May 1, 2025 • 8 mins
Pseudo Echo's Love An Adventure is about to turn 40 years old and the band are on the road again with some shows. Lead singer Brian Canham came into the studio to reminisce with Clairsy & Lisa where they talked about the multi generational age groups at their gigs now, the importance Molly Meldrum had in launching their career and why they knocked back the chance to tour America with Madonna.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
A Harvard Adventure for the mighty Pseudo Echo.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
It feels like yesterday. Bar that album is turning forty
and to celebrate, you can catch Ptudo Echo tonight at
the Rosemann Hotel, tomorrow at the Prince of Wales Hotel
in Bumbury, and then Port Beach Brewery in Frio on Sunday.
Tickets for all the shows are through Pseudo Echo dot net.
Briancanum is with us now, good morning.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Good morning.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
So you know does feel like yesterday?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, well, I'm sure we stopped to think about how
it was when I.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Hear it, and when I perform it feels like that.
It's only when I said the old video clips that
it feels a little bit longer.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yes, like your hair. That's right. I feel a little
bit dated. Maybe we're just talking off here about how
kids teenagers but living little kids. You can go to
a big bash game and so kids dancing to funky
town and a lot of movies and TV have helped that. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
I've been lucky with a bit of placement in that
always good.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Yeah. So I'm sorry, No, they're just going to say
gigs you must see the multiple multiple generations.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Yeah, yeah. We It started quite a few back, you know,
we started to see kind of mums with their kids,
dads with their sons, and then and then eventually just
the kids. And so there's this little tribe of youngies
at our gigs now and it's kind of surreal.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
It's awesome. So it's the fortieth anniversary of Love and Adventure,
the band's biggest album. How much of the album will
you play at these celebration shows?
Speaker 3 (01:27):
We play most of it. We sometimes rotate the songs, right,
if we play sort of the whole album, some just
don't transcend very well live, and that's probably why we
haven't played them over the years. But we do rotate
it a bit, and we put some in that we
haven't played for forty years. So yeah, you know that
even took us a few shows for us to break
(01:48):
the cobwebs off and kind of feel comfortable playing them.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
When you're doing a show, do you ever sort of
go along and you kind of have a set list
and then but you start to get a feel like,
you know what, I feel that this audience it's going
to love this song. Let's chuck this in.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Yeah, absolutely, And sometimes the reverse happens you're all excited,
you go, this one's going to knock them dead. We
haven't played this forever and we are.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Putting this in.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
We put it in and it's kind of like everyone
scratching their head, sure what it is.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
So we learned pretty quickly. The set we have is
a killer set.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
It's a real cross section of all albums and focused
on the Love and Eventure album and as I said,
you know, pulling out some songs we haven't played for
a long time. So yeah, it's fun. You know, I've
got a couple of girls in the band now in
these days six piece band, so it's a real vibe
on stage, and they really bring it home like it's
quite a young band I have these days, and they
(02:40):
really they really embrace it. They respect that original sound
and you know, we do a lot of work fine
tuning it so it sounds We wanted to really transport
people back.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah. I always thought with the success of Listening and
Funky Town and that is the title track from this album,
Love and eventually got a little bit lost, I was
sort of an underrated It's a great Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
It's one of those it's very popular live and it
did pretty well. You know, but it was maybe it was,
you know, just a positioning of where it was released
on the album, but maybe got in a top twenty
or top ten or something like that. So we weren't
upset about it. But yeah, it's one of those songs
and there it's maybe the most re recorded song of
(03:21):
Pseudo's that it must have the most versions that we've
done with that song.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Oh really, you know, we.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Recently did the Machine remix of it, which is pretty crazy. Yeah,
there's an acoustic version of it, there's a chill out
version of it. There's an unplugged version of it. Oh,
it just goes on whatever your mood.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
There is a love and adventure for it is one
next time.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Actually, I was going to ask you about the Machine remix.
I believe that has a sort of darker electronic vibe
about us.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Yeah, this which which was kind of influenced by how
the band was evolving live. Yeah, I'm hard with remixes.
