Fast-Track Foursome

"We don’t have enough nice things to say about Tony,” Griswolds singer Chris Whitehall admits of Tony Hoffer, the producer of their debut album, Be Impressive. Whitehall is on the line from a little town called Needles in California’s Mohave Desert as the band drive to LA.

“For us, he was a dream come true. We didn’t actually think that we would be able to get him but the label asked us who we would like to work with and he was everyone in the band’s favourite producer, pretty much. Like, he’s done some of our favourite albums – Midnight Vultures by Beck, Alphabetical by Phoenix, both The Kooks’ early records – he’s worked with Foster The People, Supergrass, Ladyhawke, a bunch of great bands that we just all admire. So when we had to choose someone, it was him all the way.”

To suggest that The Griswolds really are something of an overnight success would, for once, be an understatement – the cliché really does apply. After all, two-and-a-half years ago, there were no Griswolds. It all started with Whitehall, guitarist Daniel Duque-Perez and a song.

“Dan was playing in a band in Sydney, as was I, both separate bands, both, funnily enough, very boring kind of rock bands, and we weren’t really happy in those bands but we’d always go and watch each other play around Sydney because we were friends and we started hanging out and one night, having a couple of drinks with an acoustic guitar, Dan came out with the riff for the song, Mississippi, and that song alone made us want to start a band, want to write more music like that, that was happy and upbeat, and we didn’t have any rules about what instruments were in it – we just write and had fun with it.”

To their surprise, there was a huge reaction to the song in the blogosphere when they put it up online. In short order they called in a couple of friends they’d previously played with, bass player Tim John and drummer Lachlan West, and came up with a band name a week before their first gig. Within four months, they’d won Unearthed Parklife for a berth on the 2012 festival stage around the nation, their first official single, Heart Of A Lion, hit number three in the Netherlands, which got them playing in Amsterdam, and in May last year, they were playing New York City. No wonder they were nervous when they went in to cut their debut album.

“Tony wanted something like 25 to 30 songs and three months out from recording the album and we only had about five!” Whitehall admits with as chuckle. “We were scared to say the least. We ended up we went to New York and pretty much lived in a songwriting studio there for a while in the middle of winter. We just knuckled down and just wrote maybe another nine songs – we went in with 14.”