Stripping Off

When The Music talks to Cloud Control on the eve of the release of Dream Cave Unplugged, keys player Heidi Lenffer is on her way up to the shimmering Blue Mountains, their hometown. She and bassist Jeremy Kelshaw have moved back to Sydney permanently, following months spent living in London, with her brother, Ulrich, drums, and frontman, Alister Wright, staying behind. Having toured the US, the UK and Australia since the release of last year's Dream Cave, Lenffer speaks about the differences between the countries in terms of their receptiveness to Cloud Control's dreamy synth/guitar-pop tunes. “The US is our new favourite place to tour… There's a whole new attitude there that we haven't encountered in the UK. We're really enjoying the open-mindedness of the US public. We're already selling out shows there and we've only been there twice.

“I think music appreciation is culturally enshrined or culturally guided,” says Lenffer. “I was talking about that open-mindedness that I've noticed in some of the people who've come to see us recently in the US and I think that's a product of their belief that you can achieve anything. People who come from the States I think have grown up believing that nothing is out of your grasp if you work hard enough for it. And failure is just a step on the path to success, so you need to fail a thousand times... Whereas in the UK, and even here in Australia to an extent, failure is just seen as failure. The way that that translates into music appreciation is that people are willing to give, in the US, bands a go more readily. I think in the UK you have to be seen to have proven yourself. With your friends, you'll only go around to see a band if your friend has OKed them, will go check 'em out then. But the amount of people who stumbled upon us on a blog or whatever and then decided to come along, or just came along with their mates to a show on a Tuesday night in San Francisco, and then found us that way. I'd say there's a marked difference. There's an air of optimism in the States that you don't find in the UK. And I'm not trying to hate on the UK, I had a great time performing there, but there is a more sort of cultural oppression, rather than the freedom that you feel in the US.”

Australia, on the other hand, is a scene that's more intimate, and the home of the majority of Cloud Control's growing fanbase. “The Australian scene is really five cities, and you do the circuit between those five cities until someone overseas invites you to come play for them, whereas in London, international bands come in and out of there all the time. We've found there's less of a community there because it was a much more transient place… When we were playing the Sydney circuit it was all going between venues, so two or three years of that band life; we literally knew most, like 80 per cent, of the bands, and they all came to the same parties and went to the same university and all went to the same band comp. It's a lot more tight-knit. That just comes from population size as well but also mentality because a lot of people hang around Sydney for a lot longer than they do in London. London's really two years and then you're done.”

The band are back in Australia to promote Dream Cave Unplugged, a stripped-back version of last year's LP, by playing free acoustic shows across both metropolitan and regional Australia. “The arranging of the songs often, or mostly, happens in our lounge room together, just with an acoustic guitar and our voices. So we deliberately did it that way to make sure there's a strong core to every song… So the acoustic version of the album was really easy to do, it was a quite natural thing to do... It's 36 shows and we're playing tiny little country towns all around Australia which I've always wanted to do, because Midnight Oil used to play every pub in every town in Australia, that was a challenge for them to do. And I thought, one day we'll do that, and I never thought we'd do it as an acoustic band, but it'll be great.”