Interview: Daffodils Chat With The Lazy Eyes - Stay The Night NZ Tour

The titanic trans-Tasman teaming of Daffodils and Sydney's The Lazy Eyes are embarking on a five date nationwide tour of Aotearoa this month. Celebrating the launch of the Tāmaki Makaurau group's fab new Stay The Night EP and the latter unit's debut album SongBook, Daffodils and The Lazy Eyes will be spending a whole lot of time together in late August. Getting the between-gig banter off to a rolling start, Daffodils members Theo Salmon (guitar vocals) and Louis Graham (bass) used their Zoom meeting skills to lock in a candid conversation with The Lazy Eyes' Harvey Geraghty (guitar / vocals) and Itay Shachar (guitar) — encompassing such topics as favourite noodles, weirdest tour stories, pub fights, musical guilty pleasures and more...

UnderTheRadar proudly presents...

Daffodils - Stay The Night Tour
with special guests The Lazy Eyes

Tuesday 23rd August- The Sherwood, Tāhuna / Queenstown
Wednesday 24th August - Dive Bar, Ōtepoti / Dunedin w/ Neive Strang
Thursday 25th August - Loons Bar, Ōtautahi / Christchurch w/ Imperial April
Friday 26th August - The Hollywood, Avondale, Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland w/ Baby Zionov
Saturday 27th August - Meow, Pōneke / Wellington w/ Bleeding Star*

General public tickets available HERE via UTR
*Wellington tickets available via moshtix.co.nz

Theo Salmon (Daffodils): I’ll hit you with the first question. What is your favourite Ozzie beer?

Harvey Geraghty (The Lazy Eyes): I’ve got to say VB. VB has a lot of haters but maybe that’s why I love it so much. Because I’m defending it.

Louis Graham (Daffodils): I think that’s my favourite Australian beer too. At least of the classic beers you know?

Itay Shachar (The Lazy Eyes): Is the beer different in New Zealand?

Theo: We’ve got a few different beers. We’ve got you know the classic pub beers which I think would be very different from your guys' ones. We’ve got Lion Red one of the classic ones.

Louis: That’s kind of like XXXX Gold.

Theo: Yeah then we’ve got Speights. That’s what we’ll be drinking in Dunedin.

Harvey: Is New Zealand doing like the new fancy breweries and stuff with cool labels on them?

Theo: Yeah we’ve got some really good ones... There’s a couple in Auckland and there’s a few in Wellington that are really good... We can point you guys in the direction.

Harvey: What would you say Itay?

Itay: VB is pretty good. I dunno it gets a lot of hate for no reason really. Umm, I dunno. Coopers?

Louis: We like the Coopers.

Harvey: I thought you were going to say Newtowner.

Itay: I mean Newtowner is like… It also kind of divides people I reckon. Young Henry’s Newtowner.

Harvey: Yeah it’s like Newtown is where we went to high school. So that’s our local beer. Its getting pretty well known now.

Theo: You guys are from Sydney?

Harvey: Yeah.

Theo: Sweet I got that one right.

Harvey: Was that one of your questions?

Theo: Oh no. I mean it can be? [laughter]

Harvey: While we’re on the topic of putting things in your mouth, what are your favourite two minute noodles?

Theo: Oooooohhhh. Shin Ramyun.

Louis: I like Jin Ramen.

Harvey: There’s a Jin Ramen?

Louis: Yeah that’s a Korean one. That’s my favourite and then probably… I don’t know what my second favourite is.

Harvey: I’m with you Theo Shin Ramyun all the way.

Louis: Yeah Jin and Shin are very similar. I like both of those ones.

Harvey: I’ve gotta try the Jin.

Louis: You’ve gotta get the spicy one though. The other one's not… That’s a good question though.

Harvey: They’re good answers. You’re in my good books now. Let's get some Shin Ramyun for the tour.

Theo: Okay, who's the laziest Lazy Eye?

Itay: Probably me. Yeah I reckon.

Harvey: Either you or Noah. Noah's pretty Lazy.

Itay: Yeah. Maybe Noah. Noah’s lazy more often, I’m lazy less often but I go hard on the laziness you know?

Theo: That’s like a one day a week spent exclusively in bed versus every hour you have a little lie down kind of vibe.

Harvey: Yeah I reckon that’s accurate.

Itay: What’s your guys’ musical guilty pleasure?

Theo: Oooh. Shit that’s a good one. I don’t know if I feel guilty about it but I really froth 'Primadonna Girl'. It’s one of my all time favourite songs. But I don’t know if I feel super guilty about that.

Harvey: That’s good you shouldn’t really feel guilty about any music.

Theo: Yeah I kind of agree... There’s definitely some like… Maybe Yung Gravy sometimes. That song that was really big on TikTok a year or so ago. I feel real guilty about listening to that. How about you guys?

Harvey: Hmmm. Probably just some OG 2010s bangers like Justin Bieber era, Will.i.am. But again I don’t really feel guilty because shit slaps.

