Life, age, obligation – none of these seem relevant when you’re truly committed to a particular path.
Halfway are one of those bands who know nothing but their music, having created some of the most underrated Australian indie rock for well over a decade, courtesy of their steely guitars and a terse and tempered twang. Though they’ve been through the wringer with band members over the years (the current lineup numbers eight talented individuals), every one of them has appreciated and stood for the same thing: Halfway’s matchless musical mantra.
Like a tumbleweed gathering strains of talent, Halfway’s 16-year history has seen them grow to collect members from all over Queensland. Guitarist John Willsteed explains that they came together with different musical histories for one united purpose.
“[Halfway started] as kind of a bunch of guys in Rockhampton who had a band called Saint Jude, then two songwriters and a drummer moved down to Brisbane,” he says. “The core of the band is three guys from Rocky, three from Brisbane. We’ve added more members over time – me and Luke Peacock are the two most recent members.
“I was in The Go-Betweens in the ’80s. The reason I ended up in the band was because Robert Forster told me to go see Halfway. They were big fans and knew who I was – when the time was right and one guitarist left, they had a spot, I joined. It seemed appropriate because I got the connection between them [Halfway] and The Go-Betweens – it’s quite a different layer of influence because these guys were brought up on indie and I wasn’t.
“We get compared to Wilco a lot, because there has been an old country indie rock influence there, but it’s not very strong – we get called a country band but we’re not at all. Really we’re an indie rock band – loud, lots of guitars, influenced by that indie-pop stuff.”
With their multiple backgrounds and musical influences, it’s no surprise that the band’s name should reflect such eclectic qualities. “I always feel like it’s halfway to nowhere or halfway to somewhere,” says Willsteed. “Rocky is a fair way from Brisbane and to drive north to Cairns, it’s still a two-day trip – Rocky is halfway there, halfway back, on the Tropic of Capricorn. I feel like that’s significant in a bunch of different ways.”
For other bands, having members drawn from all over the place would naturally create some sort of mash-up of sounds, but for Halfway, that diversity only goes to strengthen their creative output.
“Even though we do have different backgrounds, we’re fairly open and have fairly catholic tastes and love good melodic music, and love where it lives – inside The Monkees and The Jesus and Mary Chain,” Willsteed says. “All of us have stuff to contribute to any song we bring in. We elaborate on acoustic melodies usually, and on the new record there’s a lot of sonic clues, a bit of a sonic pathway to follow. For all of us, we start with those ideas and elaborate. All of us are finding places to add to the density, where density is important, and also looking for space. It’s a strange kind of game to play in a band of this size – we really work stuff up by playing around, spending a lot of time with the song, trying to find the heart of it and making sure it’s elegant.
“Songs are weird things. They’re true to themselves, and it’s obvious when it’s working and when it isn’t. The whole thing’s gotta work on an emotional level – I think that’s really important.”
Halfway will soon find themselves performing at Sydney Festival with material from their new album The Golden Halfway Record in tow, including the haunting single ‘Welcome Enemy’.
“I reckon when I met this band, they’d just released their third album, but one of the things that struck me when I saw them live – nine members back then, they had a dense sound and I was struck by how it felt, like driving the highway at night,” says Willsteed. “There’s something that rolls along in the music, and that’s even true now – all kinds of influences are making their way into the music. There’s a little bit of grandness, a rolling quality. You mentioned a melodic quality – music without melody is just crap. You don’t wanna be a genre Nazi like the ARIAs where there’s virtually no guitars. It’s turned into laptop music, it’s very tedious, there’s almost no point.
“[Halfway’s music] does have a dark density. I just love playing songs this band writes because there are beautiful melodies in there.”
[Halfway photo by Luke Henery]
Halfway’sThe Golden Halfway Record is out now through Plus One/ABC; and you can catch them in theMagic Mirrors Spiegeltent as part of Sydney Festival 2017 onSunday January 22.
