Sticky Fingers Are Living In The Land Of Pleasure

29 July 2014 | 2:54 pm | Liz Giuffre

Sticky Fingers are living in the Land Of Pleasure

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Sticky Fingers’ new album, Land Of Pleasure sees a developing musical direction from their 2013 debut, Caress Your Soul.  The Sydney band describes themselves as “a melting pot of psych, rock, reggae and bourbon”, leaving out a decent slab of pop that seems to be creeping in. First single, Gold Snafu, has a hooky riff and just enough “la-la-la”s in the chorus to walk the line nicely, complete with a ‘70s era clip that looks like Don’s Party travelled to the present day (including proper moustache work – none of that hipster bullshit).

"I can now play rock’n’roll with a Gorillaz beat and some rapping over the top. You can do whatever the fuck you want now."

“When we chose Just For You as the single, we really enjoyed the polarised response, being so ravey and upbeat and stuff. We got some great new fans, but also some purists saying ‘You’ve changed.’ But that’s how it is, we’re always changing,” explains Paddy “Fingers” Cornwall, Sticky’s bass and vocal man. “There’s not many bands that don’t change; you can’t help it. Naturally musicians get different inspiration, listening to a different album than you were before,” adds guitarist Seamus Hollywood.

In the band’s early work, reggae lived in pretty much a pure form (think tunes How To Fly and Australia Street in particular). On Land Of Pleasure, the genre develops, including echoey vocal tricks with Lazerhead. In terms of mixing sounds but keeping an offbeat edge, the Stickies are happy to continue to be inspired. “We’re just ultimately a rock’n’roll band in terms of attitude and the way we go about it. We’re a pretty mongrel mix of dudes with different upbringings and inspirations,” says Cornwall.  Here, Hollywood chimes in, enthusiastically, “The best thing about being in a band nowadays, you’ve got a catalogue of the last 50, 60, 70 years of the best music, and you can just take it all and grab what you want. Back when people say ‘We just want ‘70s this’ or ‘‘60s rock’, I think ‘Fuck that.’ I can now play rock’n’roll with a Gorillaz beat and some rapping over the top. You can do whatever the fuck you want now.”

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The band’s approach to exploring and morphing old and new sounds comes as a result of their clashes, both gently and musically with each other, as well as not so gently, and old school musically, with The Clash. “When we started we were a bunch of white boys playing an upright rocky sound, and then Dylan (Frost, vox and guitar), being the Kiwi, he just came in and just started putting a two-tone skank over it, which sounded great,” Cornwall explains. “Also, my dad originally said, ‘You guys sound like The Clash,’ which I thought was crap, but then he got me this album, Sandinista!, which for The Clash was a total flop when it came out, but that record ended up being one of the biggest inspirations for us, this weird-arse double-disc, psychedelic dub album, which was way ahead of its time. And so we thought, ‘Here’s some badarse white boys doing reggae, we can do that shit without growing dreadlocks and wearing hemp and all that.’” Hollywood agrees, “I think people forget, if they play reggae they’re all about being happy and all the rest, but they forget that reggae comes from one of the most badarse places, Jamaica.”

The band put Land Of Pleasure together quickly after returning from home a big tour of Europe. The experience got them hungry to get on with it and make their music focused. “We came back hotter players than we’d ever been before,” begins Cornwall, “and we were freshly inspired, so we got home, built a home studio in the garage. And we didn’t want real jobs anymore… and ever since then the band’s really moving; everyone’s much more committed to it. So the work output is just tenfold compared to only a year ago. It was a very easy decision; we’re broke, but it’s really fun, we all wanted to do it,” Hollywood confirms. “The last album was a collection of songs written from the beginning of the band, whereas this one was written in a garage in a month, so it’s a lot tighter, a lot more set.”

The decision to focus and leave the ‘other work’ safety net is one that all artists have to make at some point, and one that lots struggle with. “I think we all wanted to do it,” says Cornwall. “I know a lot of bands, fucking good bands too, who have that fear of failure. So they always have that safety net of going ‘Oh, we never gave a fuck in the first place,’ so they never really failed, but then they never can really get somewhere really great.”

‘Yeah, that took Scorsese two weeks to shoot and us half an hour. So cop that Scorsese and fuck you Coldplay!’

For the Stickies a ‘real job’ was pulling beers at the Annandale Hotel, but even that was something that got them in the right headspace to focus on how to make a musical life, as Cornwall explains. “[The Annandale] was the only place that really would still hire us because we were on the road so much, absolute salt of the earth the Rule brothers [former Annandale owners]. We owe a lot to those boys, they really helped us out in the early years. You’ll see in our liner notes ‘special thanks to the Rule brothers’. That was on all the releases so far and probably will be til we’re dead.”

Triple j and the festival circuit, including Splendour, have already got on the Sticky Fingers wagon, but recently they got some of the mainstream media involved too with a little bit of Sticky/Coldplay controversy. It came about over the UK band’s decision to shoot a ‘look at us walking down the road and having a street party with our people’ video clip in Newtown a couple of months back for their song A Sky Full Of Stars. It’s a genre many bands, including Stickies, had jumped into previously. Once those in the know noticed the comparisons, the story started to run.

“We knew it was very obvious that it was a coincidence, but our manager said ‘You’ve got to do something, it’s too good.’ So all I did was really subtle, just on our Facebook I said, ‘Seen that new Coldplay clip?’ and posted the link to our [walking down the Newtown Street] video, the Australia Street one. And then Ninemsn and the Sydney Morning Herald and you guys [theMusic.com.au] all wanted an interview,” Cornwall explains. “And the funniest was we were talking about how our original inspiration, this one long single take out of Goodfellas? In the interview I was like ‘Yeah, that took Scorsese two weeks to shoot and us half an hour. So cop that Scorsese and fuck you Coldplay!’ and in the story they wrote ‘Paddy’s furious – Fuck you Coldplay,’” he laughs.

You could argue that such attention, and ‘news’ from a video clip, is old hat these days. But for an indie band, and indeed, for musicians trying to attract new fans generally, these Sydney boys remain firmly behind videos as important tools. “If Chris Martin walked in the room right now I’d stand up and shake his hand, because he gave us dope promo,” says Cornwall. Continues Hollywood, “If you want to find a band generally the first place people go is YouTube, and you can just find ten videos of someone, and if you sit there for an hour before you know it you’re a fan.”

Recent news suggests that YouTube might start bullying indie musos (read: charge, try to do deals or kick them off) might mess with this plan, but at the moment Sticky Fingers are remaining happily under the radar and committed to just making good tunes and images to accompany them. “We’re an indie band so we’re the real deal, not on their radar,” Cornwall says of the possible YouTube takedowns. “We don’t put ads on our YouTube channel either and we won’t. The comparison I’d draw is that you don’t walk into an art gallery and see an ad for Maccas tacked onto the bottom of a painting, so how do you think it’s acceptable to put a 30-second ad in front of your music? What a way to ruin the party, man.”