Crooked ColoursIn the past, when a Perth band attained any national or international success, the usual thought would be to relocate over east in the hopes of being in a better position to nurture their career. For Crooked Colours singer and guitarist Philip Slabber, this wasn't the case, and he says the band are happy remaining down in their hometown of Secret Harbour where the trio live together, dividing their time between making music and surfing. “I think when you live in the city there's just stuff that kind of clutters your day and there are too many distractions, so when you're far removed from it it's good creatively,” says Slabber. “We were thinking about moving to Sydney but at the moment I think it's good for us just to be here; we kind of like the image of being from Perth. We all surf as well and that's good too; we don't really find much physical exercise other than that so it's the one thing that kind of helps us sleep.”
While Slabber still has to come up to the city for his day job working in a bottle shop, he says he still remembers his first taste of the big city, at least by Perth standards. Slabber's experiences would ultimately go on to inspire the band's most successful single, Come Down.
“At that stage, just when we were turning about 18, 19, there were a lot of promotions people or companies starting out and we were kind of there in the mix when these guys were trying to make a name for themselves. There were quite a few warehouse parties in Subiaco and in north Perth and we were just mingling in and that was our introduction to the Perth party scene. Us being from Mandurah, I think that's just where that vibe came from and it was so much bigger than we were used to. The main inspiration behind Come Down though was we were seeing quite a few people in our situation going to these parties and kind of being overwhelmed by it, just taking it a bit too far and just not being careful.”
Slabber says the track also helped the band find the sound they were looking for. “That was originally an acoustic track I was playing and I kind of just wrote it that way on the guitar, and then we finished the first EP but we wanted something completely different so I recorded that guitar bit and then we added the electronic stuff a couple weeks later. It kind of put us in the right direction because we had lots of influences and music we liked but we didn't really have anything we were set on making and it certainly gave us a platform to work off, kind of like a method or recipe for writing songs.”
