Love It Or Hate It, Home Is Where The Heart Is

An artist's upbringing, background and surroundings have a profound effect on their creative output, and the influence of living in a small country town like Bendigo has been so all-pervasive on Tony White and the others members of Fountaineer that they wrote, recorded and released what is more or less a concept album about the town, growing up there and their shared and individual experiences there.

"We started a few years ago, my brother and I just got together," White recounts the band's history, speaking from the town's library. "We finally got a band together, we'd been talking about it for years. We hadn't played together since we'd left high school, and it all started from there.

"The Bendigo thing just happened naturally," he explains. "There's always a lot going on around town, and that's what we started writing about, and the album centred around that. We're just a very Bendigo-focused band."

That where you live seeps into your psyche and then, in turn, comes out in your creativity is more or less unavoidable for certain artists, and this band chose to simply embrace it. "I think where you live and where you grew up is pretty much a family member in a lot of ways," he says. "It's a love/hate thing and you push and pull against it, but it's there. It's nothing something you can change, unless you move. You have to learn to deal with it and appreciate the good things, and do your bit to try and make the place better."

And living in a small regional town, by its very nature, has its own effect. "Everything in a small town is finite. There are boundaries, there are limits. You're not going to find new people, not like in a city where there's always different bars and different people to meet. Whoever's here and whatever's here is what you have to work with. Everyone knows everyone, and that sucks a lot of the time!" he laughs.

The album, entitled Greater City, Greater Love, whose creation was so heavily influenced by its surroundings, has been out since August, and the band are heading off on their very first full-blown tour during November and December. White is looking forward to playing to people outside of their own regular crowd. "Maybe people will turn up that we don't know, usually in the past it's pretty much family and friends to be honest," he laughs, "there may be a few punters who've just listened to and enjoyed the record, you never know."

The album has somewhat of an electronic and new wave type of sound and feel to it, and while their live set will be dominated by tracks from the album, punters rocking up to the shows can expect a very different vibe to what they experience listening to the record. "We just put it all out there," he describes, "it'll be mostly songs from the record, maybe a few that aren't on the record. It's pretty raw, almost like a garage band just giving their all, we're not overly technical. It's probably got a lot more intensity than what you get on the record."

The album has received some pretty significant airplay on triple j, and has also garnered almost wall to wall praise from reviewers and punters. White feels that moments like that make working in such an unforgiving industry so much more worthwhile, especially when it comes to gaining acceptance in their hometown. "All the ups and downs, as you know the old music industry can be quite fickle," he says, "but stuff like that makes us pretty proud.

"The biggest thing for me is that it makes people in Bendigo take us seriously. No one's really taken us seriously so far, apart from ourselves, so it's good to have that sort of thing to hang your hat on."

As far as the future of the band is concerned, White is quite casual and relaxed about their prospects, preferring to live his busy life in Bendigo, take it all in his stride and allow things to come naturally. "We've started work on album number two at the moment," he reveals, "we've got a lot of demos sitting 'round. I'd hope this record comes out quicker than the last one. But real life gets in the way, we're probably more concerned about jobs and real things than what's going to happen with the band. The music will take care of itself, we can't really worry about it too much."