'Australian Crowds Are Fucking Amazing'

“Too many!” he laughs. “I don’t even want to think about it. We tour a lot but we’re happy, we’re getting to go to some pretty amazing places, which is always good. And Australian crowds are fucking amazing. The last run of festivals [2013’s Groovin The Moo] we did were unbelievable. Splendour [In The Grass] was one of my favourites, one of my top gigs ever, the last time we played there. And there’s pretty girls, which is always nice.”

"We tour a lot but we’re happy, we’re getting to go to some pretty amazing places, which is always good. And Australian crowds are fucking amazing"

The band’s ascent to their golden perch all came about under a simple but seemingly unlikely scenario. After recording a humble EP and sending it to industry bods merely to tee up some gigs, some smart cookie offered them recording time instead, after which scenesters were quick to stamp the indie pop tag on the four-piece, despite their signing with Virgin. Ten years and four albums later, their wave of success continues to roll, but is there anything Pritchard would have tackled differently? “Hell yes,” he admits. “I mean, I had a lot of fun making a lot of mistakes but I think my one big thing is that I feel that we rushed our second album. I think it’s a good record but we went into the studio and didn’t give ourselves enough of a breather. But really it’s all fucking brilliant. I was about 19 when it all started, so it was a pretty good 20s.”

They’ve have taken a small axe to that twangy, love-struck pop rock sound that began their journey with Inside In/Inside Out in 2006; 2014’s Listen has more of the percussive influence of its US hip hop producer Inflo, which has been the source of some ill comments from stalwart fans as well as less than perfect reviews. But Pritchard says retracing their steps was counterproductive. “You can fall into a trap of doing it because you want to keep making money or you enjoy the lifestyle and the music becomes secondary. I think it really is a people thing, even if we’re not best mates every day and we don’t go skipping down the street, we go into the studio and we want to keep riffing off each other. You have to fucking love it; it’s a lot of work, that’s why you have to really fucking want it.”