No High Altitude

The two female members of Melbourne sextet Alpine – Phoebe Baker and Lou James ­– sit around the corner of a boardroom table inside Mushroom HQ. Their outifts are a beautifully assembled mix of florals, lace, velvet and delicate knits – both look like they've leapt from the pages of a vintage catalogue. The band's debut album A Is For Alpine has just dropped, which may be another factor contributing to their exuberance. “It's so exciting, I feel like we're having a baby!” Baker gushes in her charmingly posh, English-tinged accent. James adds, “I adore [the album]. So proud of it.”

Alpine formed only three years ago and James admits of the band's career trajectory, “It's been really fast for us”. Even their first booking promised great things. “This woman, a friend of Christian [O'Brien] the guitarist, asked us to play at Hamer Hall,” Baker recalls of how the opportunity for Alpine to supply the sounds for a design conference knocked. “She just heard our demos. We'd never done a gig and she was like, 'Do you wanna play?' We're like, 'Yeah, we'll play.' But we're a bit, 'Shit, we've never played a show!' So quickly we organised two shows for practice.” 

“I remember being so terrified I couldn't move,” James contributes.

There have never been any other vocational aspirations for the brunette chanteuse. “I have always wanted to do music,” she admits, “but then I kind of phased the idea out 'cause I was like, 'Pfff, realistically it ain't gonna happen'.” While Alpine were touring with Matt Corby, a long-time friend's discovery inside a hole in her wall reminded James of her own adolescent conviction. “I'd completely forgotten this: there was a break [in her wall] and we put these notes in. And she's like, 'Oh, I found this note,' and she took a photo and sent it to me. I was 12 years old and I was like, 'Hi, um, Dear Reader' [laughs]. I basically was saying, 'When I'm older, I'm gonna be a singer or someone famous.' My grammar was really weird. 'My name, which is obvious that you need to know,' and then I put my full name. But I just thought that was the coolest thing, 'cause I'd totally forgotten about it. I just always loved singing.”

“We both had young aspirations of wanting to be singers, pop singers,” Baker clarifies, “and we were both fans of Spice Girls.” So did they have favourite Spice Girls? “Baby,” Baker answers immediately before James confesses, “Gerry, and no one says Gerry. I'm like, she was the slutty one. I think because she was really confident and maybe because I was quite shy. I'm a lot different now, but I used to be quite shy and I think I used to think she was just amazing... When I lived in England they actually had a Spice Girls clothing shop and my mum was so lovely and drove me all the way out to the Spice Girls shop. And we got there and it was closed!”

”I remember I had a Spice Girls party, but it wasn't Spice Girls, I called it a jazz party 'cause I didn't know what genres were,” Baker acknowledges while her bandmate laughs hysterically. “I thought Spice Girls were jazz. I'm like, 'Come to the jazz party!' And so I spray painted my hair blue and about five people came.” On whether anyone rocked up dressed suitably for a 'jazz party' the blonde singer tells, “One person did and they were like, 'You don't know what jazz is.' I was like, 'Yes I do'.” Baker estimates she was, “maybe seven or eight? Yes, definitely young,” at the time.

The band headed over to South By Southwest earlier this year and played ten shows in just three days. “It was the best experience,” James remembers. “I mean, for us to fly – to get to Austin it's basically, what, 15 hours? It ended up taking us 30 hours...” Baker begs to differ: “Thirty-three, 'cause we missed a flight and then we had to drive from Houston to Austin in the night.”

“And so we got in at, like, 3am Austin time,” James confirms. “We had a show at 10am the next day and, 'cause we have to get up and get ready...” Baker continues: “Because we were so high on adrenaline – some of us hadn't been to America. We were just so excited, everyone was really friendly and the South By Southwest vibe is just the most incredible – it's electric, it really is: there's music on the street, in the venues, people are so friendly, it's vibrant, it's just amazing.”

“And [there were] people who were really hardcore fans, which was sort of really cool,” James marvels. “I mean, one of them – we were playing in a bar, but it was outside in a garden and there was no foldback so we couldn't hear ourselves. It was bloody hot and we were just like 'la-la-la' singing the songs, dancing around and then afterwards we had these people, right in the front, going, like, 'Play this song, play this song!'... That's really magical, when you fly 33 hours or whatever and people are like, 'Oh, this one, this one!' And you're like, 'What!?'

“The highlight was actually the last show we did. It was called Crow Bar and it used to be a church, then it was a whorehouse, then it was a bar – so it just had this really cool vibe. The venue had this tiny, tiny stage and there was maybe seven people [in the audience] and they were just buying us these chilli whisky shots. We were given three whilst we were playing!” Baker stresses, “And these were people that had come and seen us during the week and [then] come again.”

“And it was such an awesome way to end,” James observes. “It was unpretentious and we just got drunk with them afterwards, with all the locals – it was just the best thing.”

A band's online presence these days means that international fans have access to songs simultaneously around the globe, but James says this doesn't necessarily translate to lyrical knowledge. “The funniest thing is YouTube,” she offers. “Like, people who have looked at videos and they've interpreted lyrics, which is the funniest thing for me. Heartlove is...”

Baker pipes up: “Something about cat food.” This jogs James' memory, “Yeah! One of them says, 'Ring me solshat/I'm out of chips/I'm happy/ I like cat food/Tonight I'll be happy,' which I thought was pretty incredible. Which is totally not the lyrics!”

Monitoring international fanbases is something the Alpine ladies admit Facebook is useful for. “The funniest thing for me, which amazes me, is we just get people being like, 'Come to Mexico', on our Facebook.” James enthuses. “We have a Mexican following, it's crazy! And I was looking up the statistic thing, 'cause I'm a bit of a nerd, and it was saying: followers you've got Australia, then it goes America and then Mexico. If all else fails we'll all go live in Mexico, eat breakfast burritos and drink tequila.”