so appropriate – D.I.Y. You’ve done it, more or less, your fuckin’ self.

And ironically, it’s our first album that we haven’t released ourselves. [laughs]

I know, I was amused at that.

Yeah, it was a nice little subtle touch of irony, I think.

Well, you’re good at that. You know, the sense of humour always comes through, which we like a lot.

Thanks man.

Those couple of years after Thrust sort of slowly morphed into SRB, and people came and went through the band, it took a little while for you to find the sound that you were after. It bounced around a little bit. Were you confident that it might take a couple of years, but you’d get to where you wanted to be?

Yeah… I mean, I don’t know if it was confidence or just straight up stubbornness or stupidity. Whatever you want to call it, but I’ve always believed in what we’re doing, you know what I mean? And I think that I got that from basically just seeing the crowd’s reaction – when people discover us, you can see it on their faces at SRB shows. And whenever we go into these new things, you know, and seeing us sort of win people over, you go, ‘there’s definitely something here and we’ve just got to fucken stick it out.’ Like I said, in the modern world it’s so hard to find your lane, and I’m not gonna fucken whore myself out on TikTok or anything like that. To each their own, if they wanna do that, fucken more power to them. But that’s just soul destroying to me. So it’s just about, you know, hoping that you get that break and not knowing how or where that’s going to come from. And then the fact that it’s one of your fucken heroes – Justin Hawkins!!! That is pretty fucken surreal… And we can really feel the people behind us and there seems to be a bit of a swell in the rock ‘n’ roll thing, or at least in our lane. At the minute there’s a little bit of excitement coming around it again, I feel.

People like Justin Hawkins – that must be one of the most valuable connections you’ve made.

Absolutely, man. Absolutely. I mean, when we did the Warwick Castle show in them in the UK last month [one reviewer wrote, “they know their audience and are intent to entertain and warm up the crowd which is exactly what they do… By the time they take their leave, people aren’t about to forget The Southern River Band as they deliver a performance like it’s their own show.”], it was fucken surreal, you know? And he got us up to play with him at Sweden Rock as well. It’s surreal, man, and they’re all such fucken great people and they’ve gone into bat for us hard on so many occasions. It’s… it’s fucken surreal, and we’re just mega, mega appreciative and, yeah, it’s constantly ‘pinch yourself’ shit. I mean – you know me, I grew up in fucken Thornlie. This was a fucken dream to me. I thought it’d be a completely different world. Even getting a chance to go to fucken Europe or whatever. It’s completely, you know, it’s not something you expect to happen. You always hope that it does. But you know, it’s pretty fucken surreal.

I think pretty much everyone in the country who plays music would give their right arm to be where you are right now. You’ve somehow made those fuckin’ dominoes fall somehow magically in exactly the right sort of order.

Man, we funnily enough, last year, you know, people have got families and shit now and, you know, life takes hold. There’s only so long that you can really sort of… well, I’m going to be doing this ‘til they put me in the ground, but trying to get everything [organised] and, you know, keep the band motivated and go, ‘is this worth it for everybody?’ ‘Cos you don’t want to be just the band, you know, fucken losing money going around Australia, ‘cos it’s just so fucken expensive. People have got lives and shit, so we’re like, let’s give it an absolute fucken red hot crack for the next 18 months. And if we stiffen out and you know, everyone wants to fucken go their separate ways and we’ll just do fucken reunion shows every year and then everything just went fucken bang and it’s 10 years into the fucken band and now it’s like, you know, you can really… there’s a sense of prosperity on the horizon, I think. And it’s, yeah, it’s unreal. But that’s, like I said before, I don’t know if it is the stubbornness thing or the stupidity or whatever, but you know, it is just that 10 years and then, you know, lo and behold, things start clicking – those dominoes start falling, like you said.

Well, I was gonna ask you – without wanting to get into numbers or personal information, you keep all that to yourself, of course – but looking in from the outside some fans may think, ‘well, look, he’s touring Europe, he must be rolling in cash,’ but we know that the music industry doesn’t necessarily work that way. Are things translating a bit into more than just scraping by? Can you actually see a point where you’ll be making a living out of this?

Yeah, I mean, it’s hard… it’s fucken SO expensive, man. I mean, even in Australia, you know, it’s so hard to tour. Even if, like, we go around and do hundreds and hundreds of tickets in every city and it’s still, we’re not stiffening out by any means and then just the sheer cost of everything and then, you know, times that by fucken 30 when you go to Europe, especially with the Aussie dollar and everything and it’s like… you’ve just got to sort of stick it out and take that hit and hope that it’s connecting and thankfully, you know, from judging by that tour that we just did over there, it is fucken connecting over there. So, there’s that chance, you know, exponential growth and all that shit. So, it’s starting to become a viable prospect, I think. Hopefully anyway.

