Les Fauves: "Everybody's Getting a 3 Piece Together"
"Screwdrivers under the strings; A, double-C, G, G-sharp tuning!"
In early 2024 I received a message via my website from a guy named Jon who was just starting up Fauves are the Best People, a podcast about an Australian rock band, the Fauves. The format of the podcast is intriguing, if daunting, with an episode devoted to each song the band has released, plus feature episodes about the band’s individual albums (13 in total so far) and EPs. Meaning Jon and his collaborators will be at it for years to come.
Why me? Well, I can only assume that Jon had seen my old blog post about the band’s early EPs and gauged, correctly, that I am a Fauves fan. In fact, I was a massive fan of the band when they first started getting airplay in Australia in 1990. I loved their angular take on Oz rock, and the fact that they hailed from the Mornington Peninsula (a part of Australia where my mother’s ancestors “settled”) gave my fandom additional secret meaning.
Now, the Fauves were and remain a difficult band. Their early releases, which mixed art rock, science-tinged lyrics, sonic experimentalism and ironic metal gestures, were far from easy listening. But with their self-deprecating humour and seemingly suicidal career choices (e.g. splitting their first album into two EPs, although that wasn’t strictly their own fault), I followed them religiously right up until they cracked the big time in 1996-97. At which point, in true indie style, I disowned them and moved on. Sure, I’ve kept track of the band’s subsequent releases, but the glory days were over.
Fast-forward to 2024, when Jon asked me if I’d like to guest on an episode or two of his podcast, which goes by the name of Fauves Are the Best People— a homage to the band’s most well-known song, “Dogs Are the Best People”, from their most commercially successful album, 1996’s Future Spa (I will have more to say about both song and album in due course). I was more than happy to agree, and we recorded episodes on three obscure songs the band released in 1992 as part of a compilation album, Dress-Ups.
Those episodes went live in June this year but I didn’t publicise the fact at the time. Despite having said some pretty cringeworthy things in public as a spoken-word poet in the early 2000s, I was embarrassed by the sound of my own voice, and by my on-the-spot invention of my rock-critic alter ego, Les Fauves. And on reflection, Les’s pseudo-“analysis” of the songs in question—one original, “Angst Grinder”, plus covers of songs by two other Melbourne-based bands, The Glory Box and Pray TV—was pretty rough around the edges. I mean, I/he hadn’t even listened to these tracks for over 30 years, and they really aren’t that good.
But the act of speaking about my memories of the Fauves—even under a pseudonym—forced me to confront something more than what it feels like to listen to your own voice. It made me realise that my obsession with the band probably reflected a toxic form of depression that stalked me throughout my early 20s and remains a part of my personality today. Deep down, I was really miserable and lonely. The Fauves gave me a soundtrack for that misery that I could listen to all by myself. That was, of course, until other people began to listen to, and enjoy, the Fauves’ music.
This change in fortune for the band—not to mention my own mental health—occurred between the bumbled release of their “difficult” second LP, the acerbic The Young Need Discipline (1994) and the triumphant, rock-and-roll copy-book string of singles that accompanied their third, the aforementioned Future Spa (1996). At some point in that two-year period, which coincidentally was also a fairly grim time for moi, the Fauves ditched art rock in favour of, well, rock. And everyone seemed to love it.
Funnily enough, I started thinking about the reasons behind this change in fortune last month while stopping over in Seoul on my way to Australia. Out of the blue, Jon contacted me again, asking me if I’d be keen to record another episode for the podcast—this time focusing on “Tying One On”, a deep cut from Future Spa. Heavily jetlagged, I readily agreed, and we talked for over an hour about the song itself and the album as a collection of near-perfect power-pop gems. Stay tuned for that episode in early 2025.
But it wasn’t until last week, when Jon contacted me for a third time, that things really clicked into place. He’d asked me if I’d be keen to record a hot-take on the Fauves’ 1995 single, “Everybody’s Getting a 3 Piece Together”, a song I know very well and have always had a soft spot for. Once again, I agreed without question, writing down my thoughts in the form of a script that I could easily read out and record. This self-reflection led to my primary insight: namely, that the release of ‘3 Piece’ as a single was pivotal to the history of the Fauves, after which they became a different band.
But first, some history.
In 1990 the British post-punk four-piece Wire became a three piece, dropping the ‘e’ from their name to form Wir (apparently still pronounced ‘Wire’) after their drummer, Robert Gotobed, left the band. Wir went on to release just one album, 1991’s The First Letter, which (perhaps unsurprisingly) relied heavily on drum machines and loops and was, to all intents and purposes, a pretty heavy slog. Wire would not perform again as a four-piece until the year 2000, when Gotobed rejoined under his real name, Robert Grey.
What’s all this got to do with the Fauves? Maybe I’m just spitballing, but were Coxy and co. aware of Wir? Or, could they possibly have heard Leeds’ finest power-pop merchants, The Wedding Present, declare “two’s company but three have a better time” on their transcendent 1992 single, “Three”? Surely they would have been familiar with De La Soul’s 1989 track “The Magic Number” (itself a cover of “Three Is a Magic Number" by Bob Dorough, released in 1973). Did they even read the NME?
Who cares? The UK was half a world away from the Mornington Peninsula, where 1980s musical culture was dominated by that other Mornington export, Australian Crawl. Things just moved at a different pace, maybe. And the fact is that while the 1980s saw relatively few “quirky” three-piece acts make it big (apart from the obvious examples like The Police or Crowded House), it was not until the 1990s that a slew of trios hit the airwaves, in Australia at least. It was the decade when the three-piece phenomenon came into its own.
