.png)
.png)
Interview: Gut Health
- Jack Montague
- Jun 9
- 8 min read
Interviewed by Jack Montague
The much-adored Naarm six-piece dance-punk rock band Gut Health are steadily preparing to scintillate a crowd of loyal East Coast fans at Brisbane’s upcoming ‘Against The Grain’ one-day festival on the 20th of June. In a recent interview, lead vocalist Athina Uh Oh and I got talking about all things to do with art and creative process. In this chat, you’ll hear about everything from 1970s New York to Athina’s takes on queerness, S&M, and recording a new album.
How did Gut Health begin for you, and where did you all start making music together?
We were one of those projects that came out of COVID times. During the hectic lockdown times in Naarm, Adam (bassist) and I were dating and kind of in our honeymoon phase. The only place you were allowed to go was an intimate partner’s house. I was lucky that I had my share house with some amazing artists, and so did Adam. Both houses had an artistic energy with lots of music moving through them.
We just started having all this time to make a project together, thinking about all the intersections of our tastes and something we would want to create together. And through writing little melodies and things, we ended up with some songs, and sent those back and forth to Dom. I was an art school kid who had never really played an instrument, but I knew all these people in the music scene. So that was also how I met Micah and Eloise. We all linked up when lockdowns eased up, and Gut Health was born.
Of course, we managed to play one gig at Footscray Bowls Club and got sent straight back into lockdown! Angus came on a bit later. We actually met because I dropped my phone on the ground in the middle of the road somewhere and forgot about it. Then, a few hours later, I got a call from this random Samaritan who had rescued my phone, and it happened to be Angus. Literally could have been anyone in Melbourne!
It makes so much sense that out of a dark and boring time came this explosive, energetic sound. What is the value of punk to you as an artist, and what inspired this “dance-punk” sound?
We were so inspired by the cross-pollination of scenes and genres in 70s and 80s New York, when uptown and downtown were mixed between punk and disco. Then, in London, there was this mix between dub and guitar music that was happening. We just thought that was really valuable, and as somebody who has grown up really loving dance floors in clubs as well as going to see a rock gig, I think at its core, what people are searching for in those spaces is the same. So, I wanted to honour how both rock and dance spaces have been outlets for me as I’ve grown up, and I think the other band members feel the same.
Gut Health gets me in an incredibly New York state of mind. You’ve got a very strident vocal style that I think takes a lot of artistic work to achieve, especially with using this to be the character you want to be onstage. How do you get into the headspace to summon this kind of punk power?
I still get nervous and wonder what it is that I’m accessing onstage, to be honest. But it remains the only space where, when I’m up there, it feels like pure catharsis. Having a place to let that out and wanting the audience to feel the same thing is special. I am a bit of an art wanker, but I definitely don’t want to take myself too seriously. There’s absurdity in the seriousness of the everyday experience, so I want to be able to point at that and find the absurdity in it all when I’m performing.
Were all six of you on the recording for Stiletto?
Yes, all six of us! We are very much a unit. Everything we do has only become more collaborative as time has gone on. And I think we really honour the kind of family element to the project.
The reason I asked is because it feels so evident when listening to the music that this is the case. There’s an incredible rhythm section - and I find, for example, on songs like Two Step, you guys reach a complete synergy as a group. Each contribution is bringing so much to the mix. Can you walk me through the process of how you create songs together as a band?
It used to be a bit different when we were starting out. We would usually start with a bass line and a melody. We’re a very bass-driven band. Then Dom would come in with some guitar parts, and we would sort of demo back and forth. But now it’s really collaborative, which has been amazing. For everyone’s birthday in the band, we will all put in money to get them a music-related gift. And for the last two Christmases, we’ve collectively funded a trip away altogether. Both times we ended up arriving, pressing ‘record’, and jamming for ten hours straight, working on an idea. And then Dom would go away and cut all the different ideas we’d had over the weekend, and we each chose our top favourites from the list and moulded those together. We were really inspired by Can, actually, and their creative process of writing. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently… How it would be super improvised, and then they would work on the building blocks after the fact.
Thinking more about narrative for what we’ve been working on at the moment, collaborating on what we’re trying to say, is also a really exciting process right now for me and the band.
