Poison City is thrilled to introduce you to Fancy Weapon, a new Melbourne-based group featuring musicians that have all spent decades in the rock n roll game & continue to leave indelible marks across the underground music landscape. Fancy Weapon are Mick Turner, Claire Birchall, Joel Silbersher and Guy Maddison. Their first single ’Squid’, with a lead vocal by Claire, who also produced the single’s video, is out today in the digital world with the debut album set for JUNE 19th.
Fancy Weapon’s debut album will be available on limited edition ‘Deep Sea Blue’ colour vinyl (first 100 copies signed by the band!), CD and all digital stores world-wide.Preorders available now via Poison City E-Store and Bandcamp.
And ahead of the album’s release Melbourne audiences will have two opportunities to catch Fancy Weapon live:
Friday May 1st at the Thornbury Bowlo, with Savak (from Brooklyn)
Saturday May 30th at The Corner, with Tortoise (from Chicago).
Fancy Weapon. An unlikely band name and a most unlikely band. With a line up as unexpected as a ball of lightning, the band sees a cross-generational bunch of Melbourne music perennials – Mick Turner, Joel Silbersher and Claire Birchall – joined by recent transplant Guy Maddison, to make a singular brand of minimalist, incandescent guitar-heavy rock music in the manner that other singular, minimalist, incandescent guitar-heavy rock bands have been making for 50 years or so.
The “Melbourne music perennials” thing is key here, even if Guy is a latecomer to the local scene. In a city of dedicated musicians, the Fancy Weapon people are dedicated. They’re not kids, but they all still play in multiple bands. They all have always played in multiple bands. Music oozes from the pores of all four. Indeed, it pours from the ooze of Fancy Weapon.
Guy Maddisoncame out of the 80’s Perth Punk Rock scene in the band Greenhouse Effect. Relocating with the Effect to Sydney, he soon started throwing musical mudpies around with Lubricated Goat, whose “In The Raw” ABC TV escapades and a contract with Minneapolis based Amphetamine Reptile Records saw them touring the US in the late 80’s. In 1992 Maddison relocated, with Sydney based band Monroe’s Fur, to Seattle, where he joined the Seattle based incarnation of Adelaide band Bloodloss, working again alongside longtime collaborator Martin Bland (the two are still active in La Paire D’Or) and Mark Arm. Recordings on In The Red and RepriseRecords ensued. Guy joined Mudhoney in 2001, replacing original bassist Matt Lukin, and remains the 4-stringer for Seattle’s finest to this day. Returning to Australia in the post pandemic malaise of 2022, he hooked up with old friend MIck Turner, who invited him to join in on what would soon become Fancy Weapon.
Claire Birchall has been making music for the last 30-odd years and is prolific as hell too. Coming out of the Geelong scene in the ’90s, Claire avoided Geetroit expectations and made her mark as a somewhat experimental DIY solo artist before leading bands including Paper Planes and the Phantom Hitchhikers in Melbourne. In more recent years she has charted another new course as a solo synth-pop artist (on Melbourne’s It Records) while at the same time constantly collaborating. Concurrent with Fancy Weapon, Claire is a mainstay of Kim Salmon’s Smoked Salmon project. Her most recent solo album is 2024’s The Haunting. Usually playing guitar or keyboards as well as singing, Claire came into Fancy Weapon as the drummer and co-wrote and sung a handful of songs on this first album. She’ll be doing more of that on the next one.
Joel Silbersher, at the age of 15 in 1986, wrote and sung a song called “My Pal”, which he’s been trying to avoid ever since. A huge influence on the whole Melbourne/Geelong scene that followed – Magic Dirt, Spiderbait, through to the Drones et al – Joel and his fellow botherers in GOD were too troublesome to cash in their indie chart-topping chips for Triple J success in the ’90s. But Joel’s next group Hoss did become standard bearers of a certain type of Melbourne rock in the 90s, before expanding their horizons to create music that has is closely connected to what Joel is doing with Fancy Weapon. Having made a number of solo records (including one, in 2002, for Mick Turner’s King Crab label), Joel has also worked with The Sunset Strip, Charlie Owens (in the duo Tendrils), played occasional bass for the Dirty Three, Tex Perkins and the Simon Juliff Band, and has been sitting on a ‘new’ Hoss album for at least ten years while he finishes the lyrics. Joel’s long-held desire to form a band with Mick Turner has significantly shaped the band that Fancy Weapon has become.
And finally there’s Mick Turner himself. Seen now as something of a musical citizen of the world with the internationally revered Dirty Three, Mick is primarily a Melbourne musician, and has been since he deafened punk audiences with the Sick Things at the beginning of the ’80s. Admittedly he did spend time in the UK in the ‘80s with the Moodists (alongside Dave Graney and Clare Moore) but his iconoclastic and noisy outfits Fungus Brains and Venom P Stinger both had strong local roots, and existed before Mick seemingly became the milder post-rock musician we hear in Dirty Three (and more recently Mess Esque and Bleak Squad). While Fancy Weapon don’t reach Sick Things levels of volume, distortion or belligerence, the band does show that Mick is still happy to sometimes help whip up some sonic disturbance with a clobbering rhythm section for support.
First playing out in early 2025, Fancy Weapon have a number of well-received local shows with the likes of The Double, The Beasts, Penny Ikinger and Toody Cole of Dead Moon behind them, and now, with their first album finished and ready for release, they are set to take on the world.
Fancy Weapon’s self-titled first album was recorded in a single session at Finn Keane’s Head Gap studios in Preston in late 2024, about a week before the studio burned to the ground after a neighbouring business was criminally torched. Further mixing sessions were completed at another venue under the name Head Gap. The album was engineered by Finn Keane and produced by Finn and Fancy Weapon.
The album reflects a self-assured and creative outfit bursting at the seams with ideas. Joel and Claire share lead vocals – Joel on more than half the songs, Claire on three of them, and they share a duet. The vocal melodies are ragged but beautiful as are their occasional harmonies. Joel and Mick share the guitars, and, as a cursory listen reveals, it is very much a guitar record. They are two very distinctive players, and their singular styles mesh spectacularly. Guy on bass and Claire on drums lay solid, powerful and always gripping and striking foundations. It all gets back to that minimalist, incandescent guitar-heavy rock music that we mentioned earlier, and Fancy Weapon do it so well.
Contact Fancy Weapon –
fancyweaponmusic@gmail.com / www.facebook.com/fancyweapon / www.instagram.com/fancyweapon
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