The Missing Lincolns Lost Album Live
Quoted From The Facebook Wall Of Nick McCorriston:
‘So I got to know the lads from The Missing Lincolns way back in 2004, through some sort of contact with Dahahoo and a gig they played at The Ground Floor, a pretty gross little dive bar in the heart of Belconnen, now occupied by a Club Lime.
A bunch of us from our little theatre crowd got way into them, I remember myself, Max, Joel and Hadley romping around to their garage punk ditties often, and they had this swagger and confidence to them that was intimidating.
I pored over a 2 track single they put out, Heavyweight Crown backed with Her Alibi, a preview of an unreleased album recorded in Melbourne. After they put out their Righteous Noise opus, they added a second disc with these sessions, called Deliver Us, and as much as the rest of the band will disagree, this is my fave Lincolns material, the cheeky, innocent, wide-eyed Lincolns that I saw live so many times.
When I returned to Canberra in 2015, I got an invite to play bass for one of my favourite Canberra bands ever. I’m a terrible bass player, I have trouble with repetition and I lose my place often, so short rock songs suit me the best, and we’ve got that in spades with all this new(er) material. These songs have been on the shelf for more than 10 years at this point, and I’m really happy to be rocking up to Smith’s Alternative on Friday to play this stuff with some of the best guys I’ve known. check it right here: Missing Lincolns- the Lost Album Live
Cuz when I’m with you I feel like a million bucks.’
Quoted from the Facebook Wall of Luke McGrath:
‘Nick, Chris and I started this band in what, 2002?? 2003? In any case, it’s been a minute, and we are all still best friends which is crazy and beautiful. The first ‘album’ (a bunch of demos really) we recorded was done in Nick’s folks’ living room in Palmerston. It took us three or four Sundays (back then we practiced every Sunday for a few hours, always broken up by a trip to the Gunghalin KFC). I remember being so incredibly proud of those recordings – that shit bumped!
Then we won a Coca-Cola band competition and got to support Magic Dirt at EPIC, which was epic! It was at that show we met our first manager, who paid for us all to go down to Melbourne and record for a week in a proper studio! That was insane – Chris borrowed a kit from the guy from The Living End, I got to play a dozen different guitars including my still favourite, the Starcaster, and we got used to studio life which was mostly sitting around cracking jokes and reading Vice magazine. We made a couple of videos for it and got played on Rage back to back with The Arctic Monkeys two weeks in a row!
The rest of those recordings ended up shelved for a while until we recorded our second album with Sam King! Sam wasn’t yet the studio-owning recording tycoon he became – we recorded the album in a kind of annex of his folks’ house. Whereas our previous recordings had been just us, we decided to throw the kitchen sink at this one – we had strings, horns, organ, you name it! For a band that didn’t have a bass player, four people played bass(!) on that album! It’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever done, the songs and production are crazy good. We somehow got a song on the cover cd of Australian Guitar Magazine (the song ‘Guitar Fighter’, natch). We released this album with a bonus disc containing the songs we recorded in Melbourne – a double album!
So while we had three albums of recorded material, we were known around town as ‘the band with 100 songs’. Which was true, Nick and I were prolific (still are!). We had earmarked a bunch of those for our next album, but never got around to recording it. I moved away for a few years (Cairns and Edinburgh) and then Chris did the same (Brisbane) – Nick stayed in Canberra, concentrating his power and becoming a doyen of the arts scene.
We’d always planned to record more of those 100 songs – we even earmarked a dozen or so for another album – but got distracted with a zillion other fun and shiny things…
UNTIL NOW. We are going to record our third ‘lost’ album live in less than a week – it feels kinda wild and historic, which it is.’
Quoted From The Facebook Wall Of Nick Delatovic:
‘I have a deep-set hatred of nostalgia, which makes me act weird sometimes. When I had the idea for this show I was conceiving it as a way to declare that the best of The Missing Lincolns is still to come, and I know that it is. I was dumbly unprepared for the outpouring of people’s memories from the past 18-and-a-bit years of the band, and their words about the part we might have played in a chunk of their lives. It’s not a comfortable thing for me to reckon with all that time, and it’s a weird thing to have spent the week rehearsing songs with lyrics written by a much younger Nick, who was both more afraid and more sure about everything than me. But it’s been a good reminder for me that I’ve had the joy of getting to make the exact art that I want, with the best people in the world, for years and years and years now. And that I should relax and notice everything that I have more often. Like maybe tonight. When it’s being recorded for posterity. Lol.’
Photos by Tiffany Gleeson
Lick Nuke 