Game, Set, Match

Taking on a world tour with only one EP at your disposal may seem like a big leap of faith, but for Sydney's Set Sail, it was simply an excuse to travel the globe as friends during a gap year. The band's 2011 debut, The Riley Moore EP, set the stage for a series of memorable adventures and crazy stories, and when it picked up speed it took the band with it, breaking through any roadblocks in its way, eventually selling 14,000 copies. “In the beginning we were just burning them ourselves, then it got to the point where we were burning like 100 a day,” Willows laughs. “We'd spend all morning hand stamping CDs and numbering them. The first 2000 copies were all handmade,” he recalls.

Their success can be somewhat attributed to intense hands-on promotion and street performing, the likes of which were cause for highlights and lowlights on their overseas World Stage Tour. “The classic is when we got arrested in Madrid. We set up and played a couple of songs in the main square in front of 300 people, and just across the square was a massive tent village for a protest and I think the cops thought that we were someway involved with that. So these two Spanish policemen show up, don't say anything and just take us to the station… We were shitting ourselves in the meantime, because they're all speaking Spanish and looking official and there's so many of them and we're sitting down in these chairs against the wall, interrogation style. In the end, someone who speaks English was like, 'Hello. We like your music, but you can't play without permission,” he laughs.

Even between cities they found opportunities to grab the attention of anyone willing. 37,000 feet above sea level, they busted out into Jason Mraz's I'm Yours during a Virgin Atlantic flight, scoring free pretzels and Carlsberg for the rest of the flight. You'd be surprised how easily one can attain complimentary snacks, plane tickets, clothing and accommodation with a few acoustic instruments, a laptop, video camera and some underwear. Set Sail have mastered life on the road. “This clothing company in London was having a sale where the first hundred people to come in their underwear got free clothes. We were broke and we didn't have any clothes, so we were going to come in our underwear and just get some free clothes, but we woke up late, like a half an hour before it started, so we figured we might as well go play and film it. We ended up playing in the freezing rain in our underwear and the company was like 'Hey, we like you guys. Why don't you come in and get some free clothes'. They ended up actually not coming through on it and just giving us t-shirts, so I wrote to their head office and was like 'Oi, they promised us jeans' and then they ended up seeing the video and flying us to Madrid and having us play there again for it and giving us a pair of jeans. That's how we got to Madrid from London.

“The whole time in Europe we maybe stayed seven days in a hostel, out of three months. All the rest was just going on Facebook and being like 'Hey, we're coming to Berlin. Anyone have a place we can crash?' and one of our fans on Facebook would be like 'Hey, yeah! Just crash here'. So we'd go and meet these random people and stay at their house and go get kebabs together. We did that all over Europe and America. It was a really cool experience.”

Returning to Australia, the band had developed into something completely different from what it was when they departed. With their debut release garnering success around the globe and pulling in a worldwide fan base, Set Sail all of a sudden had expectations to live up to and the pressure was on. Hey! is their six-track follow-up and Willows says it wasn't an easy 13 minutes of music to write, record and release.

“It took us about six months of recording. I think a lot of the pressure that we felt came from ourselves because we wanted to really present something that was musically a lot more developed. We ended up cutting quite a few tracks actually, because we wanted to have a very solid musical statement and just have four killer songs on it. We recorded nine and ended up putting only four on there. That's not counting stuff that we demod, so we had about 15 all up.”

A long, drawn-out recording process also included some issues with the release date being pushed back numerous times. The first time the release of Hey! was rescheduled was when vocalist/guitarist Brandon Hoogenboom, who is a US citizen, was deported from Australia after the band tried returning home from a New Zealand songwriting trip. “He had a three-year ban on him entering the country, so we did a public petition on Facebook and we ended up getting like 80,000 people involved on that and then a lot of the Sydney media was supportive – we were on the cover of one of the Sydney newspapers. That, as well as the Department Of Immigration being nice about it, ended up overturning the ban and granting him an entertainment visa.”

The main issue with Hoogenboom being deported was the songwriting the band had worked so hard on suffered from the delay – their creativity was no longer 'fresh'. Upon his return to the country, Set Sail had to “reset” as a band and spend some time touching up songs before entering the studio, where more issues awaited. “When we actually went into record, it just evolved into a situation where, because we rented a studio space and bought the gear and made our own studio, we were spending like 14 hours a day in there, for like three or four weeks in a row. It got to the point where we'd listened to the tracks so many hundreds of times that we were putting things in, taking them out, and changing the sounds. I think we went a little bit crazy,” he laughs.

So what's next for Set Sail? No doubt the interesting and chaotic antics will continue, with an album not too far over the horizon. “Well, we have the songs. We're going with a guy called Rick Will, he just mixed our EP and he's done Thom Yorke, Johnny Cash and like everyone you can think of. He's an absolute legend, so we're taking him to Iceland and will hopefully get the album our early next year.”