Oh Pep! On Sharing A Stage With Billy Bragg, Touring & Being Swept Up In A Wave Of 'Holy Shit!'

After the release of their debut LP, Stadium Cake, in 2016, Melbourne folk-pop duo Oh Pep! found themselves thrown into a whole new world of high-profile support slots, international festivals, new label deals, and endless tours. As the weeks on the road piled up, their break-out became a new normal with all the travel and the grind of touring soon turning quotidian. It was in those moments that Oh Pep! — Olivia Hally and Pepita Emmerichs —reminded themselves that this was what they’d been working to for years, that they were right there in the moment of making good on their dreams.

“When we played Glastonbury last year, we pretty much got off the plane, rocked up, and had to play,” offers Hally, by way of illustrative anecdote, recounting how the band played on the collaborative Leftfield stage with Billy Bragg. “I was super jetlagged, and I really wasn’t excited about the prospect of playing. But, then, I was also like, ‘But, we are playing with Billy Bragg.’ I looked across the stage, and he was playing [A] New England. And that was one of the first songs Pepi and I had ever shared as a musical collaboration. And, in that fantastic moment, I was really like, ‘You are living the dream.’”

“It’s us, all the things we’ve learned as music geeks, all our quirks to the forefront, all the things we thought were interesting to play, through the filter of a pop song.”

Growing up “a pretty serious kid” on Phillip Island, Hally harboured musical dreams all the while. “A lot of the stuff you’re meant to be into down there — surfing, the football, the motorbikes — I just wasn’t into,” she says of her home. Instead, she played classical guitar, endlessly. She left Phillip Island to move to Melbourne and continue her music studies. There, she met Emmerichs. The pair started playing together straight away, and, though high-schoolers, they were ambitious from the drop.

“In serious little kid fashion, Pepi and I were, from the start like, ‘We want to be a sustained, touring international band.’” They’d play their first shows in 2009, meaning there were years of tiny gigs in the lead-up to releasing their first album, seven years later. “But I always thought we were doing this, that it was going to happen,” Hally recounts, “even when it was, say, the first time we went to Sydney, and there was hardly anyone there [at the show].”

The duo were always, Hally thinks, making accessible music. “We’re doing our take on pop music,” she says. “It’s us, all the things we’ve learned as music geeks, all our quirks to the forefront, all the things we thought were interesting to play, through the filter of a pop song.”

Pop comes to the forefront on Oh Pep!’s second LP, I Wasn’t Only Thinking About You..., a brighter, bolder sounding follow-up to their folky debut. “Pepi and I were just, ‘Let’s make a big pop album,’” admits Hally. “We started to employ more typical song structures, more of the verse/chorus form than we had ever done. I think we just got a kick out of it, really. When we listened to it, it was exciting.”

Having a whole new set, for the duo, feels like “you’re starting out a new relationship” with the songs. “We’re just still getting to know each other,” Hally laughs. The songs from Stadium Cake, of course, accompanied them far and wide, played all over the globe. They played them through Europe and North America, when they were opening for Lake Street Dive, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, Martha Wainwright, Lord Huron, Billy Bragg and The Mountain Goats. Though they sometimes got sick of playing the same set and often felt the grind of all that travel — “touring is like working 24/7,” Hally sighs — there were also plenty of those moments where they had to pinch themselves; had to remember to savour the taste of dreams come true.

“There’ve been multiple occasions where I’m swept up in this wave of, 'Holy shit!’” says Hally. “That’s what I say when I’m having a good time. Like, when we were playing The Mountain Goats, being able to watch them every night, or the Billy Bragg moment was another. They’re these real instances where I think, ‘Little Liv would not believe this!’”