Asta’s Tour Will Send Her Broke

It all happened so fast for Asta Binnie. One day the unassuming teen was just another aspiring musician and the next she'd won Unearthed and all the prestige and notoriety that comes with it. The now-19-year-old overachiever has since played some high-profile support slots with Birds Of Tokyo and Hungry Kids Of Hungary among others, released a trinity of singles and was shortlisted for the Vanda & Young Songwriting Competition – and now she's about to embark on her debut headline tour. Despite the accolades and meteoric rise, the rock star life isn't always all it's cracked up to be. “I'll be broke at the end of this tour!” Asta laughs. “I'm spending all my money on this tour! So after that, I'll be on the streets and begging for food. But it'll all be worth it.”

A lot of the money, admittedly, has gone towards costumes for the tour – “I'm pretty drawn to mega-'80s clothing … and anything gold or silver,” she admits – but one would have to assume the rising costs of life on the road would also be attributable to the recent acquisition of a live band to back her visually colourful performances. Not that Asta's complaining. “It's really good. Before, I was playing with a DJ, which really wasn't me. I was always itching to have a band, so I'm loving it. It's been such an amazing change. The sound is a lot bigger. It's less electronic; it has more of that natural rawness now. It's more rocky! … And what I hope is for people to come out of a show and just be like, 'Yeah, that was really solid. That was really rockin', that was tight.'”

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