Freedom Of Taste

On the Tuesday morning that The Music sit down with The Preatures, Sydney is all blue skies. It’s unfortunate that the interview couldn’t take place over a schooner in a sunny beer garden (it’s a little too early in the day), but conversation flows easily nonetheless, even without the pint. Frontwoman Isabella Manfredi and guitarist Jack Moffitt “prattle on”, but in a paced way, pausing to umm and ahh. They interject mid-sentence, speak over one another, but not in a mean way, instead like old friends telling a story they both know a little too well. Manfredi is comfortable in an oversized denim jacket that emphasises her petite figure, while Moffitt is clad in a hoodie and just-out-of-bed mop top hair. They both fidget, Moffitt more than Manfredi, using exaggerated hand gestures to emphasise a point.

 

"I don’t hide what my political leanings are because I don’t see the point in doing that."

“There was something in the mix that day,” says Manfredi in the tone of someone about to tell a ghost story. We’re talking about writing Is This How You Feel?, The Preatures’ breakout hit. The song features on their debut album Blue Planet Eyes, and was the starting point for a new musical direction for the band. One of the last two songs they wrote for the EP of the same name, the single reached #9 on the Hottest 100, won the Vanda & Young Songwriting Competition, and picked up Best Song at the FBi SMAC Awards. It’s quite the benchmark and it set the five-piece ablaze; they plunged headfirst into the pop world and after seven weeks in the studio have come out with a ten-track album awash with catchy hooks and clean instrumentation.

“I remember the date,” she continues. “It was the tenth of January. The boys were playing around; we had an EP of a couple of tracks and we didn’t really have anything that felt like a single. At the time I was listening to like Cat Power, the new Cat Power record Sun, which was new at that point, and Metronomy, we’d been listening to Here We Go Magic, a bit of Prince because he came and toured, a bit of Roxy Music, and Chairlift, and it just felt like there was something happening. And I didn’t know quite what it was, coming from a band that had been mostly into a lot of, I’m going to call it dirgey rock, we’d taken ourselves quite seriously up until that point, let’s just say. And then it just felt like there was this kind of sparkle of pop in the air and bands were kind of playing around with disco and more late ‘70s, early ‘80s sounds, and I really liked that. And the groove that Tom [Champion, bass] and Luke [Davison, drums] started playing…”

Moffitt cuts in, “It was kinda built around, I think, a Cure song, and now that I’ve said that people will jump on saying, ‘They ripped off The Cure!’… It just had this insistence that I think we were all really drawn to, as much as we were absolutely petrified by how different it was to everything we’d really been playing around with up until that point. We played around with it and Izzi was so quick about the song, she just leapt on it, and I think that carried it the whole way through.  Izzi took the song away and wrote it around these core ideas that were all still really new.”

“It was an evolving pattern of work that we were establishing for ourselves without realising that we’d stumbled across a really great energy for the band. We figured it out on reflection but at the time it was like, ‘We don’t know what this is, it’s new for us, it’s exciting, and it’s absolutely scary, let’s just roll with it and see what happens.’”

For Manfredi, a fledgling songwriter, the song sketched a path forward for her. “It’s a very emotional song, but because it was a certain style of song that I’d never attempted before, I’d never really tried before to write a pop song in that sort of genre, and it taught me that sometimes the best thing you can do for a song is not care about it that much.”

"I’d never really tried before to write a pop song in that sort of genre, and it taught me that sometimes the best thing you can do for a song is not care about it that much.”

But the song was met with what Manfredi at first terms “resistance” from their inner circle. Moffitt maintains, “we were so confident and happy with it, it kind of felt like it was worth the risk. If it fell flat it was like what difference does it make?” Manfredi adds, “And we weren’t anybody, we didn’t have anything to lose so it wasn’t like if we got rejected by triple j it was a big deal, we’d just go back and keep writing.”

“It wasn’t so much resistance, it was more hesitation from our team and people around. The friends that we played it to loved it, they were like, ‘Oh, this is great,’ but there was a bit of hesitation that it might not be right for triple j and that it might be too poppy and too clean. There was a big resistance against the cleanness of the track because the big trend at that point in time was a lot of lo-fi, a lot of garage, very distorted, the more distorted you were the cooler you were, so for us to then turn around and go, ‘No, we want to do something that’s quite minimal and clean,’ it was a risk. We were at risk of seeming, what’s the word? I want to say schlager.”

The single found its home on the radio alongside the garage and the lo-fi. For the album, Manfredi and the band – Moffitt, Champion and Davison, and guitarist Gideon Bensen – decided to pursue the pop aesthetic further. Now the album as a whole is looking to find its place as part of an undercurrent of female-driven Australian pop being released this year: think the disco influences on The Jezabels’ The Brink or Washington’s new “simplistic” lease on songwriting.   

“This record is really about us, and me in particular, trying to write pop songs and write to a pop structure,” says Manfredi. “So a lot of the songs are short, they’re quite classic structures. If you listen to the songs they’re intro, verse, bridge, there’s a lot of pre-chorus, I’m right into the pre-chorus with this album. That’s not to say that that’s our manifesto for life. We were pretty intent on making a record that was direct and had a lot of immediacy in every track. It’s not Kurt Vile or The War On Drugs, songs that go for seven or eight or nine minutes, even though they’re fantastic; that’s not what this record is. It’s a record that is meant to be consumed, it’s a record that is meant to be very present.”

Moffitt says the decision to go in that direction wasn’t met by any resistance within the band. “It was, ‘This is what we’re doing right now.’ And that might not be the same on the next record, it might be totally different. The shift from the EP to this record happened in a year...That’s the shedding of a particular mentality of writing. I think we’ve really enjoyed as a band cutting away all the excessive bits of what it means to be a band… If you want to be the best projection of what you are inherently you have to be honest with yourself. I think this whole process for [Izzi] as a songwriter and for me from a production point of view, has been like, ‘What’s the most honest thing about any of these songs? Let’s just go for that.’ And it just happened to be the pop thing, or the shortness of structure, and not giving ideas too much time in the sun if they didn’t really warrant it. And then the ones that did really let us move forward.”

It’s pop music about pop music for the sake of pop music. It’s pop music that was made possible by the recognition that there’s now what Manfredi is calling a “freedom of taste”, where people can create music “that has a bit of more of a sense of humour about it”. “You’ve got more people going, ‘No, well I like Katy Perry.’ I like Katy Perry, and I don’t mind a bit of Taylor Swift either, that’s just me, that’s my make-up. And I also really love Nick Cave and The Cramps and that’s okay, that doesn’t make me a bad person, it just means I have varied taste.”

Manfredi says she wrote about her relationship with music: “I usually spend my time talking to some voice in my head.” She wasn’t writing about her relationships with others or about her quite outspoken political views (don’t you recall the ‘F*** Abbott’ shirt that caused such a furore last year?).

“There’s not a lot of that stuff, and that’s a mark of the fact that what I was really trying to do with this record is get my head around writing pop music and figuring out who I am as a songwriter. And that’s quite different to who I am as a person. It’s just the way it is. I don’t hide what my political leanings are because I don’t see the point in doing that, just because I’m a musician who makes pop music. I don’t think it has to reflect in the music, though I hope one day it will. But I don’t want people to think that if they come to a show or if they listen to a record that they have to have the same views as I do. I mean, we don’t even have the same views within the band about politics, and that’s natural, that’s good.

“But if people ask me what I think then I’m going to tell them – why wouldn’t I?”