Splendour's Zulu Winter Slam A&R Mentality

Splendour In The Grass guests Zulu Winter have opened up to Sydney's Drum Media about the very calculated way the British indie rockers have approached just about every element of their band in its initial stages.

“Essentially we've been playing together for a long time and have been aware of the music industry and the hype culture that surrounds it,” bassist Ian Lock told Drum's Stuart Evans. “We realised long ago that if we released anything, the attention span of A&R men is about thirty seconds and that they'd want us to release something else immediately,”

So the band decided to get focused and pull together a large canon of songs of high quality; ambitious and patient given the ease of distribution in today's market.

“We wanted to have at least eighteen songs ready and decided eighteen songs was a good number before we gave anything to anybody. Then if someone really liked our music, we'd have more ready to go. It's a reaction to the current climate of A&R.”

In order to do this the band focused almost solely on being the best band they could, doing away with a frivolous partying lifestyle.

“We're not eighteen anymore and couldn't go around getting pissed. For three years we practised for three evenings a week. Our girlfriends at the time wondered what the hell we were doing as we spent that time locked in a room writing songs.”

Read the full story here.

The band play The Corner Hotel tonight, Oxford Art Factory tomorrow and Splendour In The Grass on Friday.