Lion Island interview
What:
Berlin (self-released)
Who:
Lion Island
Where:
Live at The Troubadour
When:
Sat Nov 28, 10.45pm
How much:
$5
MySpace:
Here
The house sits towards the end of a quiet street, 10-minutes by train to the north west of central Brisbane. From the front, you can hear a few squawks and crashes - guitar fuzz, symbol hits - but the scene is mostly unassuming and boringly suburban.
It's not until I reach the rear of the house that I realise I have the right place. Lion Island singer Verity Flute opens the wooden back door and I'm taken to a concreted space, illuminated by just a few lamps, where six more members of her nine-piece band are gathered. Aside from the regular set-up, there's a bit of rehearsal room detritus - a few strewn instruments and a PA system. On the whole, though, it looks like a perfect set-up: a good place to spend two nights a week, several hours at a time, creating music you care about.
We start with introductions. In Lion Island, Matthew Vale sings and plays guitar and ukulele; Adrian Andrews plays guitar; Verity Flute sings and play percussion; Skye McNicol plays the violin; Julian Cerreto plays the drums; Dwayne Pearce plays the bass; Nick Smethurst plays the bouzouki; Rebecca Cuskelly plays the trumpet and Sudhir plays the banjo and the harmonica. The band grew from Matt's early solo demos, with each member brought in reasonably quickly, recommended through friends of friends or through other bands.
The seven - Sudhir and Rebecca are absent - make a horseshoe around the tape recorder. Over an hour and a box of cookies we talk about being accessible, being from Brisbane, and that pesky Beirut comparison.
Paul Donoughue: It seems like the songs emanate from you, Matt. Is that right?
Matt: A lot of the earlier stuff I had in my head and I just recorded it really loosely and then we sort of formed and everyone played little parts and we have sort of grown since then. These days, I write down the ideas and record new songs, but it's having a bit more of group influence. Like Adrian will come up with a riff that will take the song to the next level.
Verity: Matt's songs kind of transform after a couple of practices.
PD: There's nine members, many instruments - a lot going on. How did you arrive at such a grand sound?
Julian: We took a few Beirut albums...
M: It's a very delicate thing because we get that Beirut association because we are big band with lots of instruments and stuff and [we] play in ¾ occasionally.
Adrian: Basically indie kids have never seen orchestras before.
Nick: And they've never seen acoustic instruments used for anything other than pure folk music, or MOR.
PD: You have a pretty distinct sound - there are not a lot of bands with nine people playing those sorts of instruments. But Beirut are probably the most well-known band to utilize a similar set-up. So what's your reaction to the Beirut comments?
N: That's true - they are the crossover.
J: I feel like we draw a lot of influences from a lot of music, including Beirut and a lot of the bands and styles of music that influenced Beirut in the first place. People jump to the Beirut comparison because Beirut is probably the only band that they know that play that style of European folk music. Whereas there's a lot, and we draw on having heard French folk music and Balkan folk music. I find it strange, because rather than being influenced by that kind of stuff, my playing is more influenced by American folk music. I listened to the drummers who play behind Bob Dylan, or the drummers who play blues or swing, and aside from a few songs, that's where I am getting most of the stuff I am playing from.
Skye: Sudhir hasn't even heard Beirut.
N: For the sake of the tape and for making it clear, Sudhir is about 53 years old. He's been making folk music longer than any of us has been alive - before [Beirut singer] Zach Condon was born.
PD: Often young bands, especially young Brisbane bands, take realist views - sometimes self-deprecating views - on the actual worth of their music and why they are making it. For many it is a hobby, not a pathway to career. But you guys seem pretty committed. To even be able to get this many people in one room, twice a week, must require a certain amount of dedication.
J: It's dead serious for me. I've cut back a full-time job to part-time pretty much because of the time this is taking up.
N: I'm not going back to uni next semester. If we were going to do this, it would be so easy to make it half-assed. But for a group of nine people we get along extremely well. I know at least a few of us have been in bands before that are much smaller, that have had much more antagonism in the construction and the creativity aspect. But the nine of us all just gel. I can speak for everyone when I saw we all have a pretty amazing time.
M: This is a bit of a study in group dynamics. If we all didn't have the chance to come up with our own parts here and there, and have our own input, it wouldn't last. We come at a song like an entity, and even after we play it a few times it doesn't mean it's set in stone. Which is cool.
PD: If it's such a democratic process, where nine people all have equal say, wouldn't you be rehearsing for hours?
S: We kind of are.
N: It would seem that way, but at the end of the day, even though Matt humbly says it's democratic, we all give him power of veto because it's his band.
With eight people, conversation can become multi-directional and convoluted. The topic switches to a recent show in Toowoomba, which turned out to be a barometer for the band's ability to reach to new audiences.
J: The Toowomba show was really an interesting occurrence because the show wasn't really promoted all that well, for whatever reason. There was nothing in the local street press up there and there weren't really posters.
N: The town crier hadn't mentioned it.
J: There were probably about 15 to 20 people in the venue and that was it, and they were pretty much about ready to leave. But they stayed, and had a really good time. There were people at the back who were dancing, there were people at the front who were dancing, and the people in their chairs, drinking their wine, were clapping and yelling. It was a really general audience - not a cool audience. There were a lot of grey-haired people.
N: We are not trying to be exclusivist in any way, shape or form. We are not just saying that we play these songs because we enjoy them and everyone else can get fucked, but we are not playing to a considered audience either. We want people to have a good time listening to the songs. It's not like we want everyone who liked the last Radiohead album to dig on what we do. Or we don't just want Tom Waits fans to get it.
J: I listen to the stuff that we are playing and I feel like it's good if the people that aren't really into music can dig it. And that happened when we went to Toowoomba.
N: We are an independent band so in that sense of the word I guess you could use the word ‘indie', but this isn't hipster music.
S: It's very uncool.
J: At the same time we are not playing bad, commercial, easy to digest music.
N: I've been in bands before where you had to be a serious music person - it was almost an elitism thing: "Only the really serious music people will get these songs but that's the point". There's a lot to unlock in this band, there are a lot of hidden things going on.
M: I think the serious muso people will get something out of it, but at the same time you can just put it on and listen to it.
PD: So accessibility is a big part of it?
V: We are just not writing for a specific audience.
N: We are writing for the internalized tastes of nine people. With that in mind, if something can match up to everyone in the band's standards, then it holds a pretty fair chance of [being broadly accessibility].
N: This has turned into a massively over-intellectualised conversation. This is not a super intellectual band.
PD: You have mentioned the term ‘party band'. That seems to suggest that it is about the audience's enjoyment as much as your own.
N: If we are all entertained then the rest will follow. Do I really deep down think we are the most party friendly band in Brisbane? Of course not. But I want people to understand that they are not just coming along for a considered chin stroke. You want people to understand that it is going to be an enjoyable experience. That's not as much of a given in the Brisbane music scene as it might be [elsewhere].
PD: So, do you feel like people are getting where you are coming from?
N: I don't know if other people in Brisbane bands - the scene - really gel with it. But I'm also not terribly concerned because actual real human being people come along a have a really good time. And that, I think, is kind of great.
Genre: Folk
Release: Interview
Keywords: Lion Island, Interview
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