Two Man Army

Although their music is reasonably straight ahead rock'n'roll, Melbourne via Adelaide outfit King Of The North have a more than interesting point of departure: despite being only a two-piece, it's possible – in fact it's highly likely – that punters with their eyes closed are going to imagine a much bigger band on stage. This also translates well to the group's debut self-titled EP. KOTN's sound is huge – and it's important to point out they don't use samples or anything pre-recorded – so much so that vocalist and guitarist Andrew Higgs is slightly cagey when we asked how, exactly, he does it.

“It's a bit like the eleven secret herbs and spices with KFC,” he says. “Everyone wants to know what the deal is, but I don't want to give too much away here. Basically, I don't know, it's just an idea I had, really. I had an idea for how to make a two-piece band sound like a four to five piece band, that's sort of how the band started. It's all analogue, there's nothing digital going on, there's nothing the sound engineer's doing to make the sound bigger. It basically comes down to the amp configuration. I use the same amount of gear that a three or four piece band would. It's fantastic until I have to load all the shit in and out.”

When it comes to what Higgs wanted from the record, he says that documenting what King Of The North do live was uppermost in his mind. “We'd been playing the same sort of set for a while and basically we wanted to get those songs down for the people who'd been coming to see us,” he says. “Also, we wanted something to attract new audiences as well, so it's sort of killing two birds with one stone. We did it pretty much live, how we would go about doing it on stage. I think it's turned out well. Of course, it's slightly different because we did it in a studio and it's much more clean-sounding, but I think we got the essence of the live feel.”

Ex-Little River Band guitarist David Briggs was brought in to produce King Of The North. Higgs says that right from the start, they knew he was the man for the job because he was always going to be able to “capture” the band's sound.

“I'd worked with Dave in a lot of other projects, so we'd created a bit of a working relationship over the years. I knew he was really good at what he does. He's good at making bands sound how they sound: he doesn't add bells and whistles. Some records, when you see the band live, it's a polar opposite. We didn't want that. We're happy with our sound; we've got our sound. So we just wanted someone who could capture what was already going on.”

When it comes to describing what a KOTN live show is like, Higgs keeps it simple. Somewhat surprisingly, though, (not to mention refreshingly) he admits that playing music on stage is much more important to him than in the studio. “It's pretty straight up,” he says. “It's loud, it's entertaining, it's rock, basically. It's everything you'd expect from a rock 'n' roll show: hard, energetic, powerful. The biggest thing we get all the time is: 'hell man, you guys have a massive sound and you put on a really good show'. That's all we care about, really. It's important that we've got a great sounding record, but all we really care about is how we sound live. That's why we play music, you know, because we just love playing live. The whole motto of this band is to keep everything as simple as possible. It's really easy to overcomplicate things, so we try to keep everything as stripped back as possible. Except for the mountain of amps we carry around, that is.”