King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizards Historic EU Tour: A Journey Through Time and Space
The Ancient Theatre in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, was the setting for the second night of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's three-show European residency tour. The marble-hewn amphitheatre, built between 98-117AD, was once a battleground for man and beast, and now hosts the Australian experimental rock band. As the band performed for two hours, it was hard not to feel like a speck in the vastness of human history.
The band's European tour has seen them post up in five different cities for three-night runs in historic or otherwise curious venues, including the panopticon Lukiškės prison in Vilnius, Lithuania, which closed in 2019 and is now a venue, and the Lycabettus hill theatre in Athens. After successful residencies in natural amphitheatre-type venues in the US, the band wanted to make sure their European fans didn't get left out.
"We're like tourists on this trip as well," says Stu Mackenzie, still in his sweat-dappled baby pink stage boilersuit. "The contrast between a regular bus tour, where we're in a different city every night, is pretty stark. Usually you wake up after a long drive and can't remember where you are and it's about orienting yourself – finding a coffee or a green space and just surviving. But on a tour like this, you actually have a moment to soak it up and breathe, which is rare."
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard started as a party band in Melbourne in 2010 and have since become their generation's Grateful Dead or Phish, bolstering their psych-rock with metal, krautrock, microtonal experiments, and more. They've headlined Green Man and End of the Road festivals, and this month saw the release of their 27th album, Phantom Island, where country choogle meets Philly-inspired soul thanks to their first foray into orchestral arrangements. The album is a beautiful yet worried record, with its lyrical protagonists often observing the world from the cockpit of a plane and wondering what the purpose of it all is.
The existential vibe feels right at home in these perspective-realigning venues, built on thousands of years of human existence. "A lot of the lyrics we've written together have stemmed from spending a lot of time away from home, from family, from kids," says Mackenzie, who welcomed his third baby just before tour started. "And trying to figure out how we make sense of all of that, and the world. It has been an existential few records," he agrees.
Gizz run a staunchly DIY enterprise. They self-release their albums, which they still record in the same small studio in Melbourne. They've never worked with a producer. Their friend Jason Galea does all their artwork and Maclay Heriot takes their photos. They release free bootlegs of every live show – the Barcelona residency is already up on Spotify by the time they hit Plovdiv – and broadcast a high-quality livestream of each night on YouTube that they've taken painstaking care to perfect.
To outsiders, they're perhaps best known for their prolificacy – in 2017 alone, they released five albums. Their output can be seen as intimidating or perceived as some sort of novelty factor. But for Mackenzie, it seems more about the sense that every creative whim is worth honouring, and every bit of life really is worth figuring out creatively, indicative of a tendency towards archivism.
