Twenty-Four Seven Road Trip

his time last year, Dunedin, New Zealand five-piece Six60, who got together in 2009 in a flat, were already punching well above their independent status, boasting two chart-topping platinum singles in their homeland. They were also already attracting festival-style attention with no commercial radio airplay whatsoever, courtesy of social media – their Facebook page currently boasts 160,000-plus likes. By the time they released their self-titled debut album here a year ago, it was already triple platinum back home, and they'd played the Big Day Out there and Homebake here.

A year on, fresh from performances at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, and Canadian Music Week in Toronto as well as sideshows in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, the album is near quadruple platinum in New Zealand, they've added three more hit singles (lifted from that album) to the tally, have toured the UK and Europe as well as North America, and won six awards – Single of the Year, Highest selling NZ single and Radio Airplay Record of the Year for Don't Forget Your Roots, Highest Selling NZ Album, Best Group and People's Choice – at last year's New Zealand Music Awards. It's no wonder the European arm of Sony Music decided to sign them up for their Columbia Four Music imprint. 

“Just going to Austin, Texas was amazing, but South By Southwest was crazy,” Six60 guitarist Ji Fraser explains. “We played nine shows over four days, and then we flew up to New York and stayed there for a couple of days and then flew over to Toronto and did three shows for Canadian Music Week, just a great experience. That's our second time to America. We toured there the end of last year – not big shows, the two to five hundred-sized venues, but there was a time we couldn't do that in New Zealand, so it's pretty amazing to be over in San Francisco or LA playing to that many people.”

While Six60 aren't getting airplay there – they're yet to cut a deal with an American label or distributor – Six60 have managed to get a couple of songs placed in pretty high-profile places.

“A company called ESPN picked up [fourth single] Forever for the Indie 500 campaign that ran in the States last year, and they just recently picked up Run For It, I think it's something to do with the NFL promotional video. So it seems to spreading over there, which is great.”

Meanwhile the big breakthrough has been in Europe, getting picked up by Sony Europe on only their first tour there.

“I think it was a case of just maybe the right person at the right time seeing us at one of the shows during our tour there. We did three shows in a row at the HMV Forum in London, had a show in Paris, played Dublin, Scotland and then went all through Germany, did Hamburg… God, I can't even remember half of the shows I played,” Fraser laughs. “I've been all through Europe and I can't remember where I've been.”

While the records have done incredible business for them, Six60 pride themselves as very much a live band.

“To spread our live show round the world was just the logical progression for us, and we're still working to perfect it. We've obviously got the big parts of our set, like the loud songs and the high-energy tracks, and we're trying to build the quieter tracks to present them in a fantastic way for the fans to see as well, visually, as well as hear it. It's still getting bigger and bigger… and more expensive,” he laughs again. “It's getting better and better.”

The downside of all this incredible success and particularly the extensive international touring is that Six60 have barely had time to draw breath let alone think about working up new material, so they essentially travelling on the one album and an early EP.

“Yeah,” Fraser agrees. “We haven't really stopped at all. The first chance we got to write new material was January this year, on a tour of New Zealand. It has been really tough 'cause we've toured so much, but we're working on new material now and we actually wrote six new songs and we're playing some new material in our shows at the moment. We've written a lot of material but we're our own harshest critics.”

As a group of quite disparate characters, each member has brought a different set of influences to the band, so that while there's a strong contemporary rock core to the Six60 sound, there are flourishes of reggae, metal and pop in the mix.

“I think that in itself has been our direction in a lot of ways,” Fraser suggests, regards that Six60 sound. “I think it reflects our fans as well, the type of music that we do play. You know, there are people from all walks of life with all different types of music and styles, so I think in that regard, we're appealing to a wider audience than we could if we narrowed ourselves to one particular genre. We're definitely figuring out what we do and how to write a Six60 song! It's definitely difficult, but I think we're creating something unique and it's definitely taking its own form.

“We know what we don't want, but we don't know what we do want,” he admits with a belly laugh. “So it's actually become really difficult to progress so that's something we're working really hard at and I think we'll eventually get there with this new album. It will be a slightly more refined version but, you know, still the same idea of the big songs and small songs and the something in between all working in harmony together. And possibly it could be a bit different as well – we don't like to put any restraints on ourselves. We'll have to wait and see.”

From Australia, the band heads for Berlin, which will be their base for the foreseeable future, and are booked to play the Forum in London in May and Glastonbury in June.

“Relocating's a funny word,” Fraser suggests, “because we travel all the time anyway. For most of the [northern] summer we'll be touring Europe anyway, and during that time we're heading back to the States as well. So we're gonna have a house in Berlin, but we'll be back to Australia, we'll be back to New Zealand, we'll be all over the show.”

Six60 will be playing the following dates:

Friday 26 April – The Metro, Sydney NSW
Saturday 27 April – Metro City, Perth WA
Friday 3 May – The Forum, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 4 May – The Tivoli, Brisbane QLD