Baby Steps

Rag N’ Bone have built a relatively strong presence within Perth’s local music scene – Owen’s gutsy vocal delivery becomes the centre of attention whenever it’s heard. The band have been playing shows around town so consistently, having yet to make the journey over east, that you’d think they had been together a lot longer than they actually have. The local scrunge-rockers launched their new single Wood & Wire a couple of weeks back at Flyrite, which was a resounding success, and given the time the group have invested into piecing together their music, it was to be expected. “We started writing together about two years ago, and then our first gig wasn’t until October 2012,” Owen explains. “It’s just taken a little while to get our single out there, which took up pretty much all of 2013, and then the plan for this year was to release the EP. We spent quite a lot of time working on it – we wanted to make sure the quality was really good, and we spent a fair bit of time shopping around for the right stuff to record with. We ended up going with Rob Grant, who has his own studio – he ended up converting this 100-year-old home into this amazing studio. We walked in and just instantly fell in love, and we knew we wanted to record there. The recording process was pretty quick, only about two days, and then we re-did a few vocal loops, and then spent time mastering. It’s come together pretty well.

“We had about eight songs to choose from, so what we did was, we started practising those songs with a click track to get the timing right, so when we got into the studio it was all a smooth process, and we could do the tracks live. Basically, we did some pre-production at a friend’s house and then picked which ones would work together. Which ones were new versus which ones were old, and that sort of thing. We wanted a balance of the old and the new, so it would flow well. Wood & Wire is one of our quirkier songs; a few of our friends have said they don’t quite know how to dance to it, so we kind of joke around with it a bit when we play it live. It’s one of the faster ones and the newest out of the five tracks, so that’s how it came to be the lead single. We were pretty excited to release it, we wanted to put out material that reflects the current state of our live show for so long, so it’s a huge relief too.”

Having toured all over town for the last couple of years, they’ve built solid relationships with a lot of the up-and-coming talent that Perth has to offer. They also plan on bringing their sounds over east for the first time. “It’s an exciting time for us, we’re looking into doing a quick stint over east before Christmas, and then we’ll be releasing the EP early 2015.” Watch this space.