From big-name acts such as Ratcat, You Am I, Silverchair, Spiderbait, Regurgitator and the Dirty Three to indie darlings like Snout, Swirl, Not From There, Gerling, Sandit, Something For Kate, The Living End, Even and Smudge, Australian music listeners were spoilt for choice when it came to bands composed of “guitar, bass and drums”—or upright bass, guitar and drums, or else guitar, guitar and drums. Or synth, synth and drums. O-or even synth, synth and synth. You get the idea.
Internationally, of course, a similar pattern emerged: Nirvana, Beastie Boys, Green Day, Hanson (LOL), Sleater Kinney, Sebadoh, The Chills, Manic Street Preachers (at least, after the disappearance of Nicky Wire), Supergrass, Primus, Blink-182, Ben Folds Five, The Tea Party and on and on all arguably hit their peak in the 1990s—with the important caveat that I can’t stand more than half of the acts on this hastily-cobbled-together and completely arbitrary list.
“Everybody’s Getting a 3 Piece Together” doesn’t really sound like any of these bands. But by the time it came out in 1995, Australia’s new wave of three-piece acts was on the brink of its imperial phase. And yet the song itself was not a celebration of musical trios per se; rather, it was a thinly-veiled stab at the temporary three-piece, the threesome of convenience, the hastily-cobbled-together sham of power-pop supergroups masquerading as creative innovation.
Although, the title of “3 Piece” does beg the question: who were all these people supposedly getting three-pieces together? It’s hard to tell, from this distance, whether it really matters. The song itself is merely a vehicle for its lyrical jab: it begins with a series of cacophonous drum fills, and a gigantic, reverb-soaked guitar line that moves restlessly, eternally, between three notes. In essence, what we hear in this song originally destined to be a b-side is the sound of an alternative, d-tuned band finally getting its shit together and opting instead for rock.
“Everybody’s Getting a 3 Piece Together” also sums up a playful side of the Fauves’ music that was strangely absent from their recorded outputs at the time. The Young Need Discipline LP was torturous enough (and let us not speak too much about their 1993 sludgy-Sonic-Youth-tribute debut LP, Drive-Through Charisma); but the b-sides accompanying the album’s two singles, “Dwarf On Dwarf” and “Caesar’s Surrender”, were anything but easy listening. It’s no wonder Polydor picked up on the straight-ahead, four-on-the-floor, give-a-fuck energy of “3 Piece” and decided to market it as a single in its own right.
I mean, “3 Piece” was already a staple of the Fauves’ live gigs in 1994 and 1995. People went off when they heard it. The band often ended shows with an extended version of the song, Coxy ad-libbing the lyrics (maybe replacing the Glenn Branca reference with something equally arch) while Doctor and Jack thrashed away at a single chord, and Doug exploited every square inch of his industrial-strength kit. “3 Piece” was a glorious, shambolic song then and it remains so now.
It’s ironic, then, that it took a four-piece to come up with the greatest put-down of the three-piece in Australian musical history. And perhaps even more puzzling that the band chose to append the song as an unlisted track (another time-honoured and subversive musical tradition) on Future Spa in 1996, having already released a six-song EP featuring two versions of the song (one sans swear words) the previous year. To me, the move felt a little bit like flogging a dead horse, but then who knows—maybe it was also the record company’s decision to regurgitate “3 Piece” for the band’s new audiences.
To conclude, however, “3 Piece” is significant not just for its skewering of a particular configuration of musicians in live and recorded formats; it also represents a fundamental turning point for the band that recorded it. Having restlessly—maniacally, even—ghosted the roads of the Australian musical landscape for years on end, searching for that perfect combination of wit, melody and energy, the band had finally arrived back home, safe in the arms of Oz Rock. Things would never be the same again, for the four members of the Fauves or for me.
But what happened next? Well, for several possible answers to that question, I recommend you take a listen to all 96 trainspotting minutes of Episode 80 of Dogs Are the Best People (available here if you don’t like Spotify), in which “Everybody’s Getting a 3 Piece Together” is dissected, intersected and resurrected. Not to blow my own trumpet too much (this is the Dreamnation, after all), it also contains a four-minute (edited) version of this very post, recorded by moi in one take, under the pseudonym Les Fauves (at around the 28-minute mark).
Thanks to Jon for putting the episode together. I’ll also be making contributions to upcoming episodes devoted to individual tracks from Future Spa, including “Dogs Are the Best People”, “Skateboard World Record” and, as mentioned already, “Tying One On”. I’m also toying with the idea of writing an alternative history of the Fauves, inspired by the band’s decision to re-release its first two EPs as a single vinyl album, Faematronic, 30 years after their original release.
Do you have an opinion about the Fauves, or a hot take of your own about “Everybody’s Getting a 3 Piece Together”? Any particular memories of the band? Or your favourite 1990s three-piece act?
Or even, perhaps, something you’d like to share about the quality and length of my posts (honestly, this one started out as a 500-word listicle). Feel free to post a comment by clicking on the big blue button below.
Of course, if you’d rather not reveal your own obsessions publicly, you can always reply to this message or contact me directly at davey@daveydreamnation.com.
All the best,
Davey Dreamnation aka Les Fauves