The Blue Tongues unveil Mr Regular Man as Aussie band puts modern life behind an animal mask

What does a chimpanzee with a cappuccino and a laptop bag have to say about modern life? Quite a lot, apparently.

Australian band The Blue Tongues have put one at the centre of the music video for their latest single, Mr Regular Man, a psychedelic take on the routines we fall into, the masks we wear and the different characters we play depending on where we are.

The song takes aim at the “rat race” and the rigid structures that can quietly begin to define everyday life, without saying there is anything necessarily wrong with being regular.

Band member Jake Woodhead said the song was about people from all walks of life.

“The rigid structure that life can define us by and trying to break out of that mould, not to say that there’s anything wrong with that,” he said.

The song had been kicking around for more than two years before its official release, becoming a favourite at live shows thanks to its punchy chorus and closing riff.

For the music video, that “regular man” became a chimpanzee.

Played by the band’s close friend Declan Montgomery, Mr Regular Man moves through the city with his laptop bag and cappuccino, boards the train, heads to work and follows the familiar patterns of his day.

He is joined by a cast of other animal-faced characters, including a pigeon and, appropriately for The Blue Tongues, a lizard.

So why a chimpanzee?

“It’s to do with that (chimpanzee) being our closest primitive primate,” Jake said.

“Homo sapiens are closely linked to chimpanzees.”

But the animal motif goes further than that.

We already use animals to describe much of modern life. We join the “rat race”, enter a “dog-eat-dog world” and, somewhere between the two, attempt to climb the corporate ladder.

For The Blue Tongues, putting humans behind animal masks offered another way to play with how people move through that world.

“We put masks on, and we do have to pretend a little bit in different environments,” Jake said.

“We play different characters depending on the people we’re around.”

The idea of humans being animals dressed up for modern life is not entirely new territory for the band either.

Their first song, Atoms In The Sun, includes the lyric: “I’m an ape with a front door.”

“We are sort of just dressed up and have these skills as humans in these houses, but we are just animals,” Jake said.

The chimpanzee also creates an unlikely parallel with one of the biggest pop stars in the world.

Robbie Williams famously appeared as a CGI chimpanzee in the 2024 biopic Better Man, an unconventional portrayal linked to the singer’s experience as a performer and how he viewed himself while entertaining an audience.

It is a comparison that becomes particularly interesting when Mr Regular Man is coming from a band of performers themselves.

“We had not thought about that at all,” Jake said when asked whether Williams’ chimpanzee had played any part in their thinking.

But once the similarities were raised, he could see the common thread.

“It is, in what you’re saying, probably the same sort of reason as to why we’ve done it,” he said.

While the two projects are vastly different, both use an animal to explore performance and the versions of ourselves we present to the world.

For Williams, that idea plays out through life as an entertainer. Mr Regular Man brings it into everyday environments, where people can find themselves putting on a different face for work, friends, family or whoever happens to be in the room.

For The Blue Tongues, it all comes wrapped in a sound they have spent years developing.

Jake, Isaac Cagnoni and Cooper Woodhead formed the band out of high school about six or seven years ago, initially playing gigs across Sydney’s inner west most weekends.

Their earlier music leaned heavily into psychedelia, but their sound has since evolved towards pop and Aussie rock while holding onto those roots.

Jake points to Ball Park Music, Pond, The Beatles and Tame Impala among their musical influences.

These days, the band has shifted its focus from regular live gigs towards recording, with Mr Regular Man also forming part of a bigger project yet to be fully revealed.

Creating its music video was fittingly homegrown.

Jake was living in Perth at the time, leaving the band to work around distance, a limited budget and the realities of producing independent Australian music.

The Blue Tongues started by storyboarding the video in a Microsoft Word document, mapping out Mr Regular Man’s journey through the city.

“The story of this regular man character, and how he walks through the world, mostly to do with him getting onto the train, going to work, kind of feeling like he’s in the simulation,” Jake said.

The lyrics gave them plenty to work with visually, including references to the laptop bag and cappuccino that would eventually become part of the character.

They then took the concept to director Cameron Lawton.

“We wanted to make it a bit trippy, a bit kooky,” Jake said.

“We very much as a band don’t take life seriously.”

Rather than a huge production, the group grabbed a camcorder, found their animal masks and filmed footage around the city.

“It was very much a say-yes-to-everything sort of approach,” Jake said.

Cameron then brought his own creative direction and editing to the project, while Declan stepped into the monkey mask and another friend, Marcus Croese, created the artwork.

It is the kind of DIY collaboration that has long helped independent Australian music get made, particularly when big budgets are not an option.

“A lot of artists and bands, especially in Australia, do need more funding for the creative arts; you have to do a lot yourself,” Jake said.

“We’ve got a lot of artistic friends that are very close to us, and you’ve just got to make it happen yourself.

“Ultimately, it makes you more skilled anyway.”

It also makes supporting Australian music about more than the person standing behind the microphone.

Behind Mr Regular Man is a group of young Australian creatives directing, editing, acting, designing and helping turn an idea storyboarded in a Word document into a finished music video.

And despite the song’s references to the rat race and breaking out of the mould, Jake does not think any particular way of living has all the answers.

“Creative, corporate, whatever genre you fall into, I think we all find ourselves falling into this system regardless,” he said.

“You can only really get by if you do use these means or have these phones. It’s pretty inescapable.

“But yeah, breaking out of it once in a while is good for all of us.”

More than anything, The Blue Tongues want people to have fun with it.

“I think I would like (listeners) to feel a sense of escapism,” Jake said.

“First and foremost, though, we just want people to enjoy it.”

Mr Regular Man is available across streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music, with its accompanying music video being released on YouTube.

For a song about the routines, systems and masks people inevitably fall into, its message does not need to be more complicated than that.

Break out of the routine once in a while, have some fun and maybe connect a little more as humans.

Or, as Jake was quick to correct: “animals”.