Leigh Ivin plays guitar and pedal steel with country rock band The Re-Mains. They have just released their third album titled Field Conditions and are currently on tour around Australia. It is described on their website as an exhaustive 15 song epic that was over a year in the making. Leigh plays a custom Mastersound and an old Maton Silvertone lap steel made in the late 1960’s.

What turned you on to playing Maton guitars?

Well, ahhhh, let’s see… I’ve had a Maton acoustic for a long time; I always thought they (Maton’s) were the best acoustics, particularly the ones from the eighties. When I started playing with The Re-Mains I got my first steel guitar, and I happened to buy an old 1960’s Maton Silvertone, which was apparently one of only a couple hundred made. After a few discussions with the crew at Maton, they said ‘Why don’t you play one of our (Mastersound) electrics?’ So I said “Yeah, if you can put together one that I like!” That’s how my custom model came about.

What’s ‘Custom’ on your Mastersound?

It’s a long scale, similar to a Fender, and has less powerful (low output) single coil pickups (rather than a humbucker/single coil combination). It’s nice and bright; I didn’t want that real midrange grunt that a humbucker has. So what I ended up with was something that sort of sounds a bit like a Gretsch actually! I use it a lot, it stays in tune really well, and it’s just good to play an Australian (guitar) rather than an overseas brand.

How was it that you came to playing steel?

Well I just got sick of playing guitar really! I grew up in Tamworth, and I guess that country sound was sort of always around me. I can’t really pinpoint the reason why, but I guess I just wanted to play something else and play something different and have another feather in my cap. It turned out to be one of the best things I ever did because it has opened up a lot of doors; I’ve done a shit-load of sessions since I started playing steel, and then moved on to pedal steel shortly after that. My style comes more from the pedal steel school of thought, rather than the lap steel school of thought.

Who are your guitar influences?

Hmm, well Pete Townshend and I’d have to be an idiot not to say Jimmy Page! Jeff Beck and some country players like Albert Lee. But I guess if I were to mention the two biggest it’d definitely be Pete Townshend and Lovell George, I think my style of playing is something of a cross between those two.

Which artists influence The Re-Mains?

I would have to say there’s a fair smattering of Neil Young, a bit of Bob Dylan. There’s a bit of a rock ‘n’ roll factor like The Who, and also Little Feet, but I guess a lot of folk music and the better end of country music as well. Mick, the main songwriter is a lyric-man and he’s very much from the Bob Dylan and Neil Young School, that’s his thing. But the rest of the guys in the band add different colours to the music so it doesn’t really sound much like them.

What is the mission statement of The Re-Mains?

Well one of the things that we’d like to do is to play away from the major centres because we feel as though that not enough attention is given to regional areas, so we like to tour those places a lot. I guess the mission is to tour the widest possible range of places and just to build a solid career out of it. I don’t think anybody in the band has any grandiose rock star visions; we’re all a bit past it to sort of think that way!

Where has the band performed in the past?

Well, with the exception of Western Australia and Tasmania, just about everywhere now. There aren’t too many pubs in Australia we haven’t touched! We’ve done Darwin, Alice Springs, Katherine and Tennant Creek. We’ve been up to Cairns and Northern Queensland, outback places like Longreach. All of the Capital cities, we have quite a good fan base going in Melbourne and Sydney now. Country music festivals have been great, we have been a fairly popular fringe acts there these days.

What approach did you take when you recorded your new album Field Conditions?

Good question! Initially we wanted to record the album in a number of different places and simulate the field conditions. Where it came from was that you’d turn up at a gig and be presented with a certain set of conditions; like here’s the stage, here’s the audience, this is the town, and this is the demographic you’re dealing with and in the end you’ve gotta pull the gig off one way or another! So we decided it would be good to make an album based on that, where we take a few different locations and we go in and record, and what comes out of it is the field conditions. It didn’t end up working quite that way however, so to really answer your question we recorded everything live, and then embellished the live recording with overdubs and any small mistakes got fixed up with overdubbing. If you took off the overdubs it wouldn’t sound too different, it would sound pretty much as it was. Most of the stuff we used is the original take, like the vocals and guitars. I’d much rather hear a good solid take than absolute perfection of the sound of each individual instrument. There is no fancy editing or Pro Tools work on the album, it’s very old school and that’s because we’re a bunch of crusty old bastards! It suits our music and I think if we did it any other way it wouldn’t have worked as well.

What was your life like growing up?

Well I grew up in Tamworth and contrary to what people think, Tamworth isn’t this big country music place all year round. I think it started in the early 70’s so by the time I was four years old I was seeing live country music downtown. Because the industry was built up around that time I used to see some of the crack country music people back when I was a child. My father was also a musician and I grew up in a musical household. I remember going to see some dude in the Tamworth town hall play guitar, and he was up there playin’ a 12-string, and I thought at six years old that was the best thing I’d ever heard in my life, and I wanna play it! Funnily enough I went on to play keyboards and trumpet, and didn’t pick up a guitar until I was eighteen. So I learnt how to play other things way before I knew anything about guitars. I used to look at guitars and think ‘ooh I want one of them!’ I think my parents thought I would end up in an evil rock and roll band if I picked up a guitar, and they were right (laughs)!

For more info and tour dates check out www.re-mains.com