The sound of holidays

So right now we're developing a sound for an album next year. I've been in my bedroom with a laptop and some hungry ants gnawing through xylophone bars. Kerridge is holed up on a house boat with an MPC2500 sampler, some Eagles and some Jamaican dub. Will is taking photos of his girlfriend dressed as a baby, holding a giant lollipop and Alex is drinking while making some new songs for the Drones.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDAD-lALZFo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRyC5B0B-9k
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=94bL91pazq4

Immaculate Confection pt 2

The double header tour is a great idea because when you get your bus bogged at 3am while trying to drive up a sand dune you have at least 8 people to push it out. Its also good because you get two separate groups of music fans at each show, except at one regional show where we had 3 groups - the bikers, the young couple and the dero calling out for AC/DC.

Best shows were probably: Brisbane, where we tried out a rave vibe with glow sticks and a Justice record; Sunshine Coast, where we got really sweaty in a little club then did black magic with some candles on the beach; Melbourne, where we were a vampire, a mummy, a witch and a killer clown - with various results; and of course Sydney, where we made the annandale stage smell really nice and then destroyed it.
We thank you all so much for coming to any of the shows on the tour, its such a nice feeling to play on the other side of the country and see a bunch of people who've gone out of their way and paid money to see some young bands like us, you're way ahead of your time...

Immaculate Confection Tour pt 1

The success of a tour is largely dependent what you eat before the show. After a long discussion with Yves Klein Blue about bulk-buying baked beans, acid reflux incidents and all-day cereal, I settled for a Hot Mona burger at Chickens Plus Mona Vale. Delicately balanced atop a lightly toasted bun were two perfectly marinated spicy chicken fillets, lettuce, cheese, peri peri sauce and yet another well-toasted bun. Earlier experiments with marinated chicken burgers hadn’t turned out so well (when we toured with Dev from Lightspeed Champion a few months ago he proclaimed Oporto to be the worst moment of his life), but Friday night was different.


With chicken coursing through our veins and the broken air-conditioner sending temperatures upwards of 75 degrees centigrade, we took the stage at the Mona Vale Hotel for the opening night of the Immaculate Confection Tour. The crowd was louder than the industrial fans next to the stage and thankfully much larger, I spotted my mum up the back and it nearly put me off. By the time we were playing our last song some rogue dancers had invaded the stage and were taking apart drums and microphones with glazed-over eyes. The song finished and I jumped off the stage, landing squarely on a broken glass in bare feet – whatever man. We hurriedly put everything back together for our team encore with YKB, which is an epic cover of a old favourite (can’t say which one or I’ll spoil the other shows) that we had never practiced and only 2 or 3 of us actually knew the chords to. We only forgot the words in one verse and stuffed the bridge, but the wild singing and laughing of the crowd managed to mask (or highlight) the shambles. I think it went down pretty well because when we left the stage I saw two drunk girls crying.


The after party; kindly hosted by Matt, friend and drummer in support band Chambers, was a similarly glassy event with a girl falling through a plate glass window on the balcony. Alex our bass player helped out by picking all the glass out of the carpet with his hands and completing the pyramid of cutting that was Friday night. We’re looking skinnier with more nervous excitement than ever about the shows ahead… No doubt plenty more intrigue.
Our new EP When The Ship Goes Down is out this weekend so check it out on itunes or jb hifi etc. and come along to the show nearest you for tears of joy and pain!

...and the beat won't stop speeeedo

Firstly, to all of you who stood up the front at a little red show with your bright eyes, clutching an umbrella shirt and clapping when we had nothing to say, thank you!

I'm writing in the few days break we have before the final (and 3rd!) melbourne show of the 'Listen to Little Red' tour, which has been the longest outing we've done so far with 20 odd shows all over the place. It seems we were unknowingly very lucky to have partnered up with our friends Little Red, because despite any initial misgivings anyone may have had about regional audience sizes or the compatibility of music styles, the tour was a great success. This was in no small part due to the ability of Little Red (or petit rouge as the french fans screamed) to pull massive crowds of genuine music lovers to the shows.

Highlights were...

- sticking it to the fascists at the Perth venue by defacing their new wall in the dressing room with our new (unofficial) mascot, the ginger bread soul man.

