George: Poly Wanna Cracker?

On the day I enter the Festival Mushroom offices for an interview with the mega-popular Brisbane group George, the five musicians are brimming with excitement and good humour for two reasons.

Firstly, their first full-length album Polyserena is about to be unleashed on the public and secondly, they’ve just finished wowing audiences at QPAC with a performance of Deep Purple’s Concerto For Group And Orchestra. The fact that a full Queensland Orchestra accompanied them gives some indication of george’s musical proficiency and ambition.

“We had an open creative license to do what we wanted, within reason, to the work,” says co-lead vocalist/keyboardist Katie Noonan. “The bits where we were playing without the orchestra, we could do whatever we wanted. We had to use the riffs and the motifs, but we could definitely add our own feel to it. Pretty much, we’re the most diametrically opposed band to Deep Purple in so many ways, and I think that’s part of the reason they chose us, because we made it completely different to the original. Some of us read music and some of us don’t and it was a real learning curve for us as a unit. We learnt a lot.”

Were you familiar with the piece prior to this?

“I was familiar with Deep Purple but not this piece,” says bassist Paulie B.

“My knowledge of Deep Purple was pretty much limited to Smoke On The Water,” says Katie. “And Ian Gillan doing Jesus Christ Superstar.”

But conversation must turn to Polyserena, george’s debut full-length album. It’s a rich, grandiose, emotional album, full of lush melodies, passionate, virtuosic singing (from Katie and brother Tyrone) and intuitive playing.

“It represents where we were at, particularly over the three month period that we worked intensively on the album,” says Paulie B.

The album has plenty of new songs, but also includes comparatively vintage material, such as Sellout, which was the first song Katie ever wrote for george.

“I wrote that at Nick’s (Stewart, guitarist) place down the Gold Coast on the day of the heat of this band competition that we were in. I’d just read Junky by William Burroughs and that was what inspired the song. Making this record was a definite journey, because I had to revisit a lot of places when singing these songs, and the same goes for Ty, because Run is something he wrote before george was even happening. But the album is mostly relevant to last year, because there’s a lot of new material on there.”

The new material includes Breaking It Slowly, in which ‘it’ is the world and the people breaking our planet are ruthless politicians and multinationals.

“The song was partly inspired by touring with Midnight Oil, who are probably my biggest Australian influence in terms of lyrics, music and everything” says the song’s lyricist Tyrone Noonan (Katie’s brother and co-lead vocalist). “And partly inspired by a video that was produced on the sly by the government several years ago promoting Australia as a nuclear waste dump for the world. The fact that the video was even produced without consulting the Australian people was an extremely undemocratic move. That really shocked me.”

The ultimate feeling this writer gets from the Polyserena long player is the tenderness and humanity present in its songs.

“I think lyrically, musically and artistically, this album is a tiny piece of the human experience,” says Paulie. “Every song illustrates something different that people go through in their life journey.”

“We’re just telling a story and we’re hoping that it speaks to someone,” says Katie.

She doesn’t need to hope: George are already taking many a punter’s breath away and the confidence and power of their superb new album will only add to their popularity. The fact that these individuals are as down-to-earth and likeable as when I first interviewed them prior to the release of their debut EP four years ago, makes their inevitable rise all the more deserved.