Birds of Tokyo - fair to say that the band is one of the country's best live bands going at the moment. With killer live shows and a penchant for forming some damn catchy anthems which have the ability to rouse high levels of off-key-in-the-shower singing both in the privacy of ones home and in the company of thousands, the lads are fitting members on this year's Splendour in the Grass festival bill. Ian Berney chats with me about the band's year so far, new material, and the irony of him taking on interviews.
Hey Ian, how’s your morning been so far?
G’day Sosefina, how are you? It’s been busy, but it’s been good.
What have you been up to?
Mostly this [interviews], to be honest - I’m doing about eight in a row at the moment. I’m the only one left in Australia, the rest are frolicking around the world…
So you’re the front of the band for now…
Yeah! It’s okay, because I’m pretty much considered the worst at interviews in the whole band. [Laughs]
So it serves them right for all being overseas?
[Laughs] Yeah!
Well it’s good to get you on the phone after having dug the new record as much as I have and after having seen the band perform in Adelaide the last time you came around. Congrats on how everything has been going.
Thanks! We’re really stoked; it’s funny, I spend a lot of time with a lot of the interviewers prodding and trying to get to the point where they’re like, ‘So, how would you describe how this record is different to the last?’ and, ‘How do you deal with the negative backlash from your rock fans?’ and all this stuff. It’s actually really refreshing to have someone say, ‘Hey, I actually really love March Fires and the new direction you guys have gone down and I enjoy the record’. That’s cool!
Well yeah – it’s a bit pointless to be expecting the same thing from a band, time after time, you know? I mean, the last Birds… album was so big in terms of arrangement and then in terms of the live shows that followed, if this was exactly the same, then we’d be like, ‘Okay, that was a bit of an anticlimax’. It was good to see a bit of a new direction here, while you still kept that anthemic rock sound.
Yeah. I think that the only way for the band to go forward was to have songs that connected even bigger than the last and I guess, from that standpoint, “Plans” was a big, connecting song for them on that record and we’re fortunate to have…well, it looks like it’s converting with “Lanterns”. We feel like we’re on a new run now and we have a song to back it up and we’re also in a fortunate position to throw away everything we knew before, take a totally new direction on, and that’s been to really let go of the heavy rock influence…well, not heavy rock, but you know, heavier rock influences, and try something different. It’s a lot more atmospheric and we took a lot of influences out of post-rock music and we wanted that to come to the fore on this record.
In terms of the way you guys rehearsed to be performing this material live, I assume it doesn’t take you too long to get in to that mood of delivering the music to its fullest potential?
The new material on the record, when played live, as long as it’s in the right space for it, it’s so much bigger than anything else we can translate on previous records. Because there’s so much space and it’s so wide-sounding, people can’t quite grasp… I think, listening to the record, you can’t quite grasp the soundscapes as well as you can live, because we’re just going to basically assault you live! In a wide enough space, songs that have the slower tempos can really wake people up – you’ll have stunned mullets in the crowd going, ‘This is heavier than I ever imagined!’.
I remember the last time I caught you guys – you can notice how much the shows have stepped up, not only in terms of the music, but the light show and everything else that comes with it. My housemate and I were both singing along, these staunch macho looking guys next to us were freaking out like girls something fierce and then you had teenage couples and loved up couples making out the whole set. There were so many different people there all being affected in different ways by the same music, it was amazing.
[Laughs] This was at HQ, right? That seemed to be a really cool show – one of the more memorable ones of the whole tour. I can’t put my finger on it, but the feedback was really good for that; we walked off-stage being like, ‘Yeah!’, but we couldn’t work out what the ‘x’ factor was. Some shows are like that; sometimes you’ll walk offstage and go, ‘Oh that show was horrible’, nobody was really in to it and then other times you’re like, ‘Man, I swear to God, we did exactly the same thing last night and this is five times better’! How does this all work?! How do we keep the moons aligning?
That’s it! Just on touring, Splendour is coming up quickly as it seems to do every year – how are you looking forward to taking the new tunes to this festival that seems to generate quite the intimate crowd vibe, even though it is a huge event?
We’re pretty psyched about it, actually. It’s probably going to be our biggest show, in terms of preparation; I think we’re going to pull all the stops out. We’re going to do two shows beforehand in Cairns and Townsville and they’ll probably see some new ideas that we’ll be trying to distinguish ourselves in this line up. We’re very, very excited about the show and we also want to take a few risks and hopefully be remembered, you know? Splendour is a very special festival and it’s highly regarded as the winter festival of the year and we don’t want people to just mull over our set. We want to be remembered.
Some of the bands further down the list are ones I’m pretty excited about, if I’m honest. I’m very excited to see Everything Everything; I want to see how they do it live, because some of the playing is just incredible. Some of the singing is very demanding, so I want to see how they pull it off. There are a lot of bands that are very much in my taste spectrum like Everything Everything and Wavves and even younger bands like The Jungle Giants, I like what they do. Klaxons’ first album was so killer, so I can’t wait to see what they do next.
Definitely, they were one of the bands whose debut remained a soundtrack for a decent few years for me, so I can’t wait to hear how it all goes down once they get here.
Yeah!
Well, once Splendour wraps up, what’s the plan for you guys? Are you heading back in to the studio or are you going overseas to do some shows?
We’re flying to North America – we’re going to Los Angeles and we’re going to start doing some work there. There are plans of a release, so we’ll see how that goes, but we’re going to promote the living hell out of it and see if we can connect and maybe put out a record. Just do all the things that bands do when they first start! Play tiny, little 80 capacity rooms and run around trying to convince radio stations to play our songs and just do it how it all began, you know?
Yeah man – I gather it would be a lot of hard work…for an Australian band like yourselves who have such a good standing over here, to go over to somewhere like America and start from scratch…I gather that would be slightly refreshing?
Yeah, we have to be really cautious in not being that really spoilt band that tries in America and then gives up because there wasn’t enough caviar on the rider. We’re coming in to it going, ‘Let’s go back to the beginning, let’s treat it like we’re all 18 year olds and we’ll all share the same room’. We’ll obviously have to drink ourselves into a stupor to get to the point where we can sleep over the sound of each other’s snoring, but we don’t want to make that mistake of being that band who is big somewhere else, therefore expects to be big everywhere. Not doing the hard yards that you had to do to get there in the first place – you’ve got to see it as a totally new, blank canvas and you don’t have that many tools. The fortunate situation is that you know, if anything converts from our attempts overseas, it’s such a bonus because we’re just so stoked and happy that we have a following and the ability to tour Australia and support the lifestyle that we want.
Definitely! Well thanks for the chat once again man, hopefully it’s not too long before we get to see a bit in to what you’re working on next.
Yeah! I think we’re going to spend a lot of time together in the US to find time for new writing!
Excellent. Best of luck for Splendour and all your overseas journeys coming up and we’ll catch up with you soon.
Thanks so much for your time, your questions were great! It was a good interview.