Always Better On Holiday

26 February 2014 | 8:16 am | Hannah Story

"We didn’t want to do the same thing as the first record again."

When the boys from The Holidays were making their second record, they didn't succumb to the pressure to take the easy route and create an album similar to 2010's Post Paradise. Instead, three years in the making, Real Feel explores new territory, as the band made up of Jones, Kortt and drummer Andrew Kerridge, try to steer away from the 'breezy Holidays sound'.

“We didn't want to do the same thing as the first record again. It wasn't like we were like, 'We don't want to do that', but we wanted to develop,” says Kortt. “We probably could've put out an album like the first one very quickly if we'd wanted to,” Jones adds. But he admits that by the end “it was a process of getting back to it a bit, naturally”.

They had in mind a darker, moodier record (although Jones jokes, “Darker than Post Paradise is still not very dark”), one that didn't necessarily adhere to the verse-chorus-verse-chorus formula. They were looking to, as Kortt says, “let the song flow. And then for the sake of having some songs that will work on radio, we worked back from there”. The Holidays were keenly aware of the need for singles that were radio-friendly, acknowledging that their record label, Liberation, had to nudge them so they'd begin writing some “songs”.

“There was a point when we'd done some things that we really liked that just weren't sounding like they'd be releasable,” Jones says. “That was kind of a low point of having a meeting with our label, and them saying we're going to need to get something we can play on radio here, rein it in. That was a low point of 'Ugh, now we've got to really do the hard work, not the fun work'. It took us a while to get out of that slump and then rediscover what we liked about these songs and finish them off.”

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It was finishing them off that took the most time. The group self-produced Real Feel, so were often found labouring over the little details, thanks to their “unlimited scope to change things”. Kortt and Jones both admit that it's the singles that take the most effort.

“Any band that says that they don't do it these days is just straight-up lying,” Kortt says of the need to craft singles. “When you're working on the singles, well 99% of bands have to have singles, that's so much more stressful than the other half of the record that are the album tracks. That almost comes easy for us, the stuff where we can let loose.”

“For some songs that you know will never be singles,” Jones elaborates, “because they don't fit the tempo or the feel of a single, you may still have a chorus, you wont agonise over 'Is that the sing-along festival chorus that people talk about?' You can't help but overanalyse it a bit because unfortunately the reality is that getting played on radio is an important thing in Australia, and it's hard not to think about it at all.

“That's kind of the unnatural bit really. You write it and then you think 'What does it take to make this song more likely to get played on radio?' and that's hard to know, especially for us. That's been the label's thing. It's their job to give you the radio formula, but there is no formula. I think literally it's just a good song is a good song.”

Writing a moodier song didn't stump Jones though, who is the principal songwriter. “More often than not you're in a mood that's not upbeat, sunny bright pop music. That's not actually hard. The hard bit is getting that stuff and trying to make it fit into what The Holidays are.

“It's kind of hard to describe but I think that one of the main things that we do is songs: song-songs, with choruses and melodies and catchy bits. So as much as we tried to avoid that to start with, we had to embrace that in the end and realise that that's what we do.”

But now it's time to turn their attention to playing the songs in a live setting, as they prepare for their first national tour since Post Paradise. They're looking forward to the upcoming shows and just having a little fun; they'll be incorporating “lots of strobes. Epileptics beware”. 

“You get into this vortex of making a record where you're so focused on the details that you kind of forget to have fun playing it,” Jones says. “And then when all you've got to think about is performing it you can really just enjoy it.”