Folk-pop collective The Bon Scotts have just returned with the single ‘Good Times’.

It’s the first taste of the Melbourne sextet’s fourth album, which is due early in the New Year. The group’s last LP, Modern Capitalism Gets Things Done, came out a mere 12 months ago, so it’s a slight surprise they’re already back with new music. However, for frontman Damien Sutton, the songs just kept coming.

“I never really stop writing,” he says. “And we’re always playing shows, so I always want to have new material. It feels natural. If anything, the break in between Modern Capitalism and the previous album [2011’s We Will All Die At The Hands Of C.G.I] felt very unnatural to me. It feels a lot more natural to just finish recording an album and tour and then come home and start again. That’s just how I like to do stuff, and I think the band does as well.”

The Bon Scotts haven’t always been quite so united. The two-year interval between their second and third albums was the result of a tactical marketing plan, much to Sutton’s chagrin.

“We had someone from the band take over the management side of things and he became very strategic about how we needed to do everything – how we needed to make sure the hype was right and the timelines were right, all these different rules. After a year of all these rules we kind of hadn’t done anything and I hated it. We had a big talk and he ended up leaving the band because of it.

“I don’t do The Bon Scotts for the business side of it. I do it because it’s fun and it’s everything I want to do. I can’t give a shit – no matter how many times people tell me I have to give a shit – whether timelines are right or whether we release at the wrong time. I just want to make music and have fun.”

On that note, in typical Bon Scotts style, ‘Good Times’ is a lively folk number with an immediately infectious vocal hook. However, despite the title, it’s not a celebration of all-out hedonism. The lyrics refer to “bad decisions” and feeling “fucked up”, and they were inspired by some fairly sobering real-life events.

“In primary school, in first grade, our teacher said, ‘There’s this kid coming to our school who’s very small and he’s been bullied at his last school,’” Sutton says. “He was introduced to me, and I was told that I had to look after him for a little while. He was my best friend all the way through to year ten when he left school to do an apprenticeship. We kept very close afterwards, but he got into drugs a lot more than all of my other friends and his life spiralled out of control a little bit. Then I actually found out from my dad that he was stabbed in a conflict. It was heartbreaking because he was a really good friend, but it was also just so scary that my life was on that same trajectory and just the small decisions probably stopped me from going down that same path.

“But the song isn’t sad,” he adds. “The song doesn’t remember him like he was a fuck-up or anything like that. It remembers him in the way that I remember him, which is this guy who was kind of dumb at life, but very good at having fun and made my life very enjoyable and probably shaped a lot of my opinions and attitudes on life.”

[The Bon Scotts photo by Lucy Spartalis]

The Bon Scotts playFrankie’s Pizza onWednesday October 14 andVenue 505 onThursday October 15.

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