Wiggles, Politics, Drum & Bass with Lime Cordiale

Matthew Casey (he/him)

With their Wellington R18 show sold out, Lime Cordiale have booked a second show (all ages) for their 14 Steps To A Better You New Zealand Tour, at the Hunter Lounge on Sunday, 18 July. Matthew Casey sat down for a Zoom with Oli from Lime Cordiale to talk about music, New Zealand, and The Wiggles.

After releasing their most recent project, 14 Steps to a Better You, during the lockdown periods of 2020, the band have had to make some changes to their usual touring style. “We’d normally just release an album and do 50 shows—we kind of did do that, but to 80-person capacity venues for the first couple of months.”

“We still don’t really know if people have heard [the album]; it’s hard to gauge if your album is doing well without personal interaction.” “It feels like an old album now already, and we haven’t even done the album tour. I just know New Zealand’s going to be so much fun, because we haven’t been there in a while and it always has been from the first show we played, I’m really excited—you’ve been sitting on the album for a year now so I’m hoping you know the lyrics.”

Asked if they’d do covers such as their Triple J, Like a Version’s “I Touch Myself”, Oli said “If there’s a large request for it then maybe.” Commenting on this famously raunchy tune, he claims that “it’s the one that unlocks everyone’s sexuality—if you’ve got the blokiest mate, watch him when we play that song and see if he lets out a bit of sexual feeling.” 

Looking locally, Oli loves “the Cuba Street sort of set up, it feels like such a good main street with some good places to eat and have a drink. I love that venue upstairs [San Fran], that’s a great venue.” Having last played there in 2019, they’re excited for the Hunter Lounge, a bigger venue. The shows “just have to be bigger and better, we’re putting a lot of work into this one [...] we’re gearing up [for] a big event, we’ve got Le Shiv coming over with us and they’re so good.” Oli assures me they are pure gold, and that he wouldn’t be shocked if they blew up off the back of this tour. 

With the band playing at State of Origin III on July 14, I checked out if the boys were big fans of the oval ball—“I like to pretend I know.” This is a big opportunity which means far more than football. To them it’s not state vs state, it’s politics—“I don’t know if you know about the whole controversy—We have 75,000 people at a footy game and then you struggle to get 1,000 people into a venue, that’s the contradiction we’re struggling with. It’s kind of funny to be playing State of Origin to a full stadium—music venues are the first thing to get shut Down”.

“There’s so much money in a footy game and all those bastard politicians, they’re probably just into the footy, they have no idea who we are”, he says begrudgingly. “The footy has to go on, it’s un-Australian to not have the footy go on.”

On the topic of origins, Lime Cordiale “didn’t really know what we were doing, we started with no real plan. I think the fact that we didn’t know what we were doing meant that you had these crazy wild dreams, it sort of just gave us a bit more freedom to be a bit weird at the start, and be like ‘just add a trombone solo in here, or a clarinet little feature in this song here.’”

Lime Cordiale draws inspiration from many areas, including some from our neck of the woods. “Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Marlon Williams are pretty up there, Aldous Harding.” Wellington’s sounds have also made their mark on the band. “Fat Freddy’s Drop has always been an inspiration,” Oli continues, “the whole dub reggae scene has just been massive for us, we started off thinking we were going to be a reggae band, but we don’t have the same sort of scene that you have in New Zealand.

As a Wiggles fan from infancy, I heard that an early inspiration for the boys were the band of coloured skivvies. Oli’s favourite song is “Big Red Car”. When asked who would win in a fight between Wags the Dog and Dorothy the Dinosaur—“Wags is a bit of a gangster ay, he’s got that D-O-double-G thing going for him, probably Wags”. To be honest, as I’m typing this out, I need to put in my two cents and say, I’m backing Dorothy. She is literally a dinosaur. They both have strengths—one eats roses and one eats bones—but Dorothy is a bad bitch, end of.

They’ve also inspired local talent themselves. You may have unintentionally heard Lime Cordiale being played by a DJ at a house party—VUW student Simple Conclusion’s bootleg of their song “Temper Temper” has amassed over 80k listens on SoundCloud. I showed Oli this version and he remarked—“how good is this [...] I love all this shit, all these extra synths and stuff, that’s the shit I like.” “It’s probably going to overtake and become the more popular version, people at shows will be like ‘hey you’re covering that drum and bass song’.” I reckon one of the first times I heard Lime Cordiale was in a drinking setting, and it’s top quality tune.

14 Steps To A Better You is an absolute ripper, and Lime Cordiale’s upcoming shows are going to be unmissable. If you haven’t got your ticket yet, keep your eyes peeled for a giveaway on the Salient Instagram @Salientgram this week.