Out In The World

On release, the proper debut album Vacation – it had been preceded by a compilation of their first four seasonally themed EPs, The Big Scary Four Seasons – from Melbourne's Big Scary got all the right attention. It received nominations left right and centre for Best New Talent and Breakthrough Independent Artist Of The Year and respectable entries into the various charts. Rather than run the tour around the time their album was released however, the duo – singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Tom Iansek and drummer Jo Syme – hit the road on the back of the single off the album, Gladiator. So it's only now Big Scary are doing their album tour, while it's the third single off the album, Leaving Home, that's doing the rounds.

They've always been two or three steps ahead of their releases, plus there were the Homebake, New Year's Eve and St Kilda festivals along the way. But the real distraction has been joining the Australian contingent of artists trekking over to South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, with a side trip to participate in Canadian Music Week. Iansek had only been back in his hometown of Melbourne a couple of days when he took this call.

“We did all the applications and got accepted into both of those,” Iansek begins, “and then it was just a case of, you know, adding shows I guess, just to make it more worthwhile. So we did the Aussie Barbecue run of shows, which was in Austin for South By and Toronto for Canadian Music Week, but they also put one on in LA and one in New York, so we were there for those shows and we also had our own shows in LA and New York as well, which was pretty cool. We did this place in LA called The Echo, which is kind of a small- to medium-sized venue and we played supporting a band called Big Deal, plus [we] also did the Aussie Barbecue show at the same place. Then in New York we had one in Manhattan supporting another band, but we actually had our own show, in Williamsburg on our second last night in New York at this place called Glasslands, which was an awesome, quirky little venue and there were some great supporting bands and there were actually people in the audience [laughs], which was a bonus.”

That Manhattan show was New York's Mercury Lounge, Tribes the headliners, with Kimbra also supporting, but Big Scary also headlined Lee's Palace in Toronto as well as supporting fellow Australians Oh Mercy at another Toronto venue, the Sennheiser Lounge Library Bar. “We've just got a booking agent [The Windish Agency] recently over there,” Iansek explains, “so he's been the reason we've been getting all these shows. We were kind of lucky to get those actually, because they were very last minute and I guess there was a bit of scrambling 'round on his part. So hopefully it was a first step of many for us over there and hopefully we'll be heading back fairly regularly and getting stuff happening over there.

“The idea of releasing something in America was immediately very daunting and we thought, you know, you have to have the help of a label to do that over there. There are a lot of awesome labels in the States and while there has been a little interest, we're really just getting ready to release it ourselves. Since we got that started it's become less of a daunting thing and we've just sort of met some really great people that could be very useful for us in doing that. There's been some radio play and a smattering of things and we were lucky enough to get a TV commercial and we've had a couple of songs on a couple of TV shows, so there've been things happening, I guess.”

It certainly hasn't hurt the cause that hit American TV show, Grey's Anatomy, has used the odd Big Scary track, but it will probably be the commercial that will make the biggest impact. “We got a commercial for [multinational telecommunications corporation] AT&T, for one of their recent campaigns – or last year actually – so there have been a few of those little things popping up over there. But it's hard to know how much of that actually gets through to your average music listener and how much it's going to inspire someone to go to a show, you know? One of the songs that they played on [Grey's Anatomy] was a really old song that we hadn't given a lot of thought to for a long time. All of a sudden there were people wanting to know the lyrics and know the chords for it and, you know, there were definitely people wanting to know more, which was pretty exciting. It was a song from our Four Seasons compilation called Thinking About You.”

The fact that it's an old song that the Americans have picked up on first sort of sits quite comfortably with the way Iansek perceives the music of Big Scary. “I definitely think that that's the kind of music we write. I don't think our songs are the ones that sort of leap out at you necessarily and, you know, get you first listen. I like to think they're more the kind of songs that get people third or fourth time round.”

As for that third single, Leaving Home, “picking singles is a strange thing,” Iansek admits. “We've had a lot of discussions about it and it's weird because you never know what's going to land or what's going to really connect with people. You have to put yourself in the listener's chair I suppose, which is almost impossible for us to do, being the ones that have written the song and been so deeply involved in making it and recording it and everything. You lose a lot of that perspective, but obviously there are songs that are too slow for radio or too sort of dark, so they sort of get chopped, then it comes down to one or two and they're a bit of guesswork and maybe an opinion or two that you trust.”