Earlier this month, I caught up with Reuben Styles from Canberra electronic duo Peking Duk and talked about their crazy New Years schedule, what we can expect from them on the Big Day Out tour, that time they broke the BDO’s Twitter account, a few loving words about Tame Impala, their new track with Laidback Luke and more!
It looks like you’ve been running around like crazy lately!
Yeah, well we started off in Fiji for a few days, doing a party for a whole bunch of Kiwis, which was pretty insane. And it’s been ongoing since then! We’ve been running from set to set, state to state… got a bit sick along the way *laughs* yeah it’s been totally crazy.
How do you push through that? Is there a secret to it?
The secret is… pack plenty of Nurofen, vitamins and pro-biotic tablets. And they don’t all have to go in the fridge! Blackmore doesn’t need to go in the fridge and does all our digestive work… not even sponsored by them, I’m all about repping them.
What have you got coming up next, before the end of the year?
We’re a part of a party at World Bar next Wednesday, running off the back of the Electronic Music Conference, but otherwise we are pretty much going to be in the studio for 18 hours a day. There’s so much we need to finish before the end of the year and we’re running out of time! I wish we had a bit of a holiday, but we’ll fall even further behind if we do that, so not going to happen!
That time alone seems hard, with shows from Magnetic Island all the way to Dubbo rounding out the year…
Yeah, we’re back in NZ on the 30th, and then Magnetic Island on the 31st and straight to Perth… it’s just going to be trying to sleep the whole plane ride, every plane ride…
And you’ve got three shows on Boxing Day?
Yeah, I don’t think we’ve done something like that for a while. Last year on the day of Stereo in Sydney though we had that, then straight to Canberra for Foreshore and then to Melbourne… so with those three shows I definitely remember that I did not party at the end of all that *laughs*. I just went to bed and crashed.
I do not blame you at all! Now you’ve put a bit of a teaser up on your Facebook page, of a track you’ve done with Laidback Luke, “Mufasa”… perhaps a bit Lion King inspired, can you tell us a little bit about what’s going on there?
Yeah the sound is very much African inspired, it’s more of a jungle rave… that’s the style of the song. It’s just a fun party rave song. It’s got African soul vocals, African melodies here and there… we started that song with Laidback Luke a few months ago, and it came together really quickly because we were so excited by it, it’s such a fun jam so we just kept going on it. After a few weeks it was fully finished and now it’s scheduled to officially come out on the 30th of December, the day before New Years. So that’ll be very exciting for all of us.
A great track to bring in the New Year!
Maybe it’s the countdown track *laughs* hopefully all the DJs can get their hands on it in time!
Of course the big thing to kick of the new year is the Big Day Out! I can’t imagine you’re not looking forward to this one…
It definitely isn’t something that we’re not looking forward to, it’s a very good point *laughs*. Love the double negatives, they make the world go round. Yeah we’re absolutely pumped for it, we’ve been dreaming of playing there our whole lives, and now we’re doing the full tour, it’s something which we couldn’t be happier about. We’ve also got a lot of new things that we’re going to incorporate into our sets on the tour. We can’t really say now, but I will just say that it’ll be really fun and hopefully it all goes well!
Are there any other bands you’re looking forward to seeing while you’re there? Being on the whole run I imagine you’ll get a chance to see many of them!
Yeah we’re going to try and see as many as possible. I’m really, really, really excited to see Tame Impala (see our video interview with Kevin from the band HERE), I haven’t seen them for about two of three years, and even in that brief time they’ve progressed so much with their sound. So looking forward to them, they’re probably my favourite Australian band. Dying to finally seeing them again.
And they dominated the ARIAs not too long ago, too…
Oh did they ever! And Flume..
Great to see two great records get such the recognition…
Yeah, it’s so amazing how much good music dominated the ARIAs.
I noticed you hijacked the Big Day Out twitter feed a little while back, will there be any more shenanigans like that before the BDO tour kicks off?
There’ll be some stuff here and there no doubt. That was hilarious hijacking the feed, I think they lost something like a thousand followers *laughs* but I think they gained some too… I think they got suspended for a day too. We broke their Twitter, going too hard. It was definitely a lot of fun.
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Tickets to the Big Day Out festival are on sale nationally.
Sunday 19th January: Metricon Stadium & Carrara Parklands, Gold Coast
Friday 24th January: Flemington Racecourse, Melbourne
Sunday 26th January: Sydney Showgrounds, Sydney
Friday 31st January: Bonython Park, Adelaide
Sunday 2nd February: Claremont Showgrounds, Perth
More details and tickets available at http://www.bigdayout.com/
