Get Excited!

Sometimes careers begin in the strangest of manners. Rising Melbourne outfit Bored Nothing began as more or less a hobby for its frontman Fergus Miller, who was creating music largely for his own amusement until he progressed to a point where he thought it would be cool to share it with his friends. Barely a year later he had an acclaimed self-titled debut album to his name and was being bombarded with gig and tour offers, not bad for someone who hadn't even bothered putting a band together yet.

“I started recording for a laugh in November, 2011 – what's happened since has been completely unintentional, I was just literally making stuff to share at the pub on Saturday night,” Miller recalls, still seeming incredulous. “I just liked having a few songs to show my mates so I'd make little CDs to hand out and hand-draw the covers, then I started enjoying the 'making stuff with my hands' thing, so I started doing more and more – batches of twenty and then thirty and then fifty – and just leaving them at pubs when I'd take them to give to my friends. It got more serious after that, unintentionally.

“[Making music]'s just what I've always done. I grew up in this age of having a PC when I was eleven or twelve, and then I figured out that I could record stuff, so since then I've been doing it just because I can.”

Eventually the slew of show offers forced him to put an ad hoc band together, in keeping with the spirit of Bored Nothing.

“I just got sick of people asking me to do stuff, pretty much,” Miller laughs. “I'm not an ambitious guy, and I was getting pretty annoyed – I wanted people to leave me alone. But I like playing, it's fun, so I thought that I might as well start doing that. We're not like a 'real band' or anything – it's my brother and two of my friends – and they don't really know how to play instruments, although I don't really know what I'm doing either. Like I don't know chords or anything, I just have to say, 'Look at my hands when I'm playing and figure it out'.”

Bored Nothing's music has a dreamy, elegiac quality reminiscent of '90s acts such as Elliott Smith or Sebadoh, but Miller's main inspiration pertains more to the DIY aspect of his craft.

“Number one is always Daniel D. Johnston, in spirit certainly,” he explains. “I love the way that he just ruthlessly does whatever he wants and is oblivious to everyone and everything that's going on. He's The Beatles to me, he's amazing – he can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned. He inspired me to start handing stuff out. But aside from that I love homemade stuff, stuff that's not really concerned with what else is going on. It's a personal interest thing to me and I like other people who are into that as well.”

Brisbane finally gets to check Bored Nothing out in the live realm for the first time this weekend, and Miller believes it all translates pretty well onstage.

“It's a bit of a mixed bag, because when I record I'm not really concentrating on how many instruments are playing or anything like that,” he tells. “Most of the songs are not too difficult – I just got a keyboard player last week and she's helping to fill in the gaps a bit. Most of the stuff is pretty straightforward, the only difference is that in the louder stuff I don't have enough distortion pedals to jump on at once. It's frustrating.”

Thursday 10 January - FBi Social, Sydney NSW
Friday 11 January - Black Bear Lodge, Brisbane QLD
Saturday 12 January - A & I Hall, Bangalow NSW