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\u2018I<\/span>t\u2019s always good to make yourself feel small,\u201d says Stu Mackenzie. We\u2019re sitting behind the stage of the Ancient theatre in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, after the second night of his band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard\u2019s three shows there. The marble-hewn amphitheatre was built between 98-117AD. We\u2019re flanked by columns bearing ancient Greek inscriptions from back when this place was called Philippopolis; the precipitous drop behind us reveals the east side of Europe\u2019s longest continually inhabited city, the glowing cross of the Cathedral of St Louis and the shadow of the hills in the distance.<\/p>\n In front of the stage where the Australian experimental rock band have just spent two hours wilding out is an arena where man and beast used to do battle in front of a far more bloodthirsty crowd than the one that just drank the venue dry of beer. It\u2019s hard not to feel like a speck here, awesomely adrift in all of human history.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Plovdiv marks the end of Gizz\u2019s European residency tour, which has seen the band post up in five different cities for three-night runs in historic or otherwise curious venues: the panopticon Luki\u0161k\u0117s prison in Vilnius, which closed in 2019 and is now a venue; Lycabettus hill theatre in Athens. After similarly successful residencies at natural amphitheatre-type venues in the US, the band wanted to make sure their European fans didn\u2019t get left out.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re like tourists on this trip as well,\u201d says Mackenzie, still in his sweat-dappled baby pink stage boilersuit. \u201cThe contrast between a regular bus tour, where we\u2019re in a different city every night, is pretty stark. Usually you wake up after a long drive, you actually can\u2019t remember where you are and it\u2019s about orienting yourself \u2013 finding a coffee or a green space and just surviving. But on a tour like this, you actually have a moment to soak it up and breathe, which is rare. We\u2019re having such a ball \u2013 spending time cruising around, eating, seeing the cities, just hanging out with each other \u2013 the good stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ambrose Kenny Smith on a day off in Hydra, Greece (left), and in Lisbon, Portugal<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n <\/span><\/p>\n If anyone knows the price of hard-touring, it\u2019s Gizz, who started as a party band in Melbourne in 2010 \u2013 hence the un-serious name, which stuck \u2013 and have gigged their way to becoming their generation\u2019s Grateful Dead or Phish, bolstering their psych-rock with metal, krautrock, microtonal experiments and more. They\u2019ve headlined Green Man and End of the Road, and this month saw the release of their 27th<\/em> album, Phantom Island, where country choogle meets Philly-inspired soul thanks to their first foray into orchestral arrangements. It\u2019s a beautiful if worried record, its lyrical protagonists often observing the world from the cockpit of a plane and wondering what the purpose of it all is.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The existential vibe feels right at home in these perspective-realigning venues, built on thousands of years of human existence. \u201cA lot of the lyrics we\u2019ve written together have stemmed from spending a lot of time away from home, from family, from kids,\u201d says Mackenzie, who welcomed his third baby just before tour started, \u201cand trying to figure out how we make sense of all of that, and the world. It has been an existential few records,\u201d he agrees.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n From left: Mickey Cavs, Stu Mackenzie, Joey Walker, Ambrose Kenny Smith, Lucas Harwood and Cook Craig backstage at the Ancient theatre, Plovdiv, Bulgaria<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Gizz run a staunchly DIY enterprise. They self-release their albums, which they still record in the same small studio in Melbourne. They\u2019ve never worked with a producer. Their friend Jason Galea does all their artwork and Maclay Heriot takes their photos. They release free bootlegs of every live show \u2013 the Barcelona residency is already up on Spotify by the time they hit Plovdiv \u2013 and broadcast a high-quality livestream of each night on YouTube that they\u2019ve taken painstaking care to perfect.<\/p>\n To outsiders, they\u2019re perhaps best known for their prolificacy \u2013 in 2017 alone, they released five albums. Their output can be seen as intimidating, or perceived as some sort of novelty factor. But for Mackenzie, it seems more about the sense that every creative whim is worth honouring, and every bit of life really is worth figuring out creatively, indicative of a tendency towards archivism.