Playing the WAM Festival Saturday Spectacular this weekend in Perth are past WA Music Award nominees Anton Franc. I had the chance to speak to Josh Bowyer & Jamie Kuzich from the group on the day their new EP All This Talk was released…
Congratulations on the release of your new EP!
Yeah! It’s pretty exciting! Released today.
Let’s start with that… it’s been a while in the making. Can you talk a little bit about the process of putting this EP together?
Well our first EP was largely a recording project when Jamie and I were living about two hundred kilometres apart. We’d send ideas we liked to one and other and bounced them around and jammed them all together and made them into something we liked. No real thought of doing anything with it, we were just having fun up in the bush.
This one, because we’d moved back to Perth and started playing as a duo around town, we started occasionally getting friends to join us. This gave us some room to grow and I went back to the way I used to write when I was with other groups before. We would strip them back and build them from the ground up… we’d find interesting ways to cover them with lots of different elements… electronic flourishes here and there… but leave at their core the essence of the song. So the songs grew over a fairly long time with lots of gigging and it took us a while to find two guys to join us permanently. One we found those guys it helped a lot.
And how did you find those guys? Was there a battle of the bands style process?
We did actually have formal interviews *laughs* We started advertising ourselves as a full band before we had the two extra members! So we had to search pretty quickly to find someone. But it wasn’t easy to get anyone to commit…. it took a while to get it to the permanent four piece we have together now.
With our drummer, Josh Ellis, he started off as a session drummer for us and then he really liked the music and we wanted him to stay, but neither of us would approach the subject… but then eventually, like some casual romantic encounter we got there and decided to keep hanging out.
And then Matt Parker, who plays bass and keys for us, we hadn’t seen him for years, and he came to our album launch about a year ago, came up to us and said the music was really cool… and then one thing led to another, we mentioned we needed a bassist, and this guy is an amazing instrumentalist, so he fit right in with our instrument swapping ways. And now here we are!
Well, tomorrow you have your official EP launch at The Bakery… let’s talk a little about that…
Yeah, we’ve got a great supports for the gig and for ourselves, we’ve really spent some time breaking the songs down and utilising some new technologies that we haven’t played around with before. We’ve found a bunch of new ways we can explore our music, and I think the result is a really dynamic live show. I think people are going to like it!
And then next weekend it’s the WAM Festival and the Saturday Spectacular that you’re a part of.
Yeah there’s such a good vibe in Perth the whole week that WAMis are on… the Saturday spectacular is going to be a great day, we just saw the final lineup and there’s so many great bands on the bill. We’re really stoked to be a part of it. This will be the first time we’ve played at WAMis with a full band – we did a duo show last year I think.
There’s a change of schedule for the event this year, which we should mention… it used to be in May/June now it’s in November for the first time. Do you think the vibe will be the same?
Yeah I really think it will work well. The weather is so much better this time of year… especially this year. We had such dreary winter months, and then a strange spring… and now we’re just getting that beautiful weather that Perth is famous for. The evenings are to die for at the moment. It should add to a great buzz for the festival.
Anyone you’re rooting for at the awards themselves?
It’s hard to pick anyone over anyone else really! I guess it’s the nature of the Perth scene to know most of the bands and want to support them all! You’d feel bad if you were backing one band over another. So I won’t draw any battle lines… everybody wins!
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The WAM Festival Saturday Spectacular happens in Perth this Saturday! More details can be found about this event, and all the WAMi Festival festivities (which take place from the 7th until the 9th of November) HERE at the official WAM Festival website.
