Well, That Escalated Quickly

When indie folk popsters Little May take to the Party In The Park stage, strategically located next to the North Sydney Oval’s famous fig tree, it’ll be quite literally a walk in the park – to abuse a cliché.

Over the past two years, the trio (and sometimes five-piece) have played Laneway and Splendour here, the CMJ Festival in New York, and gigs all over Australia as well as in London and LA. They’ve opened for Rodriguez, as well as Bernard Fanning and Angus & Julia Stone, and are set to play The Great Escape festival in Brighton, Dot To Dot over three days in Manchester, Bristol and Nottingham respectively, Voodoo in Belfast and La Fléche d’Or in Paris. So, even as last minute replacements for The Paper Kites at Party In The Park, Little May aren’t fazed – they’re looking forward to catching some of their heroes there, among them The Cat Empire, The Jezabels and Husky.

“It’s pretty full-on at the moment,” lead guitarist Annie Hamilton admits with a chuckle, “but it’s all good. I don’t think we still quite believe what’s all happening. We’re having to pinch ourselves a lot. For us though, I think it feels like it’s taken quite a lot of time. I’ve known Liz [Drummond, rhythm guitar and vocals] since I was little and Kat [Hunter, drummer] too, and Liz and Hannah [Field, vocals] had been playing covers and writing a few songs together for a few years after they finished school, and then I started jamming with them in 2011 and it was in 2012 that we decided to give it a shot. So it has been a bit of a long time coming, but definitely the last 12 months have been crazy – everything escalated a lot. Pretty wild.”

The roller coaster really took off in April last year when Little May signed with Dew Process and released their self-titled debut EP, though they’d already started getting festival gigs, their first being last year’s Secret Garden. The EP has been released in the UK, Europe and the US, and the second single, Hide, is already getting some airplay.

“It’s still mind-blowing that anyone over that side of the world is listening to our music,” a wide-eyed Hamilton laughs. “We’ve just started getting some radio play on BBC One, and when we played CMJ, we were just blown away by the response. Everyone told us it was going to be really tough, playing to no one, and the response that we had was so unexpected because we actually played to quite full rooms and some people even knew our songs, and that was amazing.

“We’re also going over to the States in June to do one of the Gentlemen Of The Road stopovers [Seaside Heights, New Jersey] with Mumford & Sons, which will be incredible. The line-up is just great – it’s got Flaming Lips and The Vaccines and Alabama Shakes, and they’re all such amazing bands that we’ve always looked up to; I still can’t actually believe that I’m going to be on tour with them!”