I’d studied computer animation at university but never moved into the field as I’d been swept onto the road by the record deal. How’d you make the leap from rock ‘n’ roll to game development? Buses, planes, trucks, shitty hotel rooms, shittier hotel rooms. There’s also a saying that being in a band is just 23 hours of waiting around. Obviously you miss family and friends, you’re plastered every frickin’ day, there are big highs and big lows. It’s hard to pin down why touring is so difficult. Was there anything in particular about touring that got you off the road? I wasn’t cut out for touring and I spent the next couple of years writing a novel, hardly leaving the house. The band broke up, as bands do, and I moved away from music. We toured the world, played stadiums, played huge festivals, had a couple of hits, went on TV gameshows, played on TV, played laser tag with bikini models (really), toured with Def Leppard, played festivals with Kiss and The Police, got chased by paparazzi with Justin Hawkins in London, set off the fire alarms at strip club on Halloween and filled the street with almost naked vampires. A week after I graduated, after the Galvatrons’ fourth show, we signed to Warner Brothers and the next four years are a bit of a blur. I was at university studying computer animation. Johnny was kind enough to take some time out of his schedule to chat with me about The Artful Escape of Francis Vendetti and the ever-shifting personas of creative people. A few years after that, he was writing a novel in seclusion.
Three or four bands later, he was fronting The Galvatrons on a world tour. Growing up in Australian rules football-obsessed Geelong, Australia, on a steady diet of David Bowie, Talking Heads, Van Halen, Prince and Devo, it was probably only a matter of time before Johnny formed a band. And it is something Johnny Galvatron, the lead designer, knows a thing or two about. That’s the central idea of The Artful Escape of Francis Vendetti, the forthcoming game from Beethoven & Dinosaur. The mundane version of yourself melts away and a fiction, created as a kind of collaboration between the performer and the spectators, steps forth. Anyone who has ever performed on stage will tell you that they are a different person in front of the audience.
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