Features / Music

"It’s funny, that song,” he admits. “I did it as a dare really. Howler, my booking agent, was, like, ‘I dare you to write a ballad,’ because I’d never written one before, so I tried and it took me ages to write that song."

"I admire Robert Plant. I’m very excited that he’ll be at the Byron Bay music festival. He was a huge influence on me. When I was just learning how to tour, most of my influences were men."

"There are two models, the XWP1 which is what we call the Performance synth. For real players, guys who are quite skilled who want great sounds, the P1 is the go."

"As loose as my writing style may appear, my roots are firmly placed in my admin past. I had appointments set up with Spencer, Matt Walker, Greeny and Tim, who I wrote with. All my lyric ideas were typed up, in folders and labelled."

“I wrote and recorded 33 songs for that project and used 24 because I felt eight songs per CD were enough, like a side of vinyl, where you have to turn it over if you want.”

“For me, moving to Australia and getting married, this is perfect for me to be able to maybe play there once a month and still keep in with the Pacha brand. That’s just really great timing.”

“Only about 20% of the music that gets uploaded to iTunes ever gets downloaded... Some bands can’t deal with it. They retreat to ‘I’m going to practise my guitar because I’m all about my art’. Y’know, I call people on that because that’s just fear.”

"When I first started playing on stage, I got a 12-string because it filled out the sound a bit and hid the fact that I couldn’t play solos."

“I have a manager who’s based in Santa Cruz in California, so when we were putting together the vision for the album, everything just pointed there. He just had really good connections with the studio and musicians and producer, so he just made it all happen.”

“I think we’re trying to consolidate things a bit at the moment rather than look too far forward... just keep writing for the next album and do a good tour for this album, and do it justice and keep building on what we’ve done so far with getting people interested.”

“A songwriters economy of words in being able to tell a whole story in a four-line verse or four-word line.”

"First of all I’m gonna do a good job. And my job is to do a show, without preaching. I didn’t start rapping to say something; I started rapping because I have to rap."