The Red Paintings

When he was 19, Trash McSweeney had a seizure in a supermarket, now he hears in colour.

“The best way I can explain it is that it was like my system had been rebooted. Now when I hear music it is like someone’s painted the front of my brain,” says McSweeney.

This is Synesthesia – a confluence of two or more sensory inputs, so you experience the world differently to everyone else. A disorder or more likely a gift, depending on your take, estimates of its incidence vary. You may not even know you have it, because after all, everyone meets the world differently anyway, a factor not lost on McSweeney, “I think everyone has synesthesia to some extent but it is unconscious. I don’t see myself as special”.

As lead singer and front man for The Red Paintings, his gift is very much to the fore. Fresh from sold-out dates in the US, UK and Europe they bring their innovative stage show back home to Australia. A five-piece orchestral art rock band, their shows are a kaleidoscope of sound and colour, combining edgy costumes – evoking everything from Geisha’s to Alice in Wonderland – with visceral, alternative rock.

“I see myself more as a visual artist than a musician,” explains McSweeney.

Strongly influenced by painters like pop-surrealist Mark Ryden and Brett Whiteley, as well as Lewis Caroll and Dr. Seuss on the literary side, McSweeney reserves a special place for Leonardo Da Vinci – “He was someone who saw in his head things that he couldn’t reproduce.”

One senses this frustration in the prolonged birth of their first full-length album, The Revolution is Never Coming, funded entirely on fan donations, it was mixed in eight studios around the world, taking five years to produce. “One guy would say to me, ‘you need to mix it this way’, and I would say, ‘no, it’s not right’, and I would take it somewhere else. They all struggled to express what I was visualising,” says McSweeney.

The album finally landed in the sound-engineering lap of the late Brian Colstrum who described it as a “21st century War of the Worlds”. A largely analogue recording, avoiding the usual reliance on digital sampling, it promises to be a big and spacious sound. There is a real 35-piece orchestra and a real 22-voice choir in the mix.

Their live shows are something else though – which brings us to the upcoming, You’re Not One of Them tour. Apart from the crunching music, themed costumes and visual projections, local artists are invited to paint on human canvases to create a truly unique, real-time art experience. Says McSweeney, “They contact us through Facebook and I introduce them just before the concert so they get painted by people they’ve never met before. It’s a fragment of time that fits the moment.” (GW)

Jun 14, The Hi-Fi, Entertainment Quarter, 122 Lang Rd, Moore Park, $27.50, thehifi.com.au