Aussie Rules

BRINGING THE THUNDER FROM DOWN UNDER, THE CHATS ARE THE WORLD’S HOTTEST NEW PUNK BAND, LOVED BY IGGY POP AND DAVE GROHL. BUT AS GUITARIST JOSH ‘PRICEY’ PRICE ADMITS: “THERE ARE SONGS ON OUR RECORD THAT I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO PLAY!”

- Jonathan Horsley

When we talk punk rock we often talk about three chords and those being enough to capture its whole aesthetic. As though that’s all you need. But that alone doesn’t get you there. You’ve got to find a way of capturing a punk intensity, of getting that attitude into a recording. The Chats, a gloriously unworked and uncouth punk trio from Queensland, Australia, applied a simple rule to the making of their debut album High Risk Behaviour: you get three takes and that’s it.

As guitarist Josh “Pricey” Price tells it, forget rehearsals. Playing in The Chats isn’t an office job. “We’d just go into the studio with no songs and then whack for a day and come out with four,” he says. “And we don’t really know how to play them still. There are like four songs on the record that I don’t even know how to play.” Does he worry about having to play them live? “I am a big fan of Joe Walsh and he said, ‘If you act like you know what you are doing, everybody thinks you do,’” says Pricey. “That’s a good bit of advice, I reckon.”