Fantastic. Some people might look at what you’re doing and think ‘ohh, overnight sensation,’ but you’ve been grinding there, as we’ve said for 15-20 years, playing in different bands. Do you feel more – and I use this term with you very loosely, Cal – do you feel more mature now, and better capable of coping with any big success that might come now, rather than if you’d have got it all when you were 10 or 15 years younger?

Ohh mate, I always [say], if people fucken held any decision that I made say 10 years ago or something against me I’d be fucked, ‘cos I was an absolute idiot – you know, as with all people full of piss and vinegar and, you know, the exuberance of youth – but I do think so. You know, there is – I think it’s the perspective thing now, because I have had to wear so many hats and had to make some pretty fucken hard calls and go through some serious shit to want to do it. I’m mega – and we all are – we’re mega, mega appreciative of what we’re able to do now. And I’m not taking it for granted in the slightest.

“Mature”?? You sure? [laughs] I don’t know, I wouldn’t use that word myself…

Well, I did say in the broader sense, Cal, come on.

Yeah, yeah, alright – I’ll give you the broad swipe.

So, the new album sounds amazing. I’ve had a couple listens to it, it sounds big and meaty – is it the sound that made you want to re-record those songs?

Well, I can kind of sing now! [laughs] I think if you go back to when we did that first album or whatever, we had the best intentions, but you can, I think if you [really listen to the mix] you can hear it, because I’d only been singing fucken like a year and a half then and I didn’t know how to do it [properly]. I kind of only started really getting the hang of it and backing myself a bit more in the last couple of years – I suppose that’s an hours thing really, but with the unit that we’ve got now, we always wanted to be able to go in and do a record live in a room like a proper fucken rock ‘n’ roll band. And now that we do have this unit, we were able to actually do that. And I think that that really shines through. It like an unspoken vibe thing, but you can fucken feel it, you know?

Absolutely you can. And the songs, as I said, they sound bigger. They sound a lot louder and fuller and, you know, it makes a lot of sense, especially with this gonna be the first album that’s released overseas and whatnot.

Yeah, that was part of the thinking as well – that we wanted to put our best foot forward and we always believed in the songs, and we just needed to capture them right. And given that it’s our first global release, it’s like, ‘Alright, here’s what we were trying to do, and we think we’ve figured it out the best we can at the minute.’

So, when will there be new music? Have you got more up your sleeve right now?

Fucking oath, brother, fucking oath! Don’t worry, we’re pre prodding I think about 12 or 15 new songs at the minute. Been going through working on all them and we’re gonna start getting some demos done, and yeah, hopefully get something out. I mean, I don’t have any dates or anything, but I’m ready to get another one out quick smart of all new music.

Fantastic. How has the concept of Southern River – Thornlie basically – how’s that translated overseas?

They just go, ‘what the fuck’s that?!’ [laughs]

Well, so do we, sometimes when we’re driving through Thornlie, you know…

[laughs] Yeah. Oh mate, everybody does. I don’t know. I guess it’s a bit of a foreign delicacy [for them] almost. You know, it’s got a sense of … errrr… exotic’s the word I’m looking for!

That’ll work.

Which you’ll know from when you were living in Canning Vale is a pretty fucken surreal concept of the lovely and exotic Thornlie, WA!

Yes. Yes, we’ll say exotic in quotation marks.

Yes, yes, yes – we could maybe put 3 ‘X’s in exotic though! HA!

Remember, we were just living in Kalgoorlie, we’ve seen that sort of shit, a lot!

Ohh, mate. Yeah. Jesus Christ. Well, I suppose Canning Vale would have prepped you for that, you know.

Yeah, a little bit. Thank fuck we’re back. That’s all I can say.

[Laughs] I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it too much, apart from the sense of just we’re going not gonna change anything and just be like, ‘look, this is what it is.’ It is funny seeing in places like Holland and Germany where when I’m fucken talking, I’ve got to the point where I was like, I’m just going to keep talking the way that I normally do because I don’t think they know what I’m saying anyway. So you can kind of just see this look of bewilderment on their faces, which is… which makes me laugh, but they get the music thing, so…

That’s so great. Through it all, mate – look, we’ve been mates for 15-odd years. You just seem like the same bloke as always – maybe a little more quote-unquote “mature”. But has the ego been tempted to get a bit out of control? When you spend two months in Europe and you’re getting, you know, festival crowds screaming for you and all that?

