EACH member of Portugal. The Man is inscribed with the mark of the lord. It’s a tradition that dates back to a particularly loose night at Frankie’s in Sydney on the final night of the final Big Day Out tour in 2014.

The Alaskan-born, Portland-based rock band had thrown an unofficial after-party for headliners The Arcade Fire, shouting the entire bar a round of whiskey shots, when “one of the Australians” partying with them that night declared: “The lords of Portland are in town.”

That in-joke became an ink-joke, with all six members and long-time crew now bearing PTM’s gang insignia somewhere on their body. But the first person outside the band to get “lorded” was a plucky photographer from Wollongong named Maclay Heriot.

(Photo: Instagram/@myfearofmusic)

Maclay, who was partying with the band that fateful night at Frankie’s, struck up a friendship with PTM backstage on that same Big Day Out tour. The connection was instant, and he soon found himself living out his Almost Famous dreams on their tour bus.

He snapped the band on stage at Lollapalooza that year, and was invited to Rick Rubin’s Shangri La Studios in Malibu, where they were recording their game-changing album Woodstock with none other than The Beastie Boys’ Mike D at the helm.

That album features the Grammy-winning ‘Feel It Still’, a single you could probably hear right now on commercial radio, wedged between a Shawn Mendes power ballad and a Dua Lipa banger. The song has changed everything for this hard-touring bunch of misfits – and also nothing at all.

The venues may be bigger, but they’re still the same “shit talkers” from small-town Alaska, and they’re still bringing their old buddy Maclay on the road. On a short stopover between Coachellas in Santa Fe, New Mexico, PTM bassist Zach Carothers and Maclay discuss their ongoing bromance and the interweaving ways in which their art informs and inspires the other.

“Maclay is close enough to us that we don’t want to hide anything,” Zach says. “If someone gets in a fist fight, Maclay takes the picture. If someone’s crying, Maclay takes the picture. If someone is bleeding: ‘Take the picture Maclay! He knows us, and he knows that we want him to do that … He’s part of the family.”