Tijuana Cartel's New Album Was Inspired By A Gonzo Radio Play

"I was in a car going up to the Sunshine Coast and someone played it," Paul George, one half of the songwriting team at the core of Gold Coast band Tijuana Cartel, explains of the genesis of their new album, Psychedelicatessan. What was being played was a surreal piece of Double J radio history, a gonzo radio play called What's Rangoon To You Is Grafton To Me, written and spoken by Russell Guy with veteran ABC TV newsreader, the late James Dibble.

"I hadn't heard it before and just thought it was great. I hadn't heard Australian writing like that anywhere before. So originally I thought I'd use it for one song and sample it a little bit, but then probably a year later I'd started using it between or on about three or four songs. So at some point it was, like, well, rather than just using little bits, maybe we can do an album that's kind of based with Rangoon. A lot of the lyrics are about travelling or stuff that happens on the road, so we thought that there was a parallel in there somewhere.

It's definitely not the same narrative but I think they work parallel to each other, hopefully complementing each other."

"At some point, I had to write to Russell to get permission, but he liked the idea that much that he ended up coming into the studio for a few days. So we tried to work on samples that we felt would work with our narrative and his narrative. It's definitely not the same narrative but I think they work parallel to each other, hopefully complementing each other."

For those who haven't heard What's Rangoon To You Is Grafton To Me, it's a little like The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy meets Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas without the sex, violence and massive ingestion of drugs. Meanwhile, there are moments on the album where George seems to channel his inner George Harrison, whether vocally or in the occasional slide guitar sweep, The Beatles yet another influential musical tributary. "That's a good compliment," he chuckles. Psychedelicatessan is pretty vocal-heavy for a Tijuana Cartel album.

"It just kind of happened that way. The last album we did [2011's M1] was pretty much all instrumental, so I think maybe we just wanted a break from that. But we finished probably about 30 songs and picked our favourites out of those to finish, and they just all had vocals in them. We literally started [Psychedelicatessan] back in 2011 and at one point we actually gave up on it 'cause we'd kind of done so much stuff that it got a bit daunting. Eventually, probably the start of this year we sat down and started trimming it down from what was and wasn't working and picked which ones we thought would suit the narrative of Russell's stuff but also that were good songs."