Making Fronds With Phantastic Ferniture

It's a very human tendency to make comparisons when listening to an unfamiliar artist and, ultimately, it is up to the listener to decide what they get out of an artist's music. However, this sometimes leaves the artists themselves a little bewildered by what people think they hear in their sound. Julia Jacklin and Elizabeth Hughes, from quirky Sydney four-piece Phantastic Ferniture, have had some real doozies during their four years together.

"I've seen some really strange ones," Jacklin admits. "I just think people get confused because they see some girls in a band and they go, 'What other band with girls in it can we relate this band to?' I saw someone the other day say we sound like Nadia Reid, who's a New Zealand folk singer-songwriter. We sound nothing like Nadia Reid!

"I just think we write good pop songs, that's what we do."

Hughes adds: "I'm just waiting for us to get a kid's review in some kids' magazine or something that's all confused about us and says we're the next Wiggles band," she laughs.

From humble and very non-serious beginnings, the band has now made the huge journey that is the writing, recording and releasing of their debut album. It sounds as if though it is a minor miracle that they have come this far.

"When we first started out, it was a joke band," Hughes recalls. "We booked a gig before we had any songs. I think on our first gig we'd written two songs, so we played those and I think we played one of them again. We did a recording, it was just this demo that was just the bass and drums, then it disappeared for ages. We listened to it months later, and we were like, 'This is actually cool let's get it back on the road.'"

So it took them quite some time to become the serious and settled outfit that has produced their debut record. "We started gigging a lot, and the line-up changed," Hughes remembers. "And then finally once we started gigging a lot, that's when it really became a band. We just saw that the crowd was really responsive and we just started having a lot of fun playing live. It was such a joy getting up on stage in Sydney and having this big raucous crowd falling all over each other."

"It was just one of those things where we suddenly woke up a couple of months ago and said, 'Oh wow, we've got a record done now, how did that happen?'" Jacklin laughs.

Even the generation of the band name had a highly idiosyncratic evolution. "We originally saw a sign on Paramatta Road for Fantastic Furniture, the store," Hughes states. "And then we were having that classic conversation about band names, and we were like, 'That'd be a fantastic band name, we should make it into a pun and make it into ferns.' And then the topic of merch came up and that's when things got really exciting."

"We have no regrets about the name," Jacklin emphasises. "We love the name."

Even the furniture company themselves were more than happy about their choice of band name, and have made no attempts to chase the band for royalties or make them cease and desist. "We were a bit worried about that, and that's why we spelt the name differently," Hughes says. "We ended up getting an email of support from them, they said they liked our music and at that stage we thought, 'Yeah, it's going to be fine.'"

The band head off on a tour of the eastern seaboard and Adelaide as of mid-August, and after that they plan to maintain that same relaxed approach to running the band that they always have. "I think we just want to keep it pretty low-key because that's kind of the ethos of the band," Hughes states. "That's when we thrive, when we don't have any pressure to do anything. And that also means we all have time for our solo projects, which are important to us."