SPOD is a compound: simultaneously a band, music producer, pseudonym, solo performer and video director. Brent Griffin, the man behind SPOD, just comes that way: multipurpose, amalgamating the kind of extensive resume that’ll make you wonder when normal stuff like sleep ever happens.
Photos by Liam Cameron.
“I still like to be on the borderline of control” SPOD’s vast career has taken nothing from his erratic and explosive personality nor his endless creativity
His career tunnels back some 20 years, releasing multiple EPs and albums, the latest being Taste The Sadness, an all grown up reworking of his debut album, Taste The Radness, which he’d released a decade earlier. Matured, it’s a bittersweet celebration of age and wisdom, accepting the inevitability that life can’t be an eternity of hurtling from one debauched nightclub to another.
Not surprisingly then, he’s a busy man, hard to peg down, but kind enough to take some time out from his trip to LA to speak to Happy. In our interview, SPOD speaks of the various influences that inspired such an illustrious career.
HAPPY: Did you have any family or friends who played music that influenced you?-
SPOD: Zero family interest in anything musical, but in my last few years of high school, I befriended our high school’s sports star, Mike Rickards. We would chat about music, skateboarding and video games, and became fast friends. When we left school, I did an office traineeship and he went to uni and we both independently heard Ween and lost our minds.
When we next met, we both confessed that we loved this Push Th’ Little Daisies song to each other – quite sheepishly, as everyone else reacted terribly to that news. From that moment, we clicked into a high gear, decided to borrow a four track from his uni, started looping Beastie Boys beats on my CD player and named ourselves Jizm till we found out what it meant, so then changed our name to SPOD.
SPOD was a duo for about six years, and we had Andy Clockwise come in on drums on his school holidays for some shows and jams up to when Mike finished uni and moved to Armidale to teach. Andy was Mike’s girlfriend’s little brother. Mike and I wanted a drummer to jam with, and Mike mentioned Andy could play the drums, so we got him over. He was immediately into what we were doing and we became immediate friends.
He was mature for his age, and Mike and I were immature for ours, so it all worked out. He’s a bit of a musical savant, so it was good having him tell us how song structure worked while we just bashed away at whatever. I played some two piece shows with Andy, but put it on a back burner till I decided to keep writing songs by myself at Andy’s insistence. This is what drove me to move into the solo version of SPOD. Mike and Andy were my biggest influences in making me want to create music the way I do.
Keep an eye out for the full SPOD interview in the upcoming Happy Mag Issue 2. Get your copy at the Happy store.
