With their formidable discography and cultish followers, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard may seem incomprehensible to newcomers — some never even get past the name. Evocative in its two halves, it resembles the classic format of a front plus backing band; forcing you to wonder who or what ‘King Gizzard’ and ‘Lizard Wizard’ actually are, do they correspond to the people involved, or the topic of the music? The name contains a lot to spur the imagination too: the historical fantasy tropes of Kings and Wizards. The deep and varied cultural symbolism of reptiles; as well as the concept of ‘reptilian brain’, the core part of the brain shared by all vertebrates that regulates base bodily functions and movement. Then finally the gnarly connotations of ‘gizzard’, the stomach-like organ found in some birds that grinds food.
But the basic truth of the band is really not much more than loud, fun rock music. Beginning as a joke side project to jam at university parties, Stu Mackenzie, Joey Walker, Michael Cavanagh, Nicholas Cook Craig, Ambrose Kenny-Smith, Lucas Skinner, and Eric Moore started playing together in Naarm (Melbourne) in 2010. Beginning with lo-fi garage and surf rock, they have since moved through various progressive, heavy, and experimental styles all loosely gathered under the umbrella of neo-psychedelic rock; and in the process have become known for their friendliness, their democratic creative process, their extreme generosity, and for the inclusivity with which they treat all fans of the music.
Having risen organically through the Australian, and then international music industries, the band have carved out a distinct niche for themselves and are showing no signs of slowing. This has been achieved with a consistent ethos with the tenets of: fun, musical experimentation, and a high energy anti-perfectionist DIY approach. As well as a surprisingly prolific release schedule, this has produced a strong support network around the band that has allowed them to always stay independent and self-funded with only the minimum of exceptions. Everything is kept as in-house as possible including recording, production, artwork, and publishing. The band has only seen a few major singular points of change, the first being the departure of founding member Eric, who until 2020 was the second drummer, band manager, and founder/director of the independent label Flightless Records that published their music. King Gizzard are now managed by their long-time booking agent Michelle Cable, who also facilitates their self-publication first via the KGLW/gizzverse webstore and now the label p(doom) Records, made possible by an international merch distribution deal with Virgin records. Another large evolution occurred as the band started performing live again coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, entering a form of 2.0 ‘jam band’ era with a greatly heightened live show featuring much more diverse and unique setlists, improvisation, and free audience publication of bootleg live recordings, leading to a significant redefinition of the fan base more in the vein of Phish or The Grateful Dead.
However, to get the full picture of how that all came to be, we must start at the most humble beginnings:
Note: The objective facts in this biography have been sourced from over one hundred interviews with the band members (found in the KGLW.net interview archive), from primary research into social media posts, and interviews held with associates of the band. Speculation and interpretation are made clear in the test. This is a work in progress published in segments on this page starting February 2025.
Written by W.B.T.G. Slinger. Edited by Dan Rzicznek and AlteredBeef. Special thanks to Spid and KQ for additional research, and Cwar for research tools.
Stuart Douglas Mackenzie was born in October 1990, in Melbourne, Australia.
A connection with music was established early on in the household, listening as a family to a wide variety of classic artists such as: Neil Young, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Van Morrison, and many others. This connection was deepened by Stu’s father, who would sing and play guitar to send his children to sleep; a practice that Stu later described as ‘meditative’.
The family moved around a lot for his father’s job, but the biggest chunk of Stu’s childhood was spent down the coast in the small (population of only a few thousand) surf town of Anglesea. Another location was the rural city of Wangaratta — best known in Australian music as where Nick Cave was expelled from high school before being sent off to boarding school in Melbourne.
Into Stu’s adolescence, the family settled for good in Geelong, Victoria’s second-largest city, around an hour’s drive down the coast south-west of Naarm/Melbourne. At this formative age Stu discovered AC/DC and Malcom Young, which came with the realisation that music (and guitar playing in particular) could be cool and exciting — not just something his dad was into. Beginning to actively practise guitar gave him something to compensate for his understimulating surroundings (Comparable to Detroit, Geelong is a city based on a now defunct Australian motor industry); aside from Australian Rules Football, which he was playing and coaching (including future star Patrick Dangerfield) for his uncle’s club not too far away back down in Anglesea. Better known as AFL, it is comparable to various other forms of football around the world, with a fast pace and full-contact tackling; it is the most popular sport in Australia where grand final viewership can attract over 20% of the entire national population.
This footy and music scene came to define Stu’s high school social circle, where a bunch of names would crop up frequently: Lucas Skinner, Nicholas Craig, Jack Robbins, Monty and Casey Hartnett, Fraser Gorman, and Zak Olsen among them. All with compatible interests, this peer group began to revolve around playing music, with the general garage rock style of teenagers swapping instruments and figuring out what they wanted to play by simply trying to mimic their favourite bands. Stu became obsessed with guitar, practising multiple hours every day in order to catch up with these other musicians, and then beginning to teach students himself.
Being drawn toward the louder and more primal instinctive aspects of music making, his ability and keen attitude saw him become the local ‘go-to’ lead guitarist or drummer in a burgeoning scene around Geelong, itself a natural hub for the surrounding small coastal towns such as Anglesea, Torquay, and Ocean Grove. With little need for competition, band members swapped around freely and cut their teeth supporting each other.
