In the late 90s, when Australian pop-rock stalwarts You Am I were the scaling the heights of the independent scene, their label suggested they crawl out from under the glass ceiling of the Australian music industry and search for a bigger market. Drummer Rusty Hopkinson remembers the confusion that followed.

“I remember our record company saying, ‘You should move to America’ around the time of Hourly Dailyand Hi-Fi Way and stuff like that,” he says. “We went  ‘Yeah, great, we’ll move to Memphis’. They were like “Oh, we thought New York or LA’.”

It seemed a logical response for the quartet, who over the last 18 years of the band have been more consumed by self-satisfaction and a sense of pride in their own work than a desire to win ARIAs.

“I don’t think we’ve ever been that careerist,” Hopkinson says. “I think You Am I has just been a series of generally happy mistakes a lot of the time. I don’t think we’ve ever had that kind of bloody-mindedness where we’d want to uproot ourselves and bang out heads against the wall somewhere because we felt we’d achieved all we thought we could achieve in Australia.”

The band now give the world Dilettantes, their eighth full length record. Though it still clasps all the characteristic elements of a You Am I album –  sweaty bar room pop capped off by front man Tim Roger’s husky words  –  Hopkinson says just doing what was expected of the band was never an option.

“I don’t think we would get past the first stage if we felt like we were going through the motions,” he says. “I know Tim wouldn’t be writing songs for this band if he felt that we were just going to go ‘Ok, I’ll just press You Am I button ‘B’ to play that one, and You Am I button ‘A’ to play that one”.

“The way we recorded this record is probably a lot more similar to how we recorded Hourly Daily than anything else,” he says of the band’s chart-topping 1996 record.

“A lot of the songs we didn’t even rehearse before we recorded them we just went in and played them, and sometimes that’s the best way to do something. Sometimes you find yourself doing things you wouldn’t normally do, because you haven’t really thought about it.”

The record’s name references the personalities that make up You Am I, a band Hopkinson is pleased are still ‘vaguely relevant’ to the Australian music scene.

“We are all kind of dilettantes,” he laughs. “Andy Kent is a spirited defender in his local soccer team, I travel around and buy old records, Tim plays a million gigs a year, makes fantastic records and is like a cultural sponge, and Dave is a brilliant musician who everybody wants to play with.

“The dilettantes thing is apt because we do like to sit down and have a natter about what we’ve been listening to, what we’ve been reading, what we’ve been experiencing. I think that’s what makes life interesting.”

Dilettantes is out now through EMI Music.

ENDS