The Wombats heading to Splendour In The Grass

IT is a gutsy music man who signs off on a Twin Peaks meets Twilight video treatment for a song about a fight he had with his wife.

Matthew “Murph” Murphy, frontman of English band The Wombats, loves the rather violent clip which ends with a female werewolf taking revenge on the bunch of rednecks who dragged her out to the woods to kill her.

Murph explains the song, Lemon To A Knife Fight, was inspired by a fight he had with his wife Akemi, who he married last year, while they were in the car on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles.

“Oh yeah, she heard a demo of it; she likes being in the songs,” he says.

“She’s just jealous of all the other women in other songs. That has become increasingly more of the issue.

“But it’s fine, you’ve both just got to laugh about it.”

The band, who have been making Australian alternative music fans dance and often laugh for the past decade, provoked another fit of giggles with the video for Cheetah Tongue, ahead of the release of their new record Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life this week.

This video is tapping into the senior citizen craze sweeping pop music off the back of the success of Macklemore’s Glorious video, featuring his 100-year-old grandmother Helen Schott.

The Wombats enlisted some sassy grandmas for the 80s-inspired workout video, wisely ruling out sporting spandex themselves.

“No, no, no; that’s long been considered one of the greatest mistakes doing that, since they wore (spandex) in that Cliff Richards’ song,” he says, referencing the 1981 classic rollerskating clip for Wired For Sound.

No doubt the Cheetah Tongue video will inspire many of the outfits of their fans when the band return to tour here this year, reportedly with a return visit to Splendour In the Grass.

“I know when we are coming but I can’t say. We will have five or six shows there this year,” Murph says.

Their previous three records, A Guide To Love, Loss & Desperation (2007), This Modern Glitch (2011) and Glitterbug (2015) have generated 10 entries to the annual Triple J Hottest 100 poll, including Let’s Dance To Joy Division, Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves), Greek Tragedy and Your Body Is A Weapon.

Lemon To A Knife Fight clocked in at a very respectable No. 22 in this year’s poll, signalling their new record should enjoy a top 10 debut next week.

Beautiful People Will Ruin You was “quite a mission” to make, with the Liverpool-born band scattered around the world, Murph now based in Los Angeles, drummer Dan Haggis in London and bassist Tord Øverland Knudsen in Oslo.

Besides the geographical constraints of getting on the same page, Murph placed musical limits on the trio in the studio, banning the gratuitous use of the distinctive synth sound of Glitterbug.

That proclamation didn’t go down well.

“I really didn’t want to do it again,” he says. “And that led to me being a bit of a pariah in the studio. As soon as the synths came out, I would be ‘No’. I didn’t win all my battles.

“It would have been so easy for us to pull out a load of synths and give it the thumbs up.”

Murph wasn’t so much listening to Radioheads’s In Rainbows or Arctic Monkeys’ A.M. record for inspiration but their aesthetic certainly influenced his goals for Beautiful People.

“They were inspiring me in that they will be classic records in the next 20 years, and I’m not saying this one is, but I wanted to give it a good chance,” he says.

Lyrically, Murph says his wrestle with the demands of an adult life proved to be a deep well to draw from. Being in a band can make it easy to avoid growing up, to be Peter Pan as long as the musical life is sustainable, and the frontman and songwriter says “adulting is f---ing hard.”

Like a disturbing proportion of his musical peers, Murph has struggled with anxiety and depression.

“Being in a band for 11 years now professionally can out you into a state of arrested development and the real world will smack you in the face,” he says.

“I think if I had a more normal, stable life and was at home more, it would be easier to be level-headed and a bit less crazy.”

The Wombats are renowned for enjoying the particular kind of crazy which greets them in Australia.

Their incendiary shows — they are truly one of the best live bands in the world — are celebrated with the same joie de vivre into the early hours of the morning before they head back to the hotel for a 5am lobby call to head to the next town. And then they do it all again.

“Every time I enter Australia, it always seems like a bit of a dream. The shows are so good and I feel everybody gets the band,” he says.

“When we are there, I feel like Australia is this whirlwind and occasionally you find yourself in the eye of the storm and then it sucks you back to somewhere. So that’s why we are always excited to get back there.”

Beautiful People Will Ruin You (Warner) out now.