REEF

Hands All Over

Nineties English rock band Reef are returning to Australia for the first time in 12 years and will appear at Metropolis Fremantle on Friday, June 1. BEN WATSON spoke to vocalist Gary Stringer.

There was a time – and it doesn’t seem all that long ago – when Reef were ubiquitous.

Pretty much everywhere you went in 1997, their gigantic hit Place Your Hands was on the radio and in CD players. For Australian audiences, the band’s mix of long-haired post-grunge corporate rock and sunny-yet-gritty vocals seemed to have particular appeal.

But then, much like the old major label paradigm that they were very much a part of, it all came undone. Quickly. “I’ll fill you in, man!” Gary Stringer says in a distinctive West Country lilt. “We did our last show with Reef the first time around in August 2003, but that last six months it was pretty obvious that something was going wrong with the band.”

Heading out to Los Angeles to write and record album number five, the band came away with a bunch of material that, Stringer says, stood up well alongside the rest of the band’s output. But it never saw the light of day. “When we got back to the airport in London it was pretty obvious that Dom(Greensmith - drums) wasn’t too happy, and when we started meeting up again to play some live gigs we had booked in Japan and the UK, y’know, he said he was gonna leave the band and that was that.”

Shanghaiing a fill-in drummer and hitting the road once again, the band stumbled onward for six months or so… but the dye had been cast. “It was pretty obvious that we needed to stop really,” Stringer says. “We was a band that would go out and it felt like a gang really, we could play anywhere in the world and it would work. Weren’t scared of anything, weren’t scared of anyone, just go out and do it.

“So that’s quite a good vibe to be in that situation, and to turn that last six months into it sorta feeling a bit like work, I think it was time to draw up the old drawbridge and get back in the shell. I had a young family as well by 2003 and I wanted to hang out with them rather than trawl about and not feel good about myself. So we quit it while we were ahead. And I didn’t make music. I didn’t do anything for probably three years.”

But now, a decade down the line, that last pre-breakup album has been compiled, re-mastered, pressed onto vinyl and finally released alongside the band’s entire back catalogue. They’re back on the road, playing to packed houses in the UK. It’s now Australia’s turn. “We all met up,” Stringer says of the band’s reunion, “had a beer and a curry and it all seemed to work out well. The shows were offered to us and we said ‘let’s give it a stab!’. To be honest, that relief when you’ve sold the venues out again... you’re like ‘Jesus, this must have related to people the first time round and people still want to hear it.’ So, it’s a good vibe!”

And just as Australia seemed to embrace Reef the first time around, the band are keen to once again embrace down under. “Yeah, it’s really cool actually,” Stringer says of the current tour. “I mean that genuinely, y’know? It’s not taken for granted. I think when you’ve had a break away from something you appreciate it. It means a great deal to us.”