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve nailed a big part of the motivation for it,\u201d he says. \u201cWe as a group have a big appetite for risk. We\u2019ve been good at just being in it together, and if this fails or people don\u2019t like it, it\u2019s fine. We\u2019re all here together because we actually are all best friends, we\u2019re really grateful to be here and I don\u2019t think anyone wants to do anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n The ambition isn\u2019t to play the Royal Albert Hall, as they are this November; that\u2019s just a nicely crazy surprise. \u201cIt does keep the motors greased and it keeps us on the horse,\u201d says Mackenzie. \u201cBut it\u2019s definitely not the goal. We\u2019ve been pretty careful to honour that. As things become more seductive, we\u2019ve tried to keep it feeling very small. There might be a few more people around, but I think we\u2019ve been very protective of our little, tiny, miniature universe.\u201d<\/p>\n But in another sense, Gizz is a beautifully open-source universe. They give fans \u2013 the Weirdo Swarm \u2013 their blessing to make bootleg merch and even bootleg records of their live recordings (they only ask that they send them a \u201cfair\u201d amount of pressings in exchange). Where much pop fandom constitutes little more than idol worship, the Swarm are a generative and self-sustaining community: on their fansite, they\u2019ve put together a detailed guide to each city on the EU tour, including information about attitudes to LGBTQ+ people and drugs (both very censorious in Bulgaria). \u201cI do feel really proud of that,\u201d says Mackenzie.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In Plovdiv, a group of local fans thrilled that Gizz have finally come to their country have organised daytime meet-ups at a bar before the first and last shows, where stickers and friendship bracelets are traded and bespoke posters are sold, as well as nightly afterparty gigs at a local bar. Once again, not a drop of beer remains at any event.<\/p>\n The atmosphere is radiantly sincere and celebratory. We meet fans from Denver who are almost always on acid; a kid from Belgrade who posts in the rapidly renewing Gizz sub-Reddit that he loves Plovdiv so much he wants to move there, and includes the details of his outfit so that anyone can come up and say hi, which we do and get a huge hug. We hear about the flight from the last date in Athens to the Bulgarian capital Sofia, which was filled with about 80 Gizz heads and the band themselves.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tara from San Diego has seen the band umpteen times and used to be a Phish fan; the difference in the oft-compared \u201cjam bands\u201d, she says, is that Phish wig out into abstraction \u2013 catnip for casual listeners off their nut on drugs \u2013 while Gizz splice together intricate medleys of their songs, which rewards close focus from fans literate in their vast catalogue. One group of fans have made Gizz-themed football shirts in the Bulgarian team colours; the back of one is emblazoned with \u201cNathan\u201d, the name of the modular synth rack that looks like an old-fashioned telephone switchboard that the band have been consistently building and experimenting with on tour. \u201cEvery city we go to, they\u2019re like, \u2018Is there a modular synth place here?\u2019\u201d says Heriot, their photographer: the band \u2013 and particularly musician Joey Walker \u2013 add new bits to it like tourists collecting fridge magnets.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On day two, an excellent free socialist architecture walking tour of the city that apparently usually draws five people attracts a crowd of 43 \u2013 largely Gizz heads \u2013 to the delight of the tour guide. Before the show, an American guy called Michael is going around the venue asking people what their first ever gig was, though it\u2019s hard to imagine anyone having a better story than his: after his dad picked up some German hitchhikers who stayed for a month, to his mother\u2019s chagrin, their parting apology was to take him to see Fleetwood Mac on the Rumours tour.<\/p>\n During the performances, Heriot is underneath Nathan, shooting upwards through Mackenzie\u2019s legs, putting his battered Leica M6 \u2013 originally a war camera \u2013 to good use. Drugs may be illegal but weed, acid and MDMA are apparently flowing freely. And after a heavy rainshower before the show, fans everywhere (me included) are stacking it down the steep, slippery marble steps, many of which have no hand rails, sending drinks flying. (The venue\u2019s health and safety doesn\u2019t seem to have moved on since ancient times.) On the last night, we overhear an Australian man giving a local tips on how to know when the acid is kicking in.<\/p>\n As the final show of the run draws to a close, Walker says from the stage: \u201cThanks to our majestic crew for facilitating our bizarre-as-fuck behaviour.