Flying High

"It's feeling good!” exclaims The Paper Kites' co-founder Sam Bentley of his band's triumphs of late. “It was really good to get around the country and get to a bit of North America and just spread the word and play and get feedback… Prior to having a full-length album out, it all felt a bit like we were a band but not a grown-up band, whereas now we've got a full-length on the shelf it all feels a bit more real.”
Though prepared for the worst in terms of audience sizes when hitting the US for the first time late last year, a warm-up lap alongside Dallas Green made all the difference for the folk outfit.  
“We started off for the first few weeks from the south in Florida across to California supporting City & Colour, and that was really special – just massive venues, such a huge, professional tour, very eye-opening and a real privilege. I know I'm sounding cheesy now but it was a real privilege to be on a tour like that for a few weeks,” he chuckles. “We were obviously just the support band but everyone was very receptive over there and seemed to warm to us, and then we spent the next month or so doing our own headline tour, that was amazing as well. We kind of expected – and management all but told us – that we'd be playing to pretty much empty rooms every night. All the venues were 300-400 capacity and we were preparing ourselves… [We thought if] if we can get 50 people along to a show, it won't be embarrassing – that was our benchmark. But we actually ended up selling out almost every show, which was just amazing.”
This was in no small part due to the effort spent translating their ethereally-layered debut album to fit the stage.   
“We had to work really hard on that. The rehearsals leading into the album release tour, early on it was kind of concerning but kind of humorously concerning. We hadn't played a show in eight months, maybe even a year; we hadn't played in ages because we'd been working on the album, writing it and working on it for so long. So we finally got to the rehearsal studio a few months before the tour started and I remember fumbling through the first few songs and then we just stopped and started laughing; we're about to go out on the road and we're playing The Forum theatre in Melbourne, The Hi-Fi in Brisbane and The Metro in Sydney and we sound horrendous! People would walk past our rehearsal room and go, 'Oh that's cute, a bunch of kids have started a band,'” Bentley laughs. “It took a long time for us to really get it together, and I s'pose we have high standards of ourselves so we really worked hard on it. We've used some basic backing tracks for that kind of thing; we didn't want to fill everything out with backing tracks – we want to be able to do that ourselves, but we've used some basic parts that we thought were essential that we couldn't play live. Outside of that we've just worked really hard in trying to translate it and we feel like we're doing it justice.”
Heading out nationally for an 11-date tour, The Paper Kites have again reworked their live show, with some old favourites in store for those who've been following the band since their 2009 beginnings.  
“We've overhauled the set; after doing 55 shows or whatever it was in the last few months of last year, we decided it was well and truly time to completely rip apart the set and reassemble it. It's gonna be different in that we aren't playing quite as many songs from the new album as we did on the album tour, and we've actually pulled out a lot of old songs. [The set] is very different structure-wise, even dynamically – we've always kind of stuck to a certain formula of how the show starts, moves along and draws to an end and we've even revisited that. As well as that we've worked really hard on the lighting design because we want it to look spectacular as well as hopefully sounding spectacular.
“We're really excited. It's really cool to be going to Darwin – I've never even been to Darwin, let alone played there so that will be great. We're super-excited about some of the big venues we get to play and it's good to stretch out to a few places that we haven't been before. I can't wait to get on the road.”