From Busking To NME Love

“We didn’t really start taking it seriously until a couple of years ago,” Draper admits with a chuckle, “and we thought we’d better have a more serious name. Once we realised we wanted to play our own music to people, we started to actually write songs and put them on CD to sell to people and we just became of course obsessed with it and it took over our lives and wanted to do this for a living.”

Draper and Brady started busking weekends in Sydney’s Pitt St Mall and slowly built up the original song list.

“It’s almost like a social experiment, busking. You literally just set up in the middle of the street and kind of say, ‘Well, if all these random people enjoy our music, we’ll do well,’ and if they don’t, you don’t do very well. So it’s a good way to find out if it’s worth giving it a shot.”

Changing their name to Winterbourne, they put out an EP, All But The Sun, middle of last year and things started to happen.

"We didn’t really start taking it seriously until a couple of years ago."

“We’d been busking playing originals for about a year and Mike Taylor from Universal saw us busk and then Sony Publishing as well, almost the exact same time, and once they were interested everyone wanted to know why these people were interested in some buskers. We were literally playing on a Saturday afternoon and we had a message on our Facebook page from Mike, and we originally thought it was a bit of a hoax but we googled him and sure enough, he’s the head of Island Records! So that’s pretty much how it went down,” he laughs. From busking, they started picking up support spots and then festival spots.

“When we released the EP, it went to #9 on iTunes, which was a bit of a surprise,” Draper admits. “We didn’t really think anyone was going to jump on it that quickly. NME [UK music press] picking up on it was a surprise as well. We didn’t expect that to happen.”

Nowadays Winterbourne are both the core duo and also a band, depending on the budget, which won’t be an issue when they play Mountain Sounds Festival.

“That’s like five minutes away from me,” Draper chuckles. “I watched the festival from my roof last year in fact, so we’ll have the band for that. I didn’t actually know the festival was on and I got back and I just heard Ball Park Music coming from somewhere!”