No, I don’t really know… The only thing that I try to do with the sense of ego is do more and do better. So, like, I don’t know if I’ve said this to you before, but the idea of fame gives me the shits. I don’t wanna be fucken famous or anything. I wanna be in a good band and, you know, obviously make some money. I think it’s the driving thing of, I love playing in the band. All I’ve ever wanted to do my whole life was to be in a fucken gang or a band, you know, like a band gang essentially, and just fucken be out there doing it – and that that feeling hasn’t gone away after Europe. In fact, it’s fucken knocking on the door a lot harder again, to get straight back out there. I think it’s just finding what drives you and, you know, maximising that, really. But if a couple of me mates go, ‘hey bruz, you’ve turned into a bit of a cockhead,’ I might have to look in the mirror – but thankfully no-one’s said that just yet!

Not yet. Give it time. Give it time. Wait till the album comes out and you get an ARIA award or something!

Not yet. Absolutely, brother. Yeah, I would like to have a bit of a cockhead era – that’d be nice.

Yeah, well, it’s traditional, right. Take advantage of it.

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it’ll go cockhead era – meltdown – hiatus.

Cal Kramer: the cocaine years.

Oh shit! [big laugh]

So, look, love the video for Vice City III. That’s just like a mini-Miami Vice episode. Perfect. Has it given you a taste for acting?

I was again talking to my same mate yesterday about this sort of shit. I love the idea of telling stories. Like trying to write stories or whatever, whether that be the written word or the spoken word, or fucken visually. So, ideally we’re going to one day do all the Vice City songs – of which there’s five – and do the full length movie of it. I mean, you know, hopefully we can get fucken like Warner Brothers or some shit to financially back us there. But you know, I don’t know about acting per se, but definitely doing more sort of shit like that. It’s just shit that makes you laugh, really – I don’t think I’ll be doing any fucken dramatic readings at His Majesty’s Theatre or anything in the near future…

No cameo on Neighbours coming up or anything like that?

If you’ve got any contacts, then mate, I’m completely open to that – as long as they don’t make me cut my hair, obviously! I’d be appearing as myself.

Oh, absolutely! Look, it’s been great, mate. I appreciate your time. So, circling back to the start – in 2024, Who the fuck is Cal Kramer?

Thanks man. Hmmm… probably the same dumb fuck he was, you know, 10 years ago, but with a little bit more perspective now, and a hunger to conquer the world via music that’s exceeded anything in the past, which was already a sizable hunger. But ‘WHO is Cal Kramer’ can be left up to the viewer, the reader, the listener, and whatever they say about me – fucken, it’s probably true! [laughs]

Right on, man. Thanks so much for your time and we’re hoping we’ll catch the upcoming run of gigs.

Thanks so much mate. Bloody oath, yeah, what is it? Magnet House and Freo Social over here.

Yeah, not sure which show yet, but we’ll hopefully see you there and say g’day.

Fucken 15 years. Jesus Christ. Where does the time go, my friend?

Yeah, yeah. It’s silly, isn’t it? Getting old. The getting old part sucks, but the getting wise thing is kind of nice.

Has it happened? There is wisdom?

Well, maybe rather than ‘getting wise’, maybe ‘acquiring some wisdom’. How about we say that – like you acquiring some maturity but not necessarily being mature?

Yes, yes, yes! I like that. Yeah, turning it on when necessary.

 

D.I.Y. Tour Dates 2024

THURSDAY, 22ND AUGUST – CROWN AND ANCHOR ADELAIDE, SA
FRIDAY, 23RD AUGUST – THE CORNER HOTEL MELBOURNE, VIC
SUNDAY, 25TH AUGUST – ALTAR HOBART, TAS
WEDNESDAY, 28TH AUGUST – THE BASO CANBERRA, ACT
THURSDAY, 29TH AUGUST – DICEY RILEYS WOLLONGONG, NSW
FRIDAY, 30TH AUGUST – SELINAS SYDNEY, NSW
SUNDAY, 1ST SEPTEMBER – KING STREET NEWCASTLE, NSW
WEDNESDAY, 4TH SEPTEMBER – HOEY MOEY COFFS HARBOUR, NSW
FRIDAY, 6TH SEPTEMBER – BANGALOW BOWLS BYRON BAY, NSW
SATURDAY, 7TH SEPTEMBER – THE BACK ROOM BRISBANE, QLD
SUNDAY, 8TH SEPTEMBER – MO’S DESERT CLUBHOUSE GOLD COAST, QLD
FRIDAY, 27TH SEPTEMBER – MAGNET HOUSE PERTH, WA
FRIDAY, 4TH OCTOBER – FREO SOCIAL FREMANTLE, WA

Category: Interviews