Morning Harvey are a local drone-rock outfit, or, 'stoner-rockers' if you will, who have been quietly putting in the hard yards over the years; playing a tonne of support shows for big-name acts, including Cut Off Your Hands, Bleeding Knees Club and Gung Ho, while forming important connections within the music industry along the way. They now seem to be reaping the fruits of their labour, having recently released their debut EP Well For Wishes to positive response, as well as gaining a bit of airtime on local radio.
One of the first major sparks of hype around the group came as a result of their risqué-yet-alluring film clip for the single Sundown, where White explains, “The filmmaker and I met up for a couple of drinks and started talking over ideas that would make [the clip] as weird as possible. He had ideas of having a gathering of people where everyone was doing their own thing in a really strange way. We've got a pretty different group of friends, everyone's pretty nutty, so we just invited thirty or so of them round, not really expecting anyone to show up because it was a weekday, but everyone showed up and pretty much just got off their faces, so anything we told them to do they'd just do it. It was great!”
The next step was to release their debut EP, which proved to be a strenuous task, and as White reveals, a little disheartening at times.
“We'd been working towards [the EP launch at Coniston Lane] for quite a while, trying to get everything together to make the show as big as possible even though no one really knew us that well – we even had our friend doing visual art for it,” he recalls. “It was good to see it work out, because the rest of the shows kind of dampened our spirits before that. We were going through one of those times where nothing was really going our way. We had a Sydney show which was just a complete blow out – we didn't get a soundcheck, and the first band played twenty minutes over their set, so they had to cut us off about four songs in, and the sound was absolutely rat shit.”
Having turned their luck around since then, and with the release of the EP done and dusted, White seems positive about the band's future movements.
“We've just recently recorded a bunch of new demos which are moving in a direction that we've been wanting to experiment with for a little while now; just a bit more melody and a bit more of an up-beat sort of feel to it as opposed to the droney, sluggish rock we've been playing up until this point,” he tells. “The next shows we'll be doing will be mostly new material – we kind of just want to move on from the EP, as stupid as that may sound because we only just released it, but we've been playing most of those songs since we first started so we're kind of sick of it in a way.”
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With a mini-east coast tour set for early August, where the first stop will see them headline 4ZZZ's Wax Eater fundraiser in Brisbane, White admits he and the boys are excited to be heading out; “We've always wanted to do one of the 4ZZZ shows, we've been to a few over the past few years, and this show will actually be the first time we've headlined Black Bear. Whenever we've played there in the past we've just played with our friends' bands and just scrape through soundcheck, so I think we'll have a better sound this time around.”
