Strengths In Numbers

One listen to Gold Coast sextet Fairchild Republic's debut album Wish Upon A Paper Crane and you'd be safe to assume that the band have a lot of money behind them, a hotshot producer, major studio time and a management team driven solely to get their name out there. Their stint on the stage of the Big Day Out and some solid supports would further that notion. Yet the band's frontman Adam Lyons is understandably chuffed to be able to state that their position is very much down to them alone, right down to his brother Nathan (who is also in the band) doing their booking for their upcoming tour.

“He's about ready to put himself to bed!” Lyons laughs. “We had the demos for the album done a year ago, but we decided that we could re-record, go back through and re-do what needed to be done and start again. The recording process can be tough because we do it all ourselves, done in my bedroom outside of (working) hours, and whilst it can be easy recording piecemeal in your own home, it'd be nice to take two, three weeks off, get everything done in one go then get on with your life.”

Having six guys with instruments in a bedroom doesn't paint a pretty picture, but with incredible focus and twenty-first century technology the band were more than the sum of too many cooks.

“Luckily with the new age, ProTools and such, everything is digital,” Lyons states. “We couldn't do any of it live obviously, and being in close quarters means things could get a little heated. Things can get difficult, but it's been one thing that has always worked well. The core three or four of us has always been good friends, and we've never had any issues with egos.”

The end result is surprisingly glossy, seeing as it's a bedroom project, something that Lyons believes hinges on how they structure their songs.

“We've worked hard at recognising how we want these songs to go together – you can write a song with drums and guitar, yet when we started out we tried to pour ourselves on, to put too much together instrumentally. Now we know how to layer things and we know our processes, how to set the foundation of drums and bass, then slowly add the elements that complement each other. We then use the vocals, the vocal melody as the main instrument that all the others support. It's the reason why we've been thrown in that commercial pop element. For us, whenever we hear a song we just want to sing along to them, you never want jangly guitars lumped over the top so that you lose that main melody.”

The title, Wish Upon A Paper Crane, whilst touching on a personal experience, proves to be emblematic of the band's fortunes for a multitude of reasons.

“I had this bizarre fascination with paper cranes,” Lyons explains. “In primary school we made one thousand paper cranes for a teacher's daughter who had leukaemia, this huge gesture of well wishes. And I told people about this, so when I was going through a dark period in my life a couple years ago, a friend of mine gave me one thousand paper cranes. Now all the cranes are strung up in my room directly above where we recorded, and when we were lucky enough to tour in Japan and we went to theme parks and looked at the Hiroshima paper planes… it's not necessarily something that's changed our lives rather than something that's always been there, and that seemed important to us.”