The Brag

Children Collide
Mastering The Moshpit
By Bridie Connellan

Heath Crawley is smugly lapping up the glare in his Melbourne backyard, and taking the rare opportunity to rub it in my face; I’m calling him from a Sydney that’s wrapped in a gloomy Friday cloud.  “This is great, I think I’m even getting a sunrash,” he laughs. “Sitting in the yard, having a chat… I’ll swap with you at some point…” As the hard-working bassist for Aussie grunge-punk three-piece Children Collide, Crawley admittedly deserves a bit of sunshine. He’s on the cusp of yet another tour, this one for their new single, ‘Arrows’ – which he assures me is every inch the ‘Collide that sweaty punters have come to know and love. “I personally feel that this song is possibly a little bit less raucous and angsty, as opposed to a lot of our previously released songs. It still holds elements of that character, just presented in a slightly different way,” he says. The track is the third to be lifted from 2010’s Theory of Everything. “It’s nice to let a song run its course and do its thing; it coasts along before it’s time to let one of the other guys have its day.”

With Crawley, vocalist Johnny Mackay and percussion-whiz Ryan Caesar, the band has garnered a rep for fast-paced pop-grunge with a distinctly Australian fusion sound; Theory Of Everything had BRAG using “pounding punk”, “limber” and “alt-bush” in the same paragraph. In the follow-up to gunning singles ‘Jellylegs’ and ‘My Eagle’, ‘Arrows’ takes a more post-apocalyptic turn for lo-fi eeriness, with less twang, more substance, and Mackay’s tortured lyrics announcing that everything is a lie, there’s no such thing as fate, and we’re all suckers for nostalgia. Creepier still, and more pessimistic, is the accompanying clip shot at White Bay Power Station by fashion-focused directors Gemma Lee and Charlie Clausen (Blackberry Films), which features a host of kids fighting the end of the world by creating an unintelligible machine that Crawley describes as a “Something”. “I guess it’s up to the viewer to decided exactly what it is they’re creating,” he says. “I think it’s important that the clip almost balances such a pensive song and also represents itself.”

With a few lineup changes here and there, Children Collide have been scooting around stages and recording studios for six years – but it only took a few gigs before audiences developed a physical reaction to their sound. Their explosive sets still trigger more than just a little mosh. “The name actually came a couple of days before the band even started,” Crawley says, laughing off the idea that the moniker was spawned from the see-it-and-say-it of children literally colliding in front of the stage. “But like a cowboy troupe in the 1800s, when America might have been called ‘kids’ in the Billy the Kid-sense of the word, we are ‘children’ and we do ‘collide’.”

Anyone brave enough has experienced the frenzied fury of a Children Collide pit – and it turns out that the crowd-slamming is fine entertainment from the band’s side of the room, too. “There is the occasional rough head throwing himself around and just doing it wrong, but it’s quite interesting that people do get so much joy out of [moshing],” Crawley says. “Them all slapping into each other – you can feel the energy, the positive energy coming out of their actions. We should definitely phone a psychologist about this one.”

So I did. According to one local Sydney shrink, the act of moshing amidst a dense concentration of human bodies is, in fact, an exciting ‘sensory overload’; the bodyslammer produces a cathartic release prompted by both frenzied sound and that weird Fight Club complex to cop a bruise or five. And Crawley agrees. “I don’t know, I get it, but I don’t know how I get it,” he laughs. “The joy just… is.” Crawley himself has been described by his bandmates as the troublemaker of the group, and he admits he has a propensity for collisions of his own… “There was a stretch there where if there were a set of stairs to fall down, I’d be headfirst,” he laughs. He’s seen a good number of emergency wards since the band’s inception, although these days his raucous pace has been somewhat slowed. “I do like to have a good time all the time – but after you’ve gotten yourself into trouble that many times it can get a little bit stale, and you become more well-trained at avoiding those situations. I think I’m still the one who gets into the most trouble though.”

The band have certainly seen their share of ups, downs and broken bones – and I’m curious to know how they’ve managed to stick together. According to Crawley, it comes down to balance. “We’re all slightly different to each other, or even quite different to each other, [but] with common goals and similar tastes,” he explains. “I think after going out and doing our own thing and gathering our own inspirations and bringing them back together and putting them into the unit that we know and understand, it makes the well an eternal source of ideas. That’s how we operate; we’ve never been the kind of band to drive around in our convertible together every day and get icecream. That [concentrated relationship] can get a bit bland, and I’m so grateful for how we are.

“In any relationship, people need space, people need to be able to do their own thing and come back and be able to give back more. We have our tiffs, but at the end of the day we’re with each other because we want to be.”

What: ‘Arrows’, the third single off Theory Of Everything, is out now
With: Red Riders, Young Revelry
Where: The Metro Theatre
When: Thursday April 21