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n From left: Ambrose Kenny Smith, Cook Craig, Lucas Harwood, Mickey Cavs, Joey Walker and Stu Mackenzie at Luki\u0161kiu prison<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Part of that is rewarding the fans with a totally different setlist on each night of a single residency, not repeating any songs in a single city. \u201cIt\u2019s not really sent over until half an hour before the show,\u201d says Heriot, who has known the band for 10 years, has carte blanche to document their existence and also got their blessing to learn how to shoot on 16mm film for a forthcoming documentary. \u201cThey all know what to do, but it leaves that opportunity to step it up. You can see there\u2019s a chemistry there where they don\u2019t even have to talk, they\u2019ve played with each other for so long and for so many hours. It\u2019s super interesting to watch, and what makes it exciting to document and photograph.\u201d<\/p>\n He talks about the classic \u201chero photograph\u201d of a musician, where they\u2019re caught mid-jump or in a triumphant pose. \u201cThe photo looks incredible \u2013 then you see them doing it again the next night. It happens every night in the same spot, at the same time.\u201d Gizz\u2019s constant deviation from any script means \u201cyou really have to respond to the moment, to be as tuned in as possible to what\u2019s happening.\u201d To aid that, Heriot wears an in-ear with the front-of-house mix. \u201cIt means I can really hear what\u2019s happening on stage and chase their energy.\u201d<\/p>\n Gizz entered proggy territory around 2016\u2019s Nonagon Infinity, leading to a tightly structured live show that never stopped for breath. \u201cWe got to the end of the rainbow on that one,\u201d says Mackenzie. \u201cFor us, at least, it got boring. And that\u2019s when the setlist started to unravel, throwing in older songs. We had this back catalogue we barely ever played live \u2013 we should dig into this. We really noticed around that time that the audience slowly started to change in a nice way, and it became apparent that nobody cares if you make a wrong note.\u201d<\/p>\n It dovetailed with the 34-year-old\u2019s growing interest in connecting with people rather than shocking them. \u201cPeople are interested in the humanity of that, and that\u2019s quite a liberating feeling. It\u2019s also something we still wrestle with on the daily \u2013 you get up there and you might as well be naked. It\u2019s pretty intense, like \u2013 shit, I can\u2019t remember this song we haven\u2019t played in two years, we didn\u2019t soundcheck it. But you work your way through it together, it forces you to look at each other and make music with each other.\u201d<\/p>\n Previously, he said, he felt like a performer; now he feels like a musician. Gizz also don\u2019t rehearse. \u201cYou have no choice but to figure it out as you go, you listen and you\u2019re playing on the fly, creating in real time,\u201d says Mackenzie. \u201cIt\u2019s the best feeling. We\u2019ve leaned into that more and more. This residency thing, part of the format is that we get to play seven hours or something of all different music \u2013 that\u2019s like a dream to us.\u201d<\/p>\n On the opening, title track of Phantom Island, one of Gizz\u2019s pilots has landed on a mysterious desert island, experiencing \u201ca symphony of delusion as my thoughts finally realise their purpose\u201d. Amid loneliness and doubt, conspiracy and suspicion blooms. It feels like the kind of typically characterful reflection on modern life that Gizz have been writing in recent years.<\/p>\n In a grasping industry and an increasingly siloed modern life, their existence feels like an antidote to this sort of isolation: generous, communal, devoid of cynicism and pure of motivation. Their world is seductive: small egos, huge hearts, full of purpose. Old places can make you feel small, says Mackenzie, and so can big crowds, in the best possible way. \u201cI know some people can get anxious in them, but I think it\u2019s important. There\u2019s something in the experience of going to a concert that is innately human, being around other people.\u201d<\/p>\n Phantom Island is out now on p(doom). King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard tour the US from 28 July, the UK and Europe from 31 October and Australia from 2 December.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018It\u2019s always good to make yourself feel small,\u201d says Stu Mackenzie. We\u2019re sitting behind the stage of the Ancient theatre in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, after the second night of his band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard\u2019s three shows there. The marble-hewn amphitheatre was built between 98-117AD. We\u2019re flanked by columns bearing ancient Greek inscriptions from<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9669,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[2138,2140,949,1022,2139,2141,736,2143,2144,2142],"class_list":{"0":"post-9668","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-appetite","9":"tag-gizzard","10":"tag-high","11":"tag-historic","12":"tag-king","13":"tag-lizard","14":"tag-risk","15":"tag-tour","16":"tag-wizard","17":"tag-wizards"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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