I'm always a bit touchy with remixes. I don't like
people touching my stuff fair enough, you know, And I
think you know, fans, you know, they like Pseudo worko,
they like our brand, our sound. I just it looks
(04:07):
sometimes they're great and sometimes they're just off the track
and then people are going, what the hell are you doing?
So with the machine remixes, which I've only done the
first two songs of the album due to touring and
limitations in the studio, but we are working through doing
all the old singles as that sort of flavor, just
as another point of view, you know, and it does
(04:28):
retain some of the sort of energy the band has live.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
But how important was Molly Molly Meldren with that the
early days was a legend.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
He is such a great guy for us. I mean, look,
you know, as a kid, when I say kid, when
I was barely eighteen, I used to go to a
nightclub in the northern suburbs of Melbourne and.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
I'd go there like every Thursday night.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
It was.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
It was a sort of pumping night and I'd just
go to check out the music and Molly was the
resident DJ there And so I actually met him through
a friend and he introduced me and you know, Molly,
would you know, he's just some young kid that sort
of obsessed obsessively listening, listening every week, you know, to
the tunes and making notes and you know, I.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Was pretty peculiar.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
I guess everyone else was dancing while I was just
making notes. And then a few years went by and
you know, I started Pseudos and we started, you know,
started getting good crowds, and so somebody tipped him off
and said, you got to see this band.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Now.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
He had no idea that I was in that band.
So when he came to see us, he was so
taken back because you know, I was a bit more
animated on stage than when he'd seen me as as
a young teenager. And it was so we had this
very nice, sort of serendipitous meeting again and he just
took us under his wing. He was so sold on
(05:39):
the band and said, you guys are you know, got
so much potential and this and that, and we were
really grateful we'd only been together a year, and yeah,
he pretty much everything. He pretty much called up our
manager within a few days after seeing us and said
I want to have the band on countdown and lit
a bit of a feature. And we were just falling
over because firstly, we didn't have a record to go
(06:01):
on with and say he's our single. We were unsigned,
and so kind of made history, you know, and it
was it was a big deal. But he's just a champ,
you know, he really really believed in the band. There
was never any sort of superficial stuff with Molly. It
was always the real deal.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
I love that he called and said, yeah, absolutely, He's
very passionate question inquiring minds. I wanted to know for
a long time, is it true that you knocked back
going on tour with Madonna?
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Brian? I know as soon as the word I know
where I'm going. Yeah, true, it is true.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
It is true.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
I should explain. Yes.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
So the eighties were choofing along and we'd released you know,
tom La Park Love and Adventure Funky Town, and pressure
was on for this third album and they were saying, guys,
we want to rock it up a bit. You know,
bon Jovia having hit you know, Van Halen and having
a comeback topper in the charts. Hard, all these American
stadium rock bown having careers again, you know, from being
(07:03):
swamped with the electro eighties, all of a sudden we
turned around and went a bit rock. So record company
management guys, we need we need some rock tunes. And
you know, I grew up in the seventies noodles of
rock songs and so it was like, okay, you want
me to go back and then we'll sort of you know,
resuscitate some of those old tunes and so all this
talk about you know, rock rock rock. Then we're touring America,
(07:26):
we're trialing out our news songs for this third album
race and then we get this offer. Guys, we've you know,
managed to procure the opening spot for Madonna. Maybe she'd
heard about us, and so we were sort of requested
in fact, and so we were so mad. Again, we
(07:47):
were so confused because here we are, we just made
this sort of turn. We were going to rock out,
and we're looking for you know, maybe we'll get on
with Love a Boy or you know, Haalen or.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Just grown the HAIRDL long. Yeah, and there we get.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
Offered them a Donna support and it was like, nah,
I just didn't sit right. We just knocked it back.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
It wasn't the right thing. It must have been the
first band.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
That's ever rejected her. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you know,
you've got got to stand your ground.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
She probably took a personally great story.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Better explain, Yeah, tells the story as well, Yeah, just
slightly differently.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Well.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Love and Adventure tonight at
the Rosemount, tomorrow at the Prince of Wales in Bumbury,
and then Sunday at Port Beach Brewery. Tickets through sudawayco
dot net. Lovely to have you come in this morning.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Pleasure, so good to see all those years we've been
playing things since at fantastic I can remember coming in.
