Late Arvo Sons

Text: Oliver Georgiou


This weekend in Melbourne Late Arvo Sons will be releasing their debut album Letters From Another Alphabet at the Birmingham Hotel in Fitzroy. With an edgy punk, hardcore, garage rock, bluesy sound it’s hard to put these guys into a basket, one thing for sure though is that they bring an electric energy to the stage that has heads nodding and feet tapping. I met with lead singer Mark Lording to share a few words on how they got together, the creative process behind their music and the actualisation of their album.

We are all mutual friends of the Eddy Current boys, I met Stuart and Kent through Brendan ’cause Stuart is a high school mate of his, and I met Frosty ’cause he was Mikey’s best mate and that’s all pretty much how we met each other. Mikey suggested “Oh, hey Frosty, Stu plays drums and Kent plays guitar why don’t you have a jam together?” So they jammed together for a couple of months before I came along when we were all out one night and Stu was drunk and asked “Do you wanna come and have a sing with our band? We’ve got a few songs you know, come along and have a jam.” That was in March of 2007. I had only ever attempted to sing a couple of times when I mucked around in this high school band, but pretty much had never sung. Within four or five jam sessions we had like six songs. Our first ever show was in late November of 2007 at the Cobra Bar in the Tote.

Normally Kent and Frosty will come up with a track, and then we all come into a rehearsal and jam it out. Sometimes I will already have pre-written lyrics written on scraps of paper that I fit over the tracks when we jam, but we always record our rehearsal on a four-track, so from there I can take a CD home and write lyrics to it that way. It’s a joy to go to rehearsal, its something we’re pumped about and we’re always in a rush to get there you know, its where we definitely want to be.

We recorded the album in December 2008 over two days at Revolver in Prahran with Mikey Young. Mikey is the guy that could capture a sound that we wanted, He recorded us on an eight-track reel-to-reel, old analogue style. He is one of the very few guys that I know of who still has that equipment and is actually using it. We all really like the live sound that it has, it captures us as a band and we wouldn’t want anything more polished than that because it wouldn’t do us as a band any favours, cause that’s the way we sound live. Recording the album was fairly relaxed, just drinking beers and trying to get the takes right. It was a fairly quick process really.

Late Arvo Sons is Mark Lording (vocals), Brett Frost (bass), Kent Thomas (guitar) and Stuart Reynolds (drums). Letters From Another Alphabet album launch, this Saturday September 12 at the Birmingham Hotel, 333 Smith St, Fitzroy. Doors open at 8pm, $10.