It's awesome to hear that all six of you jam on ideas. It’s not that common to come across bands that work like that. On Stilleto, what were some of your favourite sonic elements that you ended up incorporating into the mix?
It’s all a learning process, and there are things I look back at now and have learned to focus on for the next album. Which was sort of the glory of it for me at the time, going through the first-ever process of recording an album. But yeah, I always love the textural elements and percussive samples and things that we end up adding later in the songs. There are some funny sounds like coins dropping and stuff like that, which bring weight to what the intention of the song is.
The genre-merging of dance and punk is a heavenly match. Another thing I think of when I think of you guys is the Vovos, and you are both bands with such loyal followings. What is the scene like in Naarm for this type of music, and how do you find audiences respond to a dance-punk sound?
It’s incredible. There’s so much amazing music of all different kinds, as well as some real old heads and lifers that keep everything going down here, keep the lights on in venues and so on. I’m so grateful to be surrounded by that. It’s such a melting pot at the moment. There’s a lot of post-punk and guitar music that’s much darker in comparison to things we’ve produced in the past, which is a trend I am noticing now. But there’s an amazing plasticity to this scene, and people are incredibly willing to listen to new stuff when it hits the blocks. There’s also a heap of musicians who are prepared to give new things a go, which keeps the wheel constantly turning.
I’m loving to see all of the different personalities and forms that punk is taking at the moment.
Yes! And sometimes I wonder if punk is even the best word for us because it’s such a loaded term in so many ways, but it’s true that it can take so many different shapes and forms now than it used to be able to.
Something I get really into is album covers. Your whole discography is amazing in this regard. How has your experience been with the visual side of things?
One of the beautiful things about music is that it can combine all these different mediums. And as someone coming from a visual arts background, questioning how we want to tell our story, the visuals feel super important and something we will keep bringing into the future. It’s so fun getting to experiment with that, and we were able to collaborate with some of my closest friends on this stuff. Ferg, who will be continuing to help us in the future, has collaborated with me on so many different things, even outside of this project, and it’s such fun to have this sense of alignment when dreaming up these concepts. I think that the visuals play a massive role in what we’re saying, especially as a band that likes to leave things up to interpretation. We want people to feel whatever they want to feel from the music.
I must ask - how was it touring with Primal Scream?
It was incredible, and Bobby was just such a sweet human. He came up to us immediately when we had our first gig in Melbourne and made us feel like we were talking to a mate. And you know, he’s so vocal about politics and has such a large platform, and the whole band were legends. A lot of the ways that Primal Scream has gone about producing their music and incorporating dance elements were so cool to see onstage.”
What are some of your favourite cultural moments that have influenced your vision for the band and as an artist?
While we work on this next album, I’ve been volunteering at an archive, and Eloise, who also plays in the band, is super fascinated with history and archives too. Digging into the past to understand our present and what my experience is in this setting has been really important for thinking about what to say lyrically. And over the summer holiday, I got into watching lots of Australian cinema from the 70s and 80s, and also documentaries. There’s this one called “Australia After Dark”, which is one of the first representations of more underground forms of art. It was the first exhibition of S&M and that kind of work in Australia. I’ve just been thinking a lot about place and time. I went and saw this movie called “Going Down” a couple of weeks ago, and it had all these heads, bands like Pell Mell on it. It was about to get thrown out, and then this distributor in New York had picked it up and brought it back to life. It had Gary Foley, who is an amazing Indigenous activist, and all these fabulous people in the 80s, just running around the streets in Sydney. The energy of some of these young women who wrote the script just felt so familiar to me. So I’m thinking, ‘how do things traverse over time, and what can be represented here in the music?”
One last question. What is your favourite or least favourite thing about Brisbane, and are you excited to play Against the Grain next month?
(Laughs) Every time we’ve played in Brisbane, the audiences have not been afraid to dance. I think people there appreciate live music in a different way because of the history of rock and punk there, and dance, too, for that matter. This can be different in some bigger cities. We are so grateful for that because it makes the shows so much fun. Getting the opportunity to travel and go up to Brisbane, I am always so grateful. There are so many great friends on the line-up. And my god, am I excited to play with Stereolab.
Gut Health are performing at Against The Grain Festival on June 20th.
