No Vacancy

Stewart “Leadfinger” Cunningham is one of the great stalwarts of Aussie rock'n'roll, having cut his teeth in an array of great bands since the '80s – a string of names such as The Proton Energy Pills, Brother Brick, Asteroid B-612 and The Yes-Men speak volumes for his skills and experience – but for the last few years he's been fronting a band hailing from Sydney and Wollongong called Leadfinger, named after his longstanding nickname.

Leadfinger are far from household names, but have quietly accumulated a catalogue featuring four albums of classic-sounding, guitar-based rock – quite removed from the more visceral sounds of the bands of his youth – and their most recent effort, No Room At The Inn, is probably their most accomplished long-player to date.

“The next thing you do is kinda a reaction to the last thing you do I reckon, and the last thing we did was an album called We Make The Music, and we spent a fair bit of money on that and recorded in a pretty good studio, and in some ways we liked it but the overall reaction was, 'Let's try and do something a bit more live sounding and dirtier',” recalls Cunningham of his mindset for the new album. “So we set out to try and do it as live as possible – it wasn't totally live, it just started out that way – but when you're recording if you go down one avenue it's pretty hard to go back, so at the end of the day we just tried to make it sound as good as we could.

“It's a guitar album, and it's definitely not lo-fi – but some of the albums that people make these days are so sonically amazing, and there's so much money spent on some of them these days at the higher end of the industry. I'm kind of in awe of what people do in the studio with digital editing these days, but at the same time I'm kind of repulsed by it – it's like music doesn't sound real anymore. You listen to stuff and go, 'That just doesn't sound real'. Every little drum hit is moved in sync, and every breath and note is moved around and edited. As a result, with this album we wanted to keep it real, we wanted it to sound like there's real people playing – like an actual band – and hopefully we achieved that.”

Not only did they 'keep it real', but Leadfinger conjured a collection of songs harking back to the glory days of early-'70s rock; an album which sounds completely authentic in both tone and delivery.

“I listen to a lot of music from the '70s, it's probably my favourite sound – I love The Stones and bands like Big Star – so there's also that element in there too, that I wanted it to sound a bit older,” Cunningham continues. “Also on the previous album there was a bit of a theme – it was all cohesive lyrically – and all of the songs were about playing in a band and making music and the relationships you have with people, and the good things and the bad things involved with all of that. On this album I didn't really have a theme, but I got a 12-string guitar and I think you can hear the ghost of that throughout the album – most of them were written on a 12-string guitar. I didn't consciously try and have a lyrical theme – it's just a batch of songs that I came up with. We just wanted to record them and get them out there quickly, just to keep the ball rolling.”

Leadfinger will be playing the following dates:

Thursday 7 March - Plantation, Coffs Harbour NSW
Friday 8 March - Bowling Club, Lismore NSW
Saturday 9 March - Beetle Bar, Brisbane QLD
Friday 15 March - The Tote, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 16 March - The Bridge, Castlemaine VIC