Words by Angus Thompson
Photos by Kate Balkanski

For those of you who didn’t witness Bag Raiders’ baptism of blam! – their debut live set during Australia’s recent Parklife festival tour, allow me to acquaint you. Bag Raiders are Sydney production, DJ and, now, performance duo Christopher and Jack. They released their EP through the BangGang 12 Inches label in 2007, heralding their invasion of the Australian dance scene with the ballistic track “Fun Punch”. Now that their tour schedule is tighter than my stovepipes, I decided to make an appointment to visit their home recording studio. What I found was a mother ship of instruments and a garage lined with empty bottles of San Pellegrino, indicating a serious mineral water addiction.

You guys have been on the peripheries of the scene for a while. It seems like only in the past couple of months that you’ve been thrust into the limelight.
Chris: I guess we’re quite new in original release stuff. We’ve been doing remixes and that sort of thing for a while, but we didn’t really have anything out until “Fun Punch”.

“Fun Punch” kind-of grew on everyone, I think. It seemed like a frivolous track that you must have belted out in a couple of days. But then you saw the reception you got at Parklife: everyone went fucking nuts. Did it grow on you, too?
Jack: We always thought it was pretty good, actually…We kept leaving it and coming back to it. It sounds frivolous but it’s probably the most work we’ve ever done on a track.

You’ve gone from “Fun Punch” to “Shooting Star”, which seems a lot more restrained and more mature. Did you have to exercise a lot of restraint?
Chris: It kind of reflected our energy levels. We’d turn up to gigs and the dudes before us would be belting out the craziest distorted stuff and we just started to get sick of it ‘cause it was just everywhere. So, we just wanted to chill.
Jack: But definitely a bit more mature, a bit more…
Chris: … Refined.
Jack: With the vocals and stuff, (we were) maybe looking a bit more towards radio, as well. We’ve been kind-of going in that direction with the remixes we’ve been doing lately.

When did you guys start DJing?
Jack: About two and a half years ago. The very first thing we did in the club was kind-of a live show. We were kind-of like a weird duke box band. We used to just do covers of songs and then play them live. We’d play it with guitar and keyboards and stuff.
Chris: Because there were all these strobe lights at the live show, we thought it would be a heaps awesome idea to buy heaps of glitter to throw up, just so it was a crazy cloud of glitter. And then I did, and then some of the keys on my keyboard weren’t working. I had to take it back into the store, and they took it apart, and then it was the big joke of the store: some fruity guy and his glittery keyboard.

Why did you take so long to build up a live act?
Jack: I guess when we started, we started out doing one, and then we were like…
Chris: …Let’s not do this again. We were literally just picking our ten favourite songs and then just making really fast versions of them in Protools. We just put a bass line in and Jack would play keys over it and I would play guitar, and that was a live show. So every time we’d do a new one we’d have to pick new songs and make new beats and stuff, and we didn’t want to do another live show until we had enough of our own material.

How much planning went into the Parklife set?
Chris: Like a month, or something. We were working on it pretty hard.
Jack: We tried to do different edits of stuff. Instead of playing all our songs just back to back we wanted to make it flow. So, it took us ages in the studio and then the actual rehearsal was just before Parklife.

Had you always planned to put your remixes in it?
Both: Yeah.
Chris: …Because, otherwise, it only would have been like ten minutes long.

Your live set was really fluent from start to finish. I don’t even think there were any breaks, were there?
Chris: There’s one break. We stop halfway through. Then we go “how ya’ll feelin’? Make some noise!”

Did your DJing have an impact on how you put it together?
Jack: Yeah, I guess so. Something like Parklife, which is like a dance music festival, people want to keep dancing. I guess it partly had to do with us wanting to make it flow together. Also, we’re not very good at crowd banter.

You’re going on tour to a few places next week. You’re going to a few regional areas. How do you think you will be received?
Jack: We’ve been doing that for a while, now. They’re always really different but sometimes they can be really, really fun. It’s weird, sometimes odd places can have a really good party life.

I heard about one in Maitland where there was about eight people at the show.
Chris: It probably dwindled to four at one stage. Two of them were the DJs that were there with us.

You’re going to Japan in December. Why did you choose to go there?
Jack: We got booked there…I fuckin’ can’t wait. We even booked our tickets to get there a week early. We’re just going to stay in Tokyo and buy shoes, and…
Chris: …Feed our hungry eyes.
Jack: I want to eat a blowfish, as well.

Apparently it costs about $200 AUD.
Jack: So, its $200 to possibly die?

Your music is almost typically Japanese: really energetic and probably has a tendency to cause epileptic fits.
Jack: I think we’ve sold more records in Japan than anywhere else.
Chris: Heaps of our Tshirts go to Japan, as well.

My friend has a theory that Bag Raiders translates into coke fiends. Is that true?
Jack: No, that’s not true at all! It couldn’t be further from the mark. We kind-of came up with the name when we were doing the mix CD .
Chris: Because all the songs on it were from everywhere and different people’s record collections and stuff.
Jack: So it’s more like raiding record bags…You tell him that. Stop spreading those lies.