Still Running

Much has been made of The Getaway Plan's 2009 split. The Melbourne quartet called it quits after five years of work. More remarkably, they threw in the towel at their peak. Their 2008 debut album Other Voices, Other Rooms had just recently hit number 14 on the ARIA Charts and they'd been enjoying successful tours all over the country.

“Man, before we broke up, we were pretty much locked in to bring a band over here from the UK called The Blackout and we were going to do a tour swap,” drummer Aaron Barnett remembers. “You know, we'd won awards, we'd played Big Day Outs, we were ready to take the next step. We wanted to take it to another territory and see if we could break that next market.

“We were just touring non-stop, though. We had a pretty big single. We were touring constantly and, when we weren't, we were on the promo trail. A radio interview, a press interview,” the drummer continues. “And we were still pretty young. You know, we weren't prepared for it. We just got too burnt out. We just had to stop.”

Yet there's a far better story to The Getaway Plan. The years since their reformation have proven far more remarkable. Reforming in 2010, The Getaway Plan have scaled far greater heights following their dissolution than they ever did prior – navigating from a crossover post-hardcore act into fully fledged mainstream rock contenders with comeback album Requiem in 2011.

“That just kind of happened, to be honest,” Barnett says candidly. “There was obviously a good couple of years between our first record and our second. We'd all gone off and done different things in the break and kind of brought them all back to the band. It turned out awesome, though. I know we lost some people with the change but we're all still really proud of how that album went.”

Since then, they've only continued to triumph. Most recently, they've managed to finally take their work over to Europe. Requiem has been well-received and their respective tours have been equally acclaimed. As they prepare to write and record their third album (a single due for release later in the year), the band's ambition remains undimmed.

“Coming back, that was the first thing we said,” Barnett says. “We said, 'Okay, if we're going to do this, we're going to do this properly'. No more bullshit. Just knuckle down and hit it as hard as we can. You know, there was no point to us going through all that bullshit and bringing it all back together if we were just going to half-arse it.

“At the time, the breakup was the worst thing on earth. We came off Big Day Out and everything was just steamrolling ahead but, personally, we didn't realise how much we all hated it. One of us made the call and, at the time, we all hated him for it – but, after a while, we realised it was what we all wanted. You know, we'd been drifting apart. It wasn't working.

“We'd lost sight of all of the reasons we'd wanted to do music in the first place,” the drummer says of the period. “We were trying to write another album and were getting nowhere. Nothing was really working at all. Really, that break-up was the best thing that could have happened for us – both as a band and as a group of friends. “

The Getaway Plan will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 13 April - Live It Up, RNA Showgrounds, Brisbane QLD
Friday 26 April - Hunter Valley Brewery, Maitland NSW
Saturday 27 April - Mona Vale Hotel, Mona Vale NSW