Time Masters

"I actually have punk roots,” explains Sam Bentley. “Growing up in school I played in a punk band. We did a few festivals, supported The Living End. It was fun but not really what I was meant to do.” What he was meant to do, it seems, was bring together five of his closest friends and form The Paper Kites, one of Melbourne's most talked about new outfits. Bentley, the bands lead singer and principal songwriter, is celebrating the recent release of his band's second EP, Young North. Coming on the back of tours with Josh Pyke and Boy & Bear, The Paper Kites have achieved a fair slab of airplay from the likes of triple j, some extremely choice Grey's Anatomy syncs and literally millions of YouTube views of the delightfully DIY videos for their tracks Featherstone and Bloom. They've just sold out their first Corner show and are aiming at another – a coup for any outfit, let alone one so relatively infantile in terms of recorded output. It's interesting to note, then, that it took the disintegration of his interest in his punk band (coincidentally named Best Before) to lead Bentley to his new guise as a folk soothsayer.

“It wasn't until I hit 17 or 18 and was out of school still playing in the punk band that I saw a folk band play and really thought about playing that kind of music,” Bentley explains. “I can't remember who it was, but I remember wondering what the hell I was doing. I didn't even like punk music that much anymore. It was one of those things: I was playing in a band because I thought it was cool but all of a sudden I realised I wasn't playing the music that I listened to at home. I was really into The Beatles and The Middle East and just not enjoying what I was doing musically.”

A shift had to be made then and Bentley decided that the best way to do it was to enlist a few of his closest friends to form a new outfit. Although it seems the agreement between the new collective was never formalised. “There was never really a conversation that said, 'Do you want to start a band?' We've still never really had that conversation,” Bentley admits. “Christina [Lacy – guitar and vocals] and I had this little gig in a café every week, and it was really just something we did for fun. Then we got offered this festival in Queensland so we had to pull a band together. We asked Dave [Powys], Sam [Rasmussen] and Josh [Bentley] and we managed to pull it all together. We kind of just fell into it.”

As an outfit, The Paper Kites deal in the kind of delicate harmonies that have been so prevalent in the Australian music landscape over the past few years. The Aussie rock-pig perception that has been with us for so long has been turned on its head by the likes of Boy & Bear, The Middle East and Husky – paving the way for Bentley's gentle compositions to find a large and sympathetic audience. It's always tough at the start though; who among us hasn't walked into a venue to see a struggling band or songwriter desperately trying to make themselves heard over the dull roar of a revelling crowd? For Bentley and The Paper Kites though, this conundrum is seen as more of a challenge than a deterrent. “When you play the kind of music that we play, you have to go into shows thinking that people may talk over you,” he says. “It's different everywhere you go though: Melbourne are like zombies, in a good way; Sydney is similar; Brisbane always seems to be pretty rowdy. I guess they just want to party, although it's still very respectful. Personally, I'd much rather be in a room of respect and silence than I would a room of people partying. If you build up a vibe that people shouldn't be talking while you're playing though, usually they'll start to listen.”

Listen they did, as The Paper Kites enjoyed a charmed run through the touring circuit last year. Starting with a lap around with country with Australia's lit-pop king Josh Pyke, the band also took in tours with Boy & Bear and Ball Park Music. It was on their first tour with Pyke though, that they discovered what it really takes to get to the top. “When we got offered the Josh Pyke tour, we didn't really have any managers or a booking agency, so it was pretty scary heading out and not knowing what we were doing,” Bentley explains. “We were so cautious to not get in anyone's way and not annoy anyone – trying to stay out of Josh's way. I remember one night backstage though, Sam started having a rap battle with Josh Pyke. Josh was saying all this stuff about Sam's mum and Sam came back and just destroyed him. It was the whitest rap battle of all time. Sam was crowned the winner, so we sort of cracked it from then on. We were accepted.”

It's a tough highlight to beat, but the lads and lass bravely ploughed on through the venues of Australia, leading them to their latest EP Young North. The lead single The Maker Of My Time is another gorgeous slab of uplifting folk that has been teamed with an equally inspirational video featuring a single man walking down a dirt road with a penchant for breaking into spontaneous dance. The concept was Bentley's, although it didn't garner the immediate support he'd been hoping for. “I had a really hard time explaining the idea to everyone because it was really tough to explain without it sounding like it was going to be the most boring video ever,” he laughs. “That didn't go down fantastically, even with our managers. I was just saying to everyone, 'Just trust me, just trust me'. We ended up just driving out to this location that we'd never seen before, and we still didn't have any idea what we were going to do. We'd never met the co-director, we'd never met the actor – this guy named Tendai. He didn't know he'd be the only one in the video and he didn't actually even have a background in dance or anything.”

Chaos and order in equal measure then; a formula that seems to be working extremely well. It might be seen as a tough sell in this fast-paced music market to paint yourselves as a folk band that takes their time, but Bentley and co seem more than comfortable in presenting exactly what they are in the format that suits them. He may have started as a punk tragic aching to turn it down, but as The Paper Kites popularity skyrockets, so will Bentley's confidence that he made the right choice. “Seeing bands do that kind of thing, and seeing people enjoying it, is really encouraging,” he says of this new, all-encompassing quiet. “It isn't a pansy thing to be playing folk music. It really seems to be hitting people, and I want to be able to do the same thing.”

The Paper Kites will be playing the following shows:

Thursday 11 October - Heritage Hotel, Wollongong NSW
Friday 12 October - Oxford Art Factory, Sydney NSW
Saturday 13 October - Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle NSW
Thursday 18 October - Fowlers, Adelaide SA
Friday 19 October - Mojo's, Fremantle WA
Thursday 25 October - Woombye Pub, Sunshine Coast QLD
Friday 26 October - The SoundLounge, Gold Coast QLD
Saturday 27 October - The Zoo, Brisbane QLD
Thursday 1 November - Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Friday 2 November - Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 3 November - Karova Lounge, Ballarat VIC
Sunday 4 November - Ding Dong Lounge, Melbourne VIC