Laying The Foundations

Your humble scribe has been to Cairns once, for a week. It involved a lot of backpacker pubs, two-for-one drinks deals, a boat trip to the Great Barrier Reef and… well, that was about it really. And while seven days obviously isn't long enough to explore any given place, it was pretty easy to see the live music scene isn't exactly bursting at the seams; backpackers want Sweet Child O' Mine, not some original indie-rock band trying to make their mark in the Oz music landscape.

Enter The Medics – four friends who flew in the face of this musical adversity as high schoolers before making the trip south to Brisbane. It was a move that has since seen them get a heap of radio play thanks to belting tracks such as Beggars and more recently Griffin; at the time of this conversation they're in the midst of a national tour celebrating cracking debut album Foundations.

Drummer/vocalist Jindhu Lawrie isn't about to bad-mouth his hometown, and the band's reasons for leaving are varied and understandable. “I think we got to a point in Cairns where…” he pauses to consider the place where he and cousin Kahl Wallace, Charles Thomas and Andrew Thomson, who round out the band, grew up together. “Before we made the move we'd already kind of started doing gigs out of Cairns and had to fly to places, and that was really quite expensive. Flying to places from Cairns is not cheap, especially if you're flying with a band.

“And the music – we really wanted to get out and play more venues, and Cairns hasn't got a heap of venues compared to other cities. And yeah, just playing more and experiencing more. We definitely wanted to grow and get out of our parents' house,” Lawrie laughs. “And making that move was important. A whole lot of things, personally and for the band.” I try and squeeze a little more out of him in regards to Cairns, and he reluctantly obliges. “The music scene there is… not non-existent, but there's really a lot of cover bands and there's a lot of metal bands. Don't get me wrong, some of the metal bands there are okay, but there's just not a whole lot of places to play. I feel like Cairns is like a gold mine and it just needs to be found and nurtured. The gold is there, it just needs a little work.”

What they can thank their hometown for is a DIY attitude that led the group to putting on their own shows, and also helping to shape the formidable live experience that The Medics are fast-becoming well renowned for. “A lot of what we had to do when we were starting was playing those dingy pubs every single Saturday night, but other than that there was not a lot of places that would let you play original music. We usually had to put on a lot of gigs for ourselves and we'd actually get metal bands and weird folk bands. This is when we were young kids in high school and we'd hire out a PCYC and just set up a PA in a room. We used to put on our own gigs all the time just because there was nowhere else to play!”

And this, along with just a generally excitable nature, has done the group plenty of good. “I think it's definitely part of who we are as individuals. We're all really excited and jumpy and really active. It's really hard to explain when we're on stage, like, the motions we go through. Like, how do you explain your own presence? Some of it too came from playing those little dingy pubs in Cairns. So we'd play and there'd only be five people at the bar, drinking at the bar, and I think a part of it was trying to get heard, and getting their attention. So we had to play harder.”

And playing harder they have been ever since, especially once they made the move south to Brisbane. “It's good, you know, because as soon as we moved to Brisbane we met our manager and it just kinda kicked off from there. I remember playing a gig every single weekend for a few months straight, and it was so crazy.” And from there the guys have produced their debut album Foundations, a scintillating – and soaring – take on indie-rock that's hard not to get swept up with.

Wallace goes into the process behind the album: “Half of it's old and half of it's new – it's kind of like the time when we were in Cairns, up until now,” Lawrie begins. “The album itself was probably about a year-and-a-half in the making before we released it. And that was all to do with getting a breakthrough grant from the government, which really helped us fund it all. And then we worked our way through finding a producer and all the pre-production. And then finally recording it in Byron Bay. The mixing process, we really got stuck into that – we really wanted to make it sound right, which took the longest.”

As with any band who've crafted a cracking live show, capturing that sound on record always proves to be difficult – nigh on impossible – but Wallace feels like the group succeeded. “Yeah, that was a really big thing for us. We've done a few recordings before with the producer we'd used before. He's seen a lot of our shows and he really understood what we liked. And we ended up doing just drums and bass live, and some of the other guitar parts were live. So most of it was all live in the studio, and then we over-dubbed a bit of stuff. But really trying to capture that live element was a little bit difficult, but we got it in the end. I think,” he chuckles nervously.

Most would find it hard to argue, and the plaudits that have come for the band since only further support the cause. Most recently the group won all three categories they were nominated for at the National Indigenous Music Awards – Album Of The Year, New Talent Of The Year and Song Of The Year for Griffin. And it was a special moment for Wallace who joined his father, the legendary Bunna Lawrie from Coloured Stone, to perform iconic Australian track Black Boys at the Award Ceremony in Darwin. “Oh man, I'm still kinda overwhelmed with it all. I thought maybe one award, we might win just one, but yeah, we took out all our categories. It was an amazing night just to get in touch with other families and with other Aboriginal communities. So it was just amazing being in Darwin and meeting all these people.”

The pride in his voice beams down the line. “It's definitely a big part of me and Kyle because we're both indigenous. And it was just really good to see we kinda got accepted into the Aboriginal community. It's a feeling of respect in the community, and the Aboriginal music community, which was really a big thing for me.”

The Medics will be playing the following shows:

Friday 31 August - Hotel New York, Launceston TAS
Saturday 1 September - Waratah Hotel, Hobart TAS
Thursday 6 September - The Loft, Warrnambool VIC
Friday 7 September - Jive, Adelaide SA
Saturday 8 September - Amplifier, Perth WA
Sunday 9 September - Rottofest, Rottnest Island WA
Wednesday 12 September - Spectrum, Darlinghurst NSW
Friday 14 September - The National, Geelong VIC
Saturday 15 September - The Toff In Town, Melbourne VIC
Thursday 20 September - Karova Lounge, Ballarat VIC
Friday 21 September - Ferntree Gully Hotel, Ferntree Gully VIC
Saturday 22 September - The Westernport Hotel, San Remo VIC
Thursday 27 September - Transit Bar, Canberra ACT
Friday 28 September - The Patch, Wollongong NSW
Saturday 29 September - Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle NSW
Friday 5 October Hotel - Great Northern, Byron Bay NSW