KingswoodSitting in a cafe after a week of iffy Melbourne weather has Kingswood's Fergus Linacre daydreaming of blue skies and hitting the road. Luckily for him, by the time you read this his three-piece band will be in the middle of a 16-date run around the country, starting with Sunshine Coast's Caloundra Music Festival.
"Have you seen the line-up? It's, like, Ronan Keating!" Linacre exclaims. "One of the guys in our band — Michael Belsar, who used to be in Hunting Grounds — looks a lot like Ronan so we're going to try and get a photo of the two of them together, should be pretty funny."
One can forgive Linacre for looking forward to getting back on the move; 2017 has seen the Melbourne rockers play a staggering and much-lauded first-day set at Splendour In The Grass, reinvent Destiny's Child with their funked-up version of Say My Name for triple j's Like A Version and release their second album with a recently released bonus documentary.
With their second album came a shift in sound; largely gone were the pub rock vibes and grunting rock riffs, and in their place came something lighter with a suit of multi-instrumentalists in tow. It was a potentially divisive move for a band instantly loved since their inception in 2013 with bluesy, ball-busting singles like Ohio, Medusa and She's My Baby. But months after After Hours, Close to Dawn's release, Linacre couldn't be more proud of it.
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"We totally expected half of our fans to just hate us for releasing such a weird record, but they haven't and it's been amazing," he stresses. "It's a bit of a cliche, but we try not to care what other people think. We just do what we do and make the music we want to make, because if you try to please other people it's just not going to be honest music. To have a lot of people say how much they loved it — it means a lot to us."
That connection with fans is something the band has always maintained, whether it's from the stage or via social media. But Linacre says there's always a barrier at some level to truly making contact with the people who shout their songs back at them from the audience or at their stereos. Less of a want to validate their bold step into new sonic territory and more of a genuine desire to connect with fans, the band opened their very own "hotline" where listeners could leave their feedback on the album, which was then included in behind-the-scenes footage of the album's recording process.
"It was just amazing to sit back and listen to all these people ring up and tell us these stories," Linacre says. "There was some weird ones. Some people rang up saying, 'I've got your child and you need to pay me child support.' Someone just rang up and said 'chicken salt'. But there were a lot of heartfelt ones there, too.
"We just wanted to share how much the fans mean to us and how much they are a part of it. It's hard to connect other than touring and chatting to people online, so we thought this little doco was a nice little element to add in."
The doco does indeed shine some light on just how many extra players Kingswood roped into After Hours, Close To Dawn alongside producer Ed Spear who engineered their debut LP Microscopic Wars. There was plenty of musical talent at their disposal during recording sessions in Nashville and the sudden musical opportunities that presented themselves were tempting. But rather than go out of their way to change tack for the sake of it, Linacre says they let the music inside them at the time dictate what ended up in the studio.
"Our next album could be an electronic dance record; we don't really know what it's going to be like until we do it," he explains. "When we poked our heads up and said, 'This song sounds really weird compared to the old ones,' we didn't really worry about it."
And for the band that seemingly can't sit still, surely there's already a new album in the works? "There are a bunch of new songs, I won't say too much but we're very focused on getting a new record out next year," Linacre shares. "We don't really want to stop anymore; there was a big gap between the first record and the second, we just kept touring and kept touring. I suppose in the same way that you need someone to stop and make a decision, you need someone to go, 'Okay, we're booking in the studio,' and set yourself a deadline."