Thank you guys.
A Harvard Adventure for the mighty Pseudo Echo.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
It feels like yesterday. Bar that album is turning forty
and to celebrate, you can catch Ptudo Echo tonight at
the Rosemann Hotel, tomorrow at the Prince of Wales Hotel
in Bumbury, and then Port Beach Brewery in Frio on Sunday.
Tickets for all the shows are through Pseudo Echo dot net.
Briancanum is with us now, good morning.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Good morning.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
So you know does feel like yesterday?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, well, I'm sure we stopped to think about how
it was when I.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Hear it, and when I perform it feels like that.
It's only when I said the old video clips that
it feels a little bit longer.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yes, like your hair. That's right. I feel a little
bit dated. Maybe we're just talking off here about how
kids teenagers but living little kids. You can go to
a big bash game and so kids dancing to funky
town and a lot of movies and TV have helped that. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
I've been lucky with a bit of placement in that
always good.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Yeah. So I'm sorry, No, they're just going to say
gigs you must see the multiple multiple generations.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Yeah, yeah. We It started quite a few back, you know,
we started to see kind of mums with their kids,
dads with their sons, and then and then eventually just
the kids. And so there's this little tribe of youngies
at our gigs now and it's kind of surreal.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
It's awesome. So it's the fortieth anniversary of Love and Adventure,
the band's biggest album. How much of the album will
you play at these celebration shows?
Speaker 3 (01:27):
We play most of it. We sometimes rotate the songs, right,
if we play sort of the whole album, some just
don't transcend very well live, and that's probably why we
haven't played them over the years. But we do rotate
it a bit, and we put some in that we
haven't played for forty years. So yeah, you know that
even took us a few shows for us to break
(01:48):
the cobwebs off and kind of feel comfortable playing them.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
When you're doing a show, do you ever sort of
go along and you kind of have a set list
and then but you start to get a feel like,
you know what, I feel that this audience it's going
to love this song. Let's chuck this in.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Yeah, absolutely, And sometimes the reverse happens you're all excited,
you go, this one's going to knock them dead. We
haven't played this forever and we are.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Putting this in.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
We put it in and it's kind of like everyone
scratching their head, sure what it is.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
So we learned pretty quickly. The set we have is
a killer set.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
It's a real cross section of all albums and focused
on the Love and Eventure album and as I said,
you know, pulling out some songs we haven't played for
a long time. So yeah, it's fun. You know, I've
got a couple of girls in the band now in
these days six piece band, so it's a real vibe
on stage, and they really bring it home like it's
quite a young band I have these days, and they
(02:40):
really they really embrace it. They respect that original sound
and you know, we do a lot of work fine
tuning it so it sounds We wanted to really transport
people back.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah. I always thought with the success of Listening and
Funky Town and that is the title track from this album,
Love and eventually got a little bit lost, I was
sort of an underrated It's a great Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
It's one of those it's very popular live and it
did pretty well. You know, but it was maybe it was,
you know, just a positioning of where it was released
on the album, but maybe got in a top twenty
or top ten or something like that. So we weren't
upset about it. But yeah, it's one of those songs
and there it's maybe the most re recorded song of
(03:21):
Pseudo's that it must have the most versions that we've
done with that song.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Oh really, you know, we.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Recently did the Machine remix of it, which is pretty crazy. Yeah,
there's an acoustic version of it, there's a chill out
version of it. There's an unplugged version of it. Oh,
it just goes on whatever your mood.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
There is a love and adventure for it is one
next time.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Actually, I was going to ask you about the Machine remix.
I believe that has a sort of darker electronic vibe
about us.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Yeah, this which which was kind of influenced by how
the band was evolving live. Yeah, I'm hard with remixes.
I'm always a bit touchy with remixes. I don't like
people touching my stuff fair enough, you know, And I
think you know, fans, you know, they like Pseudo worko,
they like our brand, our sound. I just it looks
(04:07):
sometimes they're great and sometimes they're just off the track
and then people are going, what the hell are you doing?