One of the earliest of these arrangements was a band called The Houses, forming in 2005 (grade 9 of high school for Stu) with Lucas Skinner, Blaise Adamson, and Tim Richards. Stu typically kept it to guitar and bass, while Lucas and the rest of the band would share duties between keys, vocals and songwriting. Their first releases are almost definitely the oldest surviving available collaboration between two future King Gizzard members. Still Stu’s longest current musical collaborator, Lucas Harwood (he changed his surname when he got married in 2019) was also born in 1990 and grew up in the Geelong area with a long-standing interest in footy, and indie, lo-fi, and slacker-rock music. By their final year of high school in 2008, The Houses self-released an album, Uncle Fever + Aunt Ammonia, an accomplished take on the various flavours of popular late 2000s indie-rock, with notable influences landing somewhere in between the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The National. However, this was not the only project Stu was involved in.
Perhaps a better expression of where he was at musically, Almacknjack was a garage rock trio with ‘Al’ (Almo Troup), and Jack Robbins. One album, Taste Of An Orange, was self-released in 2008. It is another surprisingly robust set of songs that can lull one moment with an almost Buckethead-like mechanical pace, but then bust out heavy blues licks and ripping vocals the next, all wrapped up with some deep synth noise experimentation. Their antic live show is where the magic truly happened, bringing a much less serious, more experimental raucous proto-Gizzard energy. Such as when all three members might swap instruments mid-song, or where Stu might grab a drumstick to start strumming with, or pick up Al who would continue singing from atop his shoulders.
These and the rest of the surf-coast bands would all play whatever gigs they could get, from high school events, community markets, or even occasionally the ‘real’ local venues like Geelong’s The National Hotel (also known as ‘The Nash’), or Grace Darling, either in the all-ages dining sections, or by sneaking in with older friends.
Another band Lucas played bass in was named Sambrose Automobile, formed in 2007. Playing in a more distinctly blues and soul style, the band’s title was a portmanteau of its two principal member’s names: Sam Cooper and his best friend Ambrose Kenny-Smith. Named by his father after the boxer Ambrose Palmer, Ambrose was born in July 1992, and grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Preston with his sister Edith. As the children of Broderick Smith, a long-running and successful figure in Australian rock and roll (member of Carson, The Dingoes, Sundown), they experienced a very music-focused home environment. As a child, Amby would go to sleep every night listening to Muddy Waters, and began playing harmonica at age seven. By eight a friend of his Dad’s helped to record an EP, Boy With The Blues, and he was busking on the street playing harmonica inspired by other favourites like Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, or Robert Johnson. Before eventually settling for good near Geelong in Ocean Grove, when Ambrose was around six, the family briefly moved to the regional town of Castlemaine where he started skateboarding. He progressed rapidly and first achieved sponsorship from his local skate shop Speaky’s by age 10; he would go on to gain several more including Volcom and Emerica shoes, Theeve trucks, and Foundation and Stereo Skateboards. With a street skating skillset typical of the era, Ambrose’s style was marked by his feel for technical ledge tricks and unfashionable use of no complys performed sometimes just for the reaction (a very early technique for skating up and over a curb relying the skater to step on the ground with the front foot, since the development of the flat ground ollie the no comply and its many variations have been relegated as kooky). After some of his older skating friends discovered his EP, for a time he became ashamed of playing music and destroyed as many of the copies as he could find, preferring now to listen to classic Punk bands like The Sex Pistols and The Ramones. Despite his obvious talent and the promising start of a career in skateboarding (his mum shot down the idea of moving to the US for it), he would admit in an interview for skateboard.com that ‘I don't think anyone in Geelong takes it seriously’, and most were there to get away from their difficult home situations and just hang out at the park, which provided other social opportunities such as swapping CDs. The local skaters were into a lot of Aussie Hip Hop, which started his love for the genre, growing from there to Cypress Hill and into a taste for faster technical rapping such as by Busta Rhymes or OutKast. This coincided with an interest in breakdancing, which he began performing on the streets; as well as occasionally being roped back in to harmonica gigs supporting one of his school friends who was pursuing music.
Among the skating and gigging scene, at a park up in Melbourne, he met a talented multimedia artist, skater, and videographer six years his senior named Jason Galea. ‘Juicy’ was working for a casino producing motion graphics and web content, and otherwise co-running the fledgling skate brand Steady Bumpen. They began to collaborate, skating and filming together regularly.
As most of this coastal peer group, now a strong network of mutual friends, were beginning graduate high school, they were funnelled into the typical rite-of-passage of moving out of home toward Melbourne, close enough to bring laundry home if needed, but also now right at the core of Australian live music. The pinnacle was Meredith Music Festival, a three-day camping event in December. Being non-commercial and privately run, the festival has withstood the test of time as a fertile ground for up-and-coming underground Australian bands. Keen teenagers would go to great lengths to get in, including jumping the fence.
As a fresh graduate, Stu was enjoying the last summer before making his way out into the world as an adult, and had found his way in for the 2008 edition headlined by MGMT, The Mountain Goats, Violent Soho, and Architecture in Helsinki. After three days of rain he collapsed in his tent still drunk at 11am to get some rest, but was immediately shaken awake again by some friends urging him to go see a band named Tame Impala that had just started their set. With an effortless 60’s aesthetic, the band were loose and loud, vibrating through the rain out to Stu and the few other soaked, muddy festival goers. He returned home with no less than a new purpose in life: to play psychedelic music. With his prospects wide open in front of him, Stu dedicated himself to the purpose of playing as much music as possible, and began an existence of couch-surfing to the city and back, surviving on ramen, with little more to his name than a beaten up but trusty ‘89 Fender Stratocaster and amp.
To be continued.