Q&A With Kim Moyes Of The Presets: Let’s Party Like It’s 2005

By Mikey Carr

Let’s face it, if you read this website odds are you have had a chemically uninhibited coming of age moment while listening to The Presets. Was it Are You The One? Maybe My People for you younger ones? Were you pashing on with a crush or had you just shelved a pill for a first time and were starting be whisked away on that magic carpet rising in your gut? Whatever your Presets moments was (mine was coming up on a candy-flip seeing them live before Daft Punk) or even if you never actually had one yourself (not one of us!!!) the mark that Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes have left on Australian dance music is undeniable.

Successful, one of them a parent and approaching middle age though, this might be the time you’d expect the band to start trotting out Christmas albums or compilations of duets and standards. Not the case for these two die hard dance music fans, Moyes and Hamilton teaming up with House Of Mince to throw Last Exit, a bit fuck you to the lockout laws to be held at The Red Rattler in Marrickville on Sunday 24th April.

Sporting an epic line up including a DJ set from The Presets themselves as well as Massimiliano Pagliara (Ostgut Ton – Berlin) with live shows from Zero Percent and Mike Callander (Melb) among many others, tickets have understandably already sold out (there will be some limited available on the door). With the event barely a week away we caught up with drummer and producer Moyes to discuss what made the band want to throw a party, as well as ongoing work on the new album

Heaps Gay: It’s interesting to me that at an age and time in your lives when some might expect you to be settling down and maybe even support these laws you guys are out there fighting to keep the city partying?

Kim Moyes: Hahah, I’ll do everything to defend your right to party children.  The other thing that is important to me though is that even though I am older and I am a parent this is a lifestyle for me. This experience. This music. It’s different for me, I’m a producer and I’m working in it shackled to my 16 year old dream of being a rockstar, but I still think there are a lot of people out there my age, especially in the LGBTIQ community who feel this is a family, this is a lifestyle. This isn’t just something we did while we were at uni and before we settled down. I would be happy for my son to coming to these parties I’m putting on when he’s old enough. You know as long as it’s not embarrassing for him.

You know some people need church, and some people need to rave.

HG: Exactly. The laws dismiss anything that happens after 1:30am as debauchery, and essentially tells anyone who had chosen to lead an alternate lifestyle that relied on late night revelry that they should move on. When the Premier is an avowed Christian as well, being queer it’s hard not to feel your lifestyle is being discriminated against.

KM: It’s not only that. It’s people who want to stay awake past 9:30, the whole things stinks of moralistic judgement, and that’s where it all get’s me the most. And you know it’s dangerous territory for me, talking about religion, but I respect our Premier’s views and his beliefs,  I just wish he’d respect mine.

HG: How does this all relate to the new album then? You guys have always had a social aspect to your music, has the current climate influenced the new material at all?

KM: I think we are a band that cares about stuff, if you want to put it intellectually. I mean the new album, we’re still working on it, it’s still a ways away from being finished and there is not very much I can say about it. I think that Last Exit and the album are somehow linked, like they’re coming from a similar place at a root level. But on another level, and as I said before, the music makes the most sense for us when it is being experienced by people, and I think Last Exit is a good chance for us to poke our heads out of the studio for a bit and dip into the experience again bring that back into the studio and let them feed of each other.

HG: Where did the idea for Last Exit start? Have you been thinking about it for a while or was it more a reaction to the lockouts?

KM: Jules and I had been talking about doing a night or a party for a while. And while there were others reasons we had for putting on a party, mainly we just wanted to put on a party. We’ve been out of an album cycle for so long you know, and you start to go a little bit mad when you are working on party music in the studio all the time and you don’t actually get out there and hear it in the the flesh.

So we had been really excited to throw a party and play some music that’ we’ve been working on and some music that we really love for a while, and then towards the end of last year we started speaking to some different promoters up here about doing something. It came close with a couple of other people, which for whatever reason didn’t work out. Then of course Pete Lovertits’ parties are legendary, and I remembered I’d went to one a few years ago when we were making Pacifica and it really struck a chord, and it was just a proper gritty warehouse party, with a ghetto vibe and so I approached him.

We started to get together and talk about different ideas that we could do and then around that time it was New Years and Kooky were putting on their New Years Day party which we both went down to at The Red Rattler which just had such a great vibe. So we wanted to do something similar and although we had a couple of other venues in the back of our minds but The Rattler ended up being the one we went with, which was great. The Kooky Party was just so good, it was a world class vibe there, the music was on point the crowd was so awesome, so lovely, it was the best way to see in the New Year, so if we could harness any of that energy that would be great.

HG: Do you feel some responsibility to support the city during it’s current time of need having come up in a time when the city’s nightlife was really coming into it’s own?

KM: Yeah definitely, and that was certainly one of the driving forces inputting this party on. Seeing what has happened to Sydney recently has been really been heartbreaking. Remembering a time when I was at uni and Julian and I would go out specifically to discover music and people who were interested in what we were interested in. Even just discovering things to find interesting. At that age you don’t really know what you’re interested in and almost everything you discover is this little beacon of light for you to kind of live your life by and the more experiences you have the better.

And while I think the nightlife has been grievously harmed by these lockout laws, there is no shortage of good things to go to. All over summer House Of Mince were doing OpenAir’s at the Factory, Astral People were putting on Summer Dance at the National Art School, Harpoon Harry’s is always going off and 77 has just opened up again. There is more than enough things to go, so I feel like it’s easy for us to sit here and say that the nightlife in Sydney sucks, but its not exactly true. Recently I’ve had some time down in Melbourne, and there is definitely more things going on and more choice and flexibility in terms of when you can go and check things out, but in Sydney I feel we have still adapted well to the situation.

I still think it should be better and we should have our freedom back, but what we wanted to kind of show is that if you really want to put on a party you can, if you really want to have a good time and if you really want to get together with your community just do it.

HG: Yeah I feel the bigger issue in Sydney at the moment isn’t so much lack of options as it is a morale issue, people feeling hopeless, in which case artists like you guys with a lot of profile can show those people who might not be as plugged into what’s going on that there are still great parties happening.

KM: Totally, if you still want to have a good time you can still come and have a good time. This is the thing though, before the lockouts happened, it was kind of easy to take for granted that we lived in a city that was always open. And then all of a sudden that get’s taken away and you think ‘fuck that!’ This experience has been taken away and, while maybe I wasn’t that involved in it at the time, I remember a time when it was really important to me.

And I think that’s the general feeling amongst everybody, and especially since it’s gathered momentum in the last few months, is that now is not only the time to protest the laws but to also throw your finger up to authority and saywell fuck it. We’re still going to have a good time, regardless of whether you say we can have it, and going out and supporting those people who are still throwing parties and those who’ve been giving people great things to do in this city all these years. That’s why we went with the line-up we did, it’s not hip young things, it’s established reliable people who have devoted their lives to entertaining us in Sydney and Melbourne. Veteran DJs who know what the fuck they’re doing and it’s a guaranteed killer party. That element is very important and exciting to me.

Last Exit takes over The Red Rattler in Marrickville on Sunday 24th April from 2pm – 4am