So with the machine remixes, which I've only done the
first two songs of the album due to touring and
limitations in the studio, but we are working through doing
all the old singles as that sort of flavor, just
as another point of view, you know, and it does
(04:28):
retain some of the sort of energy the band has live.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
But how important was Molly Molly Meldren with that the
early days was a legend.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
He is such a great guy for us. I mean, look,
you know, as a kid, when I say kid, when
I was barely eighteen, I used to go to a
nightclub in the northern suburbs of Melbourne and.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
I'd go there like every Thursday night.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
It was.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
It was a sort of pumping night and I'd just
go to check out the music and Molly was the
resident DJ there And so I actually met him through
a friend and he introduced me and you know, Molly,
would you know, he's just some young kid that sort
of obsessed obsessively listening, listening every week, you know, to
the tunes and making notes and you know, I.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Was pretty peculiar.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
I guess everyone else was dancing while I was just
making notes. And then a few years went by and
you know, I started Pseudos and we started, you know,
started getting good crowds, and so somebody tipped him off
and said, you got to see this band.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Now.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
He had no idea that I was in that band.
So when he came to see us, he was so
taken back because you know, I was a bit more
animated on stage than when he'd seen me as as
a young teenager. And it was so we had this
very nice, sort of serendipitous meeting again and he just
took us under his wing. He was so sold on
(05:39):
the band and said, you guys are you know, got
so much potential and this and that, and we were
really grateful we'd only been together a year, and yeah,
he pretty much everything. He pretty much called up our
manager within a few days after seeing us and said
I want to have the band on countdown and lit
a bit of a feature. And we were just falling
over because firstly, we didn't have a record to go
(06:01):
on with and say he's our single. We were unsigned,
and so kind of made history, you know, and it
was it was a big deal. But he's just a champ,
you know, he really really believed in the band. There
was never any sort of superficial stuff with Molly. It
was always the real deal.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
I love that he called and said, yeah, absolutely, He's
very passionate question inquiring minds. I wanted to know for
a long time, is it true that you knocked back
going on tour with Madonna?
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Brian? I know as soon as the word I know
where I'm going. Yeah, true, it is true.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
It is true.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
I should explain. Yes.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
So the eighties were choofing along and we'd released you know,
tom La Park Love and Adventure Funky Town, and pressure
was on for this third album and they were saying, guys,
we want to rock it up a bit. You know,
bon Jovia having hit you know, Van Halen and having
a comeback topper in the charts. Hard, all these American
stadium rock bown having careers again, you know, from being
(07:03):
swamped with the electro eighties, all of a sudden we
turned around and went a bit rock. So record company
management guys, we need we need some rock tunes. And
you know, I grew up in the seventies noodles of
rock songs and so it was like, okay, you want
me to go back and then we'll sort of you know,
resuscitate some of those old tunes and so all this
talk about you know, rock rock rock. Then we're touring America,
(07:26):
we're trialing out our news songs for this third album
race and then we get this offer. Guys, we've you know,
managed to procure the opening spot for Madonna. Maybe she'd
heard about us, and so we were sort of requested
in fact, and so we were so mad. Again, we
(07:47):
were so confused because here we are, we just made
this sort of turn. We were going to rock out,
and we're looking for you know, maybe we'll get on
with Love a Boy or you know, Haalen or.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Just grown the HAIRDL long. Yeah, and there we get.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
Offered them a Donna support and it was like, nah,
I just didn't sit right. We just knocked it back.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
It wasn't the right thing. It must have been the
first band.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
That's ever rejected her. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you know,
you've got got to stand your ground.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
She probably took a personally great story.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Better explain, Yeah, tells the story as well, Yeah, just
slightly differently.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Well.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Love and Adventure tonight at
the Rosemount, tomorrow at the Prince of Wales in Bumbury,
and then Sunday at Port Beach Brewery. Tickets through sudawayco
dot net. Lovely to have you come in this morning.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Pleasure, so good to see all those years we've been
playing things since at fantastic I can remember coming in.
Thank you guys.
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