- sleeping in beds almost half the time.

- Will getting pants off on the dance floor at the Corner and punching another band member in the face with his bizarre moves.

- scaling the wall of our melbourne hotel, smashing the window and ripping the backside out of my jeans when the doorman could have just let me in.

- whatever happened to Adrian from LR in brisbane, he won't talk about it.

- when Benn the andy bull trombone player fell in love with a girl in the front row who we named shaniqua and then found out she was dating anthony mundine.

We're back in melbourne this saturday (Sep 20) for the final Corner Hotel show and then we have a lovely 2 week break before we launch back into it for the Immaculate Confection Tour, where we'll be hitting most of the places on the Little Red tour and then some...

Tickets for the tour have gone on sale so visit

www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=24483609933

to check out the closest one to you and buy a ticket!

We're cooking up something interesting with the Yves Klein Blue guys so that your heads will explode in the final song... 

microwave spaghetti

At the moment were in the middle of making our next EP, just finished a week of tracking and waiting to put the final touches on over the next few weeks.

I think we've started to accept my theory of songwriting that the first idea to come out of your head is most often the best. With some of the new songs we turned ourselves inside out trying to improve them in some way but in the end returned to the original form... there's a certain honesty in the first draft that you can't quite put fingers on.

Our producer didn't disappoint either, we spent most of the time in the studio deciding which of the 20+ guitars to use. (I ended up using the cheapest instruments in the studio instead of the '61 jazzmaster once borrowed by thursten moore or the '63 one that johnny marr wanted to buy). We all recently got a bunch of new guitars too which we're pretty happy with and they made their way onto the record too...

Ricky-lee from australian idol was doing a new single in the studio next door with t-pain or flo rida or someone, sounded so fresh.

Kerridge wore a suede jacket and elvis sunglasses and sang on a few tracks.

   

hair extensions, meth and the plaza

Spent the weekend doing some more interstate shows with Wolf & Cub, this time in melbourne and adelaide... Reinforced to ourselves that 12 hours of waiting around isn't that great when you're staying at a 1/2 star hotel that smells like soap. 

All this time hanging around in adelaide gave us a chance to stroll hindley st discussing the finer points of life, like the effects of a meth habit on the weight of our cab driver (he claims 270kg, later reduced to 250). Kerridge picked up a nice 70c hair accessory from a variety store, i think it helped to increase our cred on the street, that and me making all calls on a hands free earpiece.

The hairpiece had quite a bit of buzz around adelaide but sadly it didn't translate when we got back home...

We've finished pre production for the next EP and are in the studio next wednesday to start a week of recording. Its just occurred to me that all the tracks we've chosen are about bad relationships... hadn't recognised this recent pessimism until now but i think it works well because the music is quite the opposite. Maybe the title of the record will be a nod to the divergence of lyrical and musical moods, or maybe The Holidays II if we could be lazy enough. Doubtful.

goodbye

Welcome!

Hello there, welcome to our blog. 

Whenever I'm on a computer it always feels like I should be checking something, and if there's nothing interesting emailwise it was always a good feeling to see what people are saying on your myspace and if you're lucky accept some friend requests with nice messages attached. But myspace, whilst being a particularly beneficial phenomenon for bands in the last few years, is a bit annoying and also kind of dying. 

We don't really like writing anything on our myspace page either because it gets lost amongst all the shit that happens on screen and it always seems like you're trying to sell something (we're not in it for money... i swear). So we've decided to kill two birds with one blog and marry our love for talking rubbish with the hope that some people somewhere like our music and would like to read about what we do...

So anyways, at this point in time The Holidays have released one record that amused radio announcers with the its triple name score, 'Holiday' by The Holidays off their EP The Holidays, and are now working on the next installment; another EP, probably 5 tracks or so to be recorded in just a few weeks time at home in sydney. Its exciting and I find studios are a bit like a holiday themselves, and you have so many voices and ideas that in the end you make decisions depending on what you had for lunch at 5 in the afternoon. This studio has one of our favourite japanese places across the road so it looks like soft shell crab will be producing this album.

We're about to play a bunch of shows all over the country in the next few months too so we'll keep posting as often as wireless hotspots and mondayitis allow.

Aspirat primo Fortuna labori

~The Holidays