1.Growing Up
Key childhood music memory: dancing around the living room to ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ by The Beatles. My direct family aren’t exactly musicians, but Dad was always musical, singing and listening to (generally) good music. I think the songs you are brought up on shape you. I have a lot of subconscious influence from that era – Stevie Wonder and Phil Collins do just seem to keep popping up.
2.Inspirations
I guess my personal heroes have always been songwriters like Neil Finn or Paul Dempsey – writers who have that uncanny ability to weave narrative and emotion into catchy-as-hell pop tunes.
3.Your Band
So Max [Pamieta] and myself met at uni and played in another band. When I started this project, Max jumped on board and we started smashing the Halcyon Drive tunes out live as a two-piece. More recently Basil [Yu] has joined to make up our most complete lineup to date. I think what has always worked is that Max and myself have a very similar vision for the band, despite the odd creative differences. Our key mission is to keep pushing the boundaries of what we can create sonically, but still fit the pop mould.
4.The Music You Make
I really dislike (hate is a strong word) the labels that get chucked on music today – but I have no shame in saying our music is definitely some form of pop! It’s bands like TV On The Radio or Yeasayer that really get me excited. Quirky, off-kilter pop? We recorded this EP with Steven Schram – we were shacked up out in the Otways National Park in an old mudbrick place to record for two weeks. It was an immersive, and fairly intensive experience. In terms of our live show, I hope people can come and really be blown away by a few dudes bringing all the energy they’ve got! We definitely make a point of being a ‘live band’, in the sense that we play all our instruments live and often improvise a fair bit too.
5.Music, Right Here, Right Now
I think the biggest difficulty today for musos is just the sheer challenge of scale. These days every man and his dog can make music – or at least anyone with a MacBook – and that’s a great thing, but the challenge then is finding the avenues in which people can find, access and appreciate your art among all the other noise.
Halcyon Drive’sUntethered is out now through Verge/Sony. Catch them play theBotany View Hotel onSunday June 12, withHigh-Tails and Yeevs.
