How A Band Member's Bombshell Forced Simon Rigoni To Find His Voice

"I did the first album and I already knew what the second album was," Simon Rigoni of 2 Inch Tape reveals. So it was all there, fully arranged, in his head? "I don't wanna sound like Brian Wilson," he laughs, "but to a degree, yeah." The Control songs were written "around about the time I did the first album, which was in 2015", Rigoni tells.

Rigoni started his musical journey as a teenager. "A friend of mine bought an electric guitar for 50 bucks and I went around to his house, and we tried to play Sex Pistols and Bowie on it and we had no idea," he recalls. After getting into "production and engineering in [his] early 20s", Rigoni then had a break from music "for a long time".

"Then, finally, probably four years ago, I started writing and started playing again, and contacted some friends that I had spoken to in 15 years... and then just started from there and [was] really having fun and then I was like, 'Let's record it'" he says.

Contemplating the differences between 2 Inch Tape's 2015 debut album, New Addiction, and its follow-up, Control, Rigoni offers, "The main difference is that I did not sing on the first album, and towards the end of that whole process — by that I mean after we'd done the launch gig and that — Mark [Petrilli], who sang on it, said to me that he didn't wanna sing the songs any more. And I was like, 'Well, who's gonna sing them?' And he said, 'You!' And I said, 'But, as you point out to me regularly, I cannot sing!' Well, it was at that point I realised that either I learnt to be able to develop a style that could work or give it all away."

He had already intended to contribute vocals on a couple of the tracks "that perhaps were more in the Lou Reed style", but Petrilli's bombshell drummed it all home and led to Rigoni's realisation: "Okay, I better learn how to sing." Although the band "used emulated Rhodes and Wurlitzers and Hammonds" on the first album, Rigoni stresses, "On [Control] there's no emulation at all... and that's something I felt passionate about."

Rigoni made sure he always recorded several "options" from the musicians to assist with Control's production. In terms of the song's arrangements, he offers, "Typically they'll be pretty set in structure. I'll have a certain feel for what I want... and I try to communicate that to the band, and I s'pose the band's a bit different in that it's not like we're a four-piece and everyone plays on every song."

For 2 Inch Tape's upcoming album launch show at Thornbury Theatre, Rigoni chuckles, "We're playing as a nine-piece band, crazily enough," before remembering, "there's sax on one song... so, yeah! It's nine-plus." And the audience will also be treated to "a bit of theremin". "We're playing the album from track one to track 11. When you're doing a launch and you're presenting an album, I think [it's] meant to be played in that order and this is the one time that'll happen."