The Smith Street Band's Wil Wagner Talks New Album, Building A Studio & Launching Their Own Festival

Chatting with The Smith Street Band's Wil Wagner, he's tired but buoyant off the back of a tour through Europe where the band were supporting The Front Bottoms.

"It was incredible, but I've just been sleeping through all of my responsibilities," laughs Wagner about his jetlag. "It was so, so, so much fun, we had just a great time.

"We haven't done a support tour like that for a while so it was really nice to have a tour where we just show up and play to thousands of Front Bottoms fans and not really have as much responsibility on us and stuff. It was really nice."

Since returning home, the group have been hard at work finalising their upcoming Pool House Party festival, named after the band's record label, and is to take place at the Coburg Velodrome on 17 March.

"We've kind of been building up to it gradually over the last few years doing I Love Life festivals and different things and it's sort of been a natural progression, I guess, for us to do something a bit bigger and then when we started the label it all just kind of fell into place and made sense," explains Wagner.

"And also, we've been really lucky to do a bunch of the big festivals in Australia and we've learnt heaps and had heaps of great advice from all the great, different people running them and it just seemed like something we should do and I'm really, really excited for it.

"It's been maybe not the easiest thing to organise while on tour in Europe with a million things going on," he laughs. "But the people at the Velodrome have been really helpful and we've started talking to all the bands and everyone's really excited and I'm really fired up for it, it should be really fun."

With a line-up that includes the likes Tired Lion, The Bennies, Ecca Vandal, Ceres, Press Club, Baker Boy, Bec Sandridge and a heap more, the festival is set to be a big day. When asked whether it was a point of bringing their friends and bands they like together, or rather a point of offering something different from other festivals, Wagner thinks that it's a bit of each.

"Definitely both of those things, really. Like sort of the same with the label, really, I mean for me, personally, it was a big chance to get bands like SCABZ and Antonia & The Lazy Susans, even Baker Boy, when we booked him I feel like he's got so much more successful in the last few months since we booked him. All these kind of people I'd seen and met and stuff along the way and just thought, like, 'How are these people not massive?'

"The same we did with Jess Locke, we've been friends with her for ages and we'd always spoken about how criminally underrated she was and so happy we got to sign her and help her get a bit more of a profile and stuff, so that was definitely a big part of it for me.

"There's just so much good music coming out of Australia at the moment, as soon as we started saying, 'Oh, maybe we could get WAAX. Ah fuck, maybe we could get Tired Lion. Oh shit, maybe ...' We just got so excited, like stacking all the bands on top of each other. It was definitely a bit of wanting to help out smaller bands, but just as much like selfishly for us like how sweet would it be to get to see Press Club, Baker Boy and Tired Lion on the same day, kind of thing. As fans, it's exciting."

Pool House Records has certainly grown a lot in the space of 12 months, having kicked off with the release of The Smith Street Band's More Scared Of You Than You Are Of Me, followed with releases from Jess Locke and The Bennies.

"I mean, in traditional style, we've bitten off more than we can chew, as we always do but it's been really fun," he chuckles.

"It's definitely been a learning experience and we couldn't have done it without the help of everyone at Remote Control and just help from talking to friends who have run labels and done similar things, it's as much a learning experience for us as it is for anyone. So that's definitely been a part of it, like I'm glad that we released our album first and then did Jess and The Bennies so we could kind of be our own guinea pigs in a way.

"Again, same with the growth of the little festivals we've been doing, we've always been quite a community-orientated band so it's always been something we've wanted to do and now we've got our own sort of profile and a bit of money or whatever and it sort of made sense for us to be giving that back to the community that helped us so much. It's definitely something I'm really proud of and hopefully will continue to grow in the future."

Further to the point of community, the coming 12 months sees big plans for both The Smith Street Band and Pool House Records.

"We've just got a property about an hour out of Melbourne, in the bush, in the forest, and we're building a recording studio out here and I'm living out here.

"The aim is to build a recording studio that us and all of our friends' bands can use, then you can come and stay here and write, and get a retreat basically going for people.

"That's sort of our main priority over the next little while is we're going to build a studio here and then Smith Street will record here in the middle of the year and then that'll be, I guess, that'll be done around the start of winter, and then we'll start looking for more bands to come out here and work here.

"It's like a sort of setting up a thing where if you're on Pool House or Ceres or any of those friends like that come out and I can produce stuff and Fitzy from Smith Street who did the Jess Locke album can engineer stuff and you know, we can write together.

"And I want to do the same thing with the Smith Street record, like kind of have it be like a big school camp where it's not just the six of us, it's like us and then a bunch of our talented, clever friends come out as well and we all bounce ideas off each other and try and make this like a kind of collaborative writing/music community kind of thing. But at the moment, the studio's just an empty shed, so every time I talk about this, I'm looking at it and it's more and more daunting," he jokes.

With Wagner's plans for The Smith Street Band to record their next album by the middle of this year, does that mean that fans can expect a new album by the start of next?

"That's the aim, but that's a year away and there's always going to be things that pop up, so that's kind of our general plan at the moment but we've got a big bunch of touring sort of from September onwards, we're doing some stuff in the UK and then doing a big Europe run supporting someone, and there's sort of a bunch of stuff coming up.

"So yeah, I don't want to say definitely, just in case things get in the way but the plan at the moment is to try and have new music out, like a new song or something out, by the end of the year and a new album out the start of next year. Yeah, hopefully! But who knows, we could fuck the studio up and go broke and who knows…" he finishes jokingly.