Sticky Success

17 April 2013 | 4:03 pm | Ben Preece

"You can kind of tie in the origins of the band back to Newtown Festival and a bunch of milk crates."

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The story of Sydney's Sticky Fingers' inception into the Australian music scene began like most – playing gigs, assembling demos and essentially looking around for that elusive break that can prop up a promising young band into believing something bigger exists. But it wasn't until the band of misfits took matters into their own hands, that they actually began to see the first signs of success.

“You can kind of tie in the origins of the band back to Newtown Festival and a bunch of milk crates,” laughs Paddy Cornwall, the group's bassist and seemingly head troublemaker. “We wanted to play the festival and got knocked back five years in a row so on the third year, we went and got 500 milk crates and built a make-shift stage in our friend's backyard, which overlooked the festival. We then we hired a sound system and unofficially headlined it. That was in 2010 and the organisers actually saw us play that gig and invited us back the following year for a prime spot on the main stage.”

You've heard them on the radio with their 2012 hit Caress Your Soul, a song that encapsulates their sound that's being dubbed everything from psychotic alt.pop to sinister surf dub, but in this case at least, calling it a modern re-rub on a Culture Club hit wouldn't be too far removed from accurate. Had it not been for that forced headline place at the Newtown Festival, the band would have never met their future collaborator, Dann Hume.

“He was in the crowd and saw us play and was under the impression he was watching this famous band he hadn't heard of,” Cornwall chuckles. “We had lots of mates up the front, going wild and singing every word – he expressed to us later that he had a sense of missing out on something. He contacted us after that and said he wanted to work with us, we were touched but didn't have many dollars, he said he could make something work because he liked the band so much. We sent him Caress Your Soul and Clouds & Cream and he thought they were amazing, really understood the sound and talked us into doing an album.”

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It was the song Caress Your Soul that eventually did place Sticky Cornwall loudly and proudly on the musical radar. It was one of the biggest Australian alternative hits of the year, receiving a thrashing on triple j and landing in at number 61 on the station's Hottest 100, attracting 200,000 clip views and generally making a mark not only here in Australia, but the world also began to take notice.

“It was interesting the way it happened, to be honest,” Cornwall explains. “When we first started working on what was to become the album, it was only going to be a five-track EP and Caress Your Soul wasn't even going to make that cut. The song started off almost as a little warm-up thing in the garage and when we started jamming it out in the studio a little faster, the engineer who recorded it came and listened to it and it sort of started to make sense. I guess we didn't really hear it as a pop song before that and then it just came together really well in the studio. Like the chorus, for example, I wrote that on the toilet in the studio and then brought it back, gave it to Dylan [Frost, vocals] and said “sing that” and he just sung it, really beautifully too. I guess we thought it sounded good, but weren't entirely sure if it was a single or not but a couple of weeks later when Dann Hume heard it, it was obvious it was to be.”

With a proper hit under the devilish belts, Sticky Fingers began to eye the recording of a full album. Their early recordings and an acoustic EP called Happy Endings garnered a fair bit of attention and led to support slots for Donavon Frankenreiter, Art Vs Science, Tame Impala and Urthboy but, again, much can be credited to the success of the Caress Your Soul single and it set the scene beautifully for the release of an album in March. But as Cornwall reveals, the group wasn't nervous at all about actually dropping a full-length on the heads of their rapidly-growing audience.

”[We were], more excited really. I guess having lots of friends in lots of different bands, we were all very aware of the idea of releasing an album too early, it can be released into an abyss and no one is going to give a fuck. We had the idea that we didn't want to burst the bubble, we wanted to get that attention first and then release the album, even back to that DIY gig, it felt like we started getting a cult rep after that, even just around Sydney. That was the first time we started developing a bit of a fanbase that extended beyond our circle of friends.”

Their album, also called Caress Your Soul, is everything a debut should be – two singles (the title track and Clouds & Cream) have already taken the listener onto a surprising journey and now a third called Australia Street is in the mix and, along with the album, solidifies their swiftly growing reputation as one of the country's must-see live acts.

“2012, I guess, was sort of where it happened. We've been a band for about five years and, internally, we've been working really hard and building this up for that time but in 2012, it really started to become fruitful and all that work has started to pay off. People from overseas and all over the joint have started to take more notice of the band; we've seen a massive increase of numbers and radio play and everything that comes with it.”

“Without trying to jerk myself and the rest of the band too hard, most of it [success] has been at the hands of ourselves,” Cornwall explains. “I think one thing we've been lucky enough to realise early is to know what to focus on as a band. We know lots of very talented bands in Sydney and Australia in general and their two primary focuses are triple j play and the major festivals including Big Day Out and Splendour In The Grass. To us, it's obviously ridiculous to make them the two primary focuses, the two precise things you have absolutely no control over. You're better off running your own tour circuit and developing your own scene; don't even bother inviting the people from Big Day Out to your gigs because, if you're good enough, they'll naturally come to you in a roundabout way too. The way we see it, if we don't get asked to play those festivals or whatever this year, then we'll just be headlining next year.”

Sticky Fingers will be playing the following dates:

Thursday 18 April - The Zoo, Fortitude Valley QLD
Friday 19 April - The Northern Hotel, Byron Bay NSW
Saturday 20 April - Big Pineapple Festival, Woombye QLD
Sunday 21 April - The Hoey Moey, Coffs Harbour NSW
Thursday 25 April - Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Friday 26 April - Baha, Rye VIC
Friday 10 May - The Gov, Hindmarsh SA