Pointing Fingers

It's been a busy year for Sydney indie-ska outfit Sticky Fingers. With the success of singles Australia Street and Clouds & Cream, the band released their debut album Caress Your Soul and toured extensively, playing two national Australian tours and their first European tour. Unfortunately for the group, bassist Paddy Cornwall says their latest tour hasn't been without its fair share of troubles due to frontman Dylan Frost's onstage antics. “We haven't seemed to be able to keep the boys in blue out our business at all on this tour,” says Cornwall. “There's been a few little instances so Rottofest was just a bit more of an, 'Oh here we go again' kind of deal.”

The band caused a stir in Perth when they performed here in September, headlining the Rottofest annual weekend festival on Rottnest Island. “It was a great crowd and Dilla was really getting into it and he climbed up onto the roof of the stage and was just dancing around towards the end of the set,” he says. “Then security came running over and were trying to grab at him and then a few were trying to yank at his microphone cable to try and get him down which I thought was pretty stupid.”

With security trying haphazardly to get Frost down, Cornwall says that's when the singer decided to stage dive off the roof and into the mosh where he was then apprehended by security. “They grabbed him and threw him out of the festival quite aggressively, and he's the kind of guy who's not very much into being touched like that so he was losing it a bit, and the cops were pretty much already waiting for him out the front of the festival and he was chucked into a paddy wagon,” he says. “He got taken to the station and got officially kicked off the island, except they didn't really even help him get off, they just turfed him out into the night and he didn't have a phone or any money so he couldn't find us. So he found some punters from the festival and started drinking some beers with them and then the cops drove past again like an hour later and brought him back to the station and gave him more fines.”

Since the ordeal, Cornwall says Frost has had to return to Perth to face court over the incident and will have to return again in January. The band will be in town before that though when they cap off the year with a New Year's performance at Capitol. Despite Frosts unpredictable antics, it won't stop the band from focusing on giving a great performance. “Dylan's a loose unit to say the least,” says Cornwall. “But I guess the rest of the band, the way we kind of look at it is if Dilla wants to put on a show and stuff we just try and not really react to it and just stay as tight a band as possible while it's all going down.”