A Glowing Review

Toby and Dan's by-day salaries come from PR and carpentry respectively; but already, the duo's infectious brand of electro-pop music has seen them sling-shotted around the globe. Sun City very much follow in the saccharine, summer-bound tradition of Australian electronic popular music. Mirroring Empire Of The Sun's apex of synthesisers, John and Mackey have managed to distil their sound into an echo reminiscent of Van She's minimalism – without losing the afterglow. It's a formula that's caught Sun City a global eye: the video for High was shot in Alberta Canada and debuted on US MTV's Iggy program. North Carolinian rapper Chip Ivory borrowed the duo's The Follower, which he reinterpreted into the track What You Know About The Follower. And then of course comes Sun City's most recent expedition untoward Africa.

“Well we've got a bit of a following in South Africa and Zimbabwe,” John says with a chuckle. “A bit of a following, it's a little bit ridiculous. It kind of just happened by chance; there's a world famous resort in South Africa called Sun City, and we had no idea when we started Sun City,” he insists. John speaks truth – first port of call after Googling Sun City is a palatial resort in South Africa; an intimidating rival among Google's search algorithms for any upcoming act. Toby expands his point. “So if you type 'Sun City' and 'South Africa' in, it literally just comes up with all these photos, and it's a beautiful resort… I guess you could say we got some help from them.”

Mackey, the stronger, silent type, elaborates. “There's three things that come to mind for me [about the African tour]. I would say it was the wildlife, the shows, and then the parties. Do you remember when we took the fishing trip on the Zambezi river?” he asks John. “And it was like 50 degrees and we jumped in the water to splash our face and we jumped back in the four-metre boat and a minute later a five-metre croc swims past?”

“We got some radio play over there to help us a little bit, and we've got some ties to the Zimbabwean and South African community here in Perth, so after playing a couple of shows from Zimfest [in Perth], one of the guys who's organising that runs a touring company, and just went ahead and got a team together and marketed us over there so we were playing in nightclubs, getting some radio play. The demand was there for us to get our first show, and so for our first show we ended up headlining a small festival called Summerfest. In the front row they were all singing along to our tracks and stuff, it was absolutely surreal,” John says.

As to how they broke big in the continent? “I'd probably put it down to just having the name Sun City and a little bit of luck,” says John wryly. “We get bombarded with Facebook messages on a daily basis from people who think we're the actual resort asking where reception is or asking, you know, just stupid stuff, where the entertainment centre might be, that sort of thing. We actually had a bit of fun with it and messed with them a bit. But yeah, I guess a little bit of luck went a really long way.”

In a display of pretty remarkable humility, Toby completely neglects to mention the band's recent fundraising gig for a documentary by Sonlife Africa on remote African communities (100% of ticket sales went into the doco); any kind of prima facie goodwill charity involvement is generally the kind of factoid more cynical and less scrupulous acts plaster over any press release at hand. Between their album release this year and another adventure in Africa, Sun City are worth the attention.

Sun City will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 13 April - Feet On The Street, Bunbury Skate Park, Bunbury WA

Friday 10 May - Metro City supporting Example