65daysofstaticIt's nice that it happened this year,” 65Daysofstatic's Paul Wolinski offers on their 2012 Association Of Independent Music (AIM) award. “Because we've been working hard, but in quite a private way. We've not really done many shows, we've mostly been working on this next record, so I suppose it's hard for anyone else to tell that we're actually doing anything at all. The thing is for us, and always has been, we know so many people who aren't in bands who work incredibly hard and the fact that we approach a band like a five day a week job, shouldn't be out of the ordinary. There are so many bands in the world already and if you're going to do it at all, you should really do it to the best of your abilities. So that's how we've always operated really.”
Towards the end of 2005, the band suggested in a newsletter to fans that they were 'a little disappointed' to have only played 91 shows that year. According to Wolinski, that's still the band's view. “Touring's absolutely the best part of everything,” he states.
“It's that kind of tangible interaction with people, night after night. Where you get to understand that your music is useful to other people and you get to meet all these amazing people who come to the shows. It's the reward for all of the other stuff. Writing can be great, but it's just the four of us in a room – a cold, damp room in Sheffield – not being sure that what we're doing is any good or that anyone's gong to care when we finally get it made. You can spend ten hours in there and feel like you've made no progress whatsoever, because it's such an intangible thing. So touring is the opposite of all that. It's tiring, but it's fantastic.”
We Were Exploding Anyway (2010), the band's most recent standard studio album, features heavy electronics and programmed drums, but Wolinski explains while it sounds complex, it was written with the live arena in mind. “With Exploding..., we made a very conscious choice to write a record that we could play live from start to finish. Because the one before that, The Destruction Of Small Ideas, we did the opposite and that was perhaps a mistake, looking back. We made that record as a studio record. We wanted it to sound interesting and we'd just use whatever tools we could think of and we'd worry about how to play it live afterwards. But the result of that is that we could really only play about half of it to a standard we thought was good enough and the rest of it was just too complicated. So with Exploding..., from the beginning it was like 'Right, this is our backline, this is our electronics setup, this is all we're going to use, we're going to make sure that whatever these songs turn into, we're going to be able to perform them live'.”
The band has been working on their new album for a lot of 2012 – when asked what the new tracks are sounding like, Wolinski laughs. “Confused, I think,” he says.
“There's some surprisingly old-school stuff on there, but for whatever reason, it feels quite fresh for us. It's perhaps a little less dancey than Exploding..., but just as electronic. We're doing different things with the programming, using more v-drums rather than programmed drums, a lot of synthesisers, but with less emphasis on the big beats. I think probably it's going to be quite strange and it's going to be quite noisy, but we've probably always been quite strange and noisy in most people's eyes.”
65daysofstatic will be playing the following dates:
Sunday 30 December - Peats Ridge Festival, Glenworth Valley NSW
Wednesday 2 January - The Hi-Fi, Sydney NSW
Thursday 3 January - The Hi-Fi, Brisbane QLD
Friday 4 January - Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 5 January - The Bakery, Perth WA
