Winds Of Change

Sydney quintet Dappled Cities have come a long, long way since their 2004 single Peach. Since then they have dropped the 'Fly' from their moniker, have travelled the world and can add bona fide models to their CV thanks to their Ben Sherman exploits, all in between crafting some adventurous pop gems over their four albums. They're now a decade in, and Tim Derricourt admits that it's been a wild ride.

“One-hundred percent, I can testify that it's been such an enjoyable experience,” Derricourt states. “I don't really feel any older than when we began, it doesn't feel like ten years has gone past – I would say five, max! We've been enjoying ourselves, and time seems to swing by when that happens. I mean, we'd love to sell a bunch of records and comfortably live off being in a band, but you have to accept that it's lucky that you can even do it at all, so that's why you keep doing it.”

After the success of their last record Zounds in 2009, the boys relocated to London, where they did a lot of travelling but also a lot of soul searching. The experience had a profound effect on them, yet in a more indirect way.

“It inspired us to make a record that could travel outside our immediate circle,” Derricourt concedes. “We were hanging out and playing with people that were into completely different styles of music, who would hang out with all these weird Europop people in Paris, and you become a little less precious about your music. When you travel you can discard that. I think in the past we've been very protective of our own indie style of music previously, and I think that we've loosened up a little bit and can expand into other genres and other sounds.”

The good times roll on, and on their fourth long-player Lake Air the five-piece sound more in control of their destiny than ever before. There's been a sonic shift from some of the more eclectic fare that earlier releases were renowned for towards a stronger emphasis on pop aesthetics, something Derricourt admits they worked very hard on.

“We're very much a band that makes mottos for ourselves; 'We are gonna be this now', kind of thing,” he states. “Nothing about changing styles, just, 'How we are gonna make a record? Okay, let's go'. So we had two transitions – we had done Zounds, which was a very densely-layered, epic thing, and what we wanted to do was go even more epic; do something that was so wild that it would blow your ears if you listened to it with headphones. So tracks like Run With The Wind and The Leopard came out of that, and I think it was a 'we've got a lot to prove' kind of moment, something severely challenging for the ears. And then as the year went on, we had a nice time overseas and relaxed, and started writing more songs about, 'What does it mean to be in a band?', 'What does it mean to enjoy yourself and be a happy person?' and a reduced style came out of that. So when we came to make the record, we ended up doing the opposite and tried to take all the layers out of the music so you could really focus on the lyrics and the chords and the rhythm.”

The result is an album that revels in overt pop eccentricities, showcasing not only the band's musical prowess but also their positive mindset.

“Something happened to us; I don't know what, but we became incredibly happy,” Derricourt laughs. “It's funny because you start out wanting to make this record that challenges people and fucks them up, that kind of thing, but then you end up saying, 'That's not how I'm feeling at the moment,' so you can't force yourself to write an album that you think people will like. We pretty much jumped off the cliff and stuck to what we were writing, and I literally put that record on every day right now, so I couldn't be more in love.”

A run on from this is the absence of the guitar interplay between Derricourt and Dave Rennick, something that has been one of the staples of the band regardless of their direction.

“It was definitely a purposeful decision,” Derricourt asserts. “For this album, literally the one thing we asked each other was. 'Is this necessary?' With the songs, we've felt that sometimes we haven't left enough up to the imagination of the listener, we fill everything in for them with a hundred guitar lines and keyboard lines and all the melodies, and we thought it'd be nice to change something so there was all this space for people to fill in on what the song can do or can be. As long as you have the heart of the song there, that's all that's important. It was a challenge for us because we sat in the studio desperately – there's takes of these songs with guitars noodling all over them, noodling keyboards all through it, and in fact the live show is full that; it's this intense spectacle of a hundred different melodies, rhythm sections and ideas, but for the record we wanted to let the songs breathe for once.” 

As the band prepares to tour Lake Air, it's at that stage of their career that Dappled Cities are oft-described as “staples of the Sydney music scene”, a concept that seems incongruous to the band's unique musical focus and the city's ever-shifting landcsape due to venue closures and exoduses south of the border. But rather than such a tag being a lazy geographical categorisation, Derricourt muses that being a band from Sydney is as much about when you play as it is what you play.

“I would say that being called a Sydney band would mean not playing that much, because there aren't effectively that many places to play, so you put all your creative efforts into one or two shows here and there. Whereas if you are a Melbourne band, or a New York band, you can focus on putting on many different shows in your hometown. So what defines someone as a Sydney band is limiting themselves to a certain number of shows so that there is no risk of repeating themselves. So there's always a show on somewhere that I know I'll enjoy, but I think people mourn the loss of place like the Hopetoun or fear the loss of the Annandale and those kind of places, but there are places like The Standard and Oxford Arts Factory that are offering amazing sounding venues, better than ever before, so you just have to go with the times. I think that Sydney is pretty healthy. All I know is that when we decide to play, we want it to be special. We want everyone there to have the best time they are ever going to have, and that's all you can wish for.”