Theo: We do a lot of throwback era playlists in this house.

Itay: Do you guys live together in the house?

Louis: Yeah us two do yeah.

Theo: We used to live with Jade (Bryham) as well but umm I think she got a bit sick of living with four boys.

Harvey: Fair enough.

Theo: She found another flat and now she’s living with eight other people!

Itay: Oh my god!

Theo: Nah we did pretty well. We’re pretty co-dependent I think. Louis went away for a few days the other day and I just didn’t know what to do with myself. I was like, I’ve got nothing to do! No one to hang out with.

Harvey: Straight to the Shin Ramyun.

Louis: What’s your favourite snack?

Harvey: Ohhhh does Shin Ramyun count?

Theo: Yeah I reckon it counts.

Harvey: Yeah I reckon it counts if you don’t add anything to it. Sometimes I add a bit of broccoli and then its like a meal you know?

Theo: That’s a good idea.

Louis: You can fry an egg and put it in there.

Harvey: Yeah. Alright bare Shin Ramyun. That’s my favourite snack.

Itay: A muesli bar is pretty good.

Theo: True. Do you have a chocolate covered or just plain nuts? Describe your muesli bar.

Itay: Oh yeah like the kinda healthy ones. That make you really full. Sometimes they’ve got coconut in them and stuff.

Theo: Those kinda remind me of primary school... That’s a good buzz. I recently discovered muesli bars for work. It’s a life hack. Crazy.

Harvey: I feel like, since they remind you of school it makes you placebo more full. Cos back then they were much bigger.

Theo: Yeah or makes you wanna eat chips because you used to swap your muesli bar for someone else's chips.

Harvey: What’s your funniest / weirdest tour story?

Louis: Ok so one time, the only other time we’ve played in Dunedin, we were staying in an Airbnb and Theo and I had to share a queen bed. We’d had like a couple of beers.

Theo: We weren’t pissed or anything.

Louis: Yeah like maybe say six beers over the course of the whole night. And we went to bed on one side of the bed and when we woke up in the morning we were on different sides of the bed. We don’t know how! We still don’t know how.

Theo: I woke up and went to look at my phone and was like, I don’t recognise this lock screen.

Harvey: Wow. That is a mystery hahah.

Itay: That’s niche haha.

Theo: That actually runs into our next question, what’s the messiest gig experience you’ve ever had.

Harvey: As in like mess or disaster?

Theo: Anything.

Harvey: I mean in terms of messy gigs, there’s been quite a lot where the room where you keep your gear is just a total junkyard. Kinda can’t put my finger on one. I dunno. What do you reckon for disastrous gig?

Itay: I feel like we can’t think of them because we’ve blocked them out of our memory.

Harvey: Maybe the Kyneton one because we snapped a string and it also had a messy gear room and then we also got pretty messy afterwards. Hahah. There you go. The triple.

Itay: It ended up being, that ended up being a really good one though.

Harvey: Yeah it was good.

Itay: So sometimes messy is good.

Harvey: We got messy with hot dogs with the venue owner. It was like midnight, well the venue had shut and we were just chatting and he was so drunk he was barely talking, but one of us mentioned being hungry and he was like, with a slur, you want hot dogs? Then he stumbles into the kitchen and comes out with these beautiful hot dogs.

Itay: They were so gourmet.

Theo: I feel like our messiest gig was one we did a few years back with another band that were some of our mates, it was a single release thing that we did on St Patricks Day. At a pub pretty close to where we live and someone decided to have a bar fight halfway through our set. And it started collecting people and it went outside.

Louis: I just thought it would stop quick but it didn’t it just kept going.

Theo: It kept going and it just got bigger and bigger and went outside and started going down the street. And we didn’t see until afterwards but they had maybe ten cop cars lined up down the road and they’d picked up people from other bars as they’d moved down the road.

Harvey: HA!!!

Louis: We just kept playing we didn’t really realise. We were just like… Oh well.

Harvey: A fight magnet.

Theo: Yeah. I think someone broke a chair over someone else at one of the other pubs.

Harvey: Sounds like it’d be a great movie scene in a documentary.

Louis: We were playing 'Johnny B. Goode' as well. Which was fun.

Theo: You know New Zealand actually has a history of moving bar fights?

Harvey: Really?

Theo: Yeah, up in Russell which used to be the capital.

Louis: I don’t know if that’s something to be proud of.

Theo: No not at all, it’s just interesting. In the end of the 1800’s there was this pub fight that started and they’ve just got one big main road, it’s a pretty small town. It went out of one pub onto the beach and then at the end of the beach there were 120 people all in this fight along the beach. I think a couple of people died. It was pretty fucking hectic.

Louis: Oh my god!

Theo: Yeah just rolled down the beach killing 2 people.

Harvey: That is such an interesting phenomenon. I’ve never heard of that. Maybe we can join one while we’re over there.

Louis: Maybe we can start one you know?

Harvey: And then just very secretly push them into our venue so they watch us.