The Waifs: London Calling.

The Waifs play the Woodford Folk Festival, the Nambour RSL on January 17, the Big Day Out at the Gold Coast Parklands on January 19 and the Great Northern Hotel, Byron Bay on January 20.

It's no understatement to say it's been an absolutely huge year for the Waifs. In addition to the mountain of touring the independent acoustic-based group have undertaken, both here and overseas, the band's profile has never been higher thanks to the commercial radio support of the haunting London Still EP. Now they're preparing for even more live work, first here and then back overseas, to support their brand new album, which will be released in January. I chatted to guitarist Josh about the making of the disc.

"Half of it was done in LA," he begins. "We recorded at a studio in Los Angeles in the Hollywood Hills which was a pretty good experience because we worked with a really fantastic engineer by the name of Mark Howard, who's been working with Daniel Lanois for about fifteen years, and he's just gone out on his own and we were one of the projects that he took on. So we did a week's worth of recording with him and we needed a bit more time to finish it off so we ended up doing it back in Melbourne with the same guy we recorded London Still with, Chris Thompson. So the album was done in two halves - half in America and half in Melbourne."

Being on the road so much over the past year, playing in America and England, I imagine there's been more than a few highlights along the way.

"The highlights would probably be playing festivals in North America," Josh muses. "They're such fantastic events, I think largely because of the acts they have access to over there, like basically the cream of acts in the folk and roots and acoustic world, a lot of them live in America so they're just playing those festivals as a matter of course. It's quite amazing who you end up being on a bill alongside of or even on a workshop stage with. Those moments I always pick out as highlights. The Newport Folk Festival - it's a real honour to be asked to play at that, we actually did it this year for the second time. It was a big year this year because Bob Dylan returned; he vowed in '66 that he wouldn't come back again, he got booed offstage and they tried to cut the power on him (because he played with an electric band - sacrilege!), but he came back and certainly got a better reception this time."

It's ironic that so many Australian acts are obsessed with getting the machinery in place to crack America, whereas the Waifs seem to have achieved that a lot faster by remaining independent.

"Well it really happened for us through, every year they have a convention that's attended by festival organisers and a lot of agents and promoters in the folk/roots world and a lot of artists go there as well and do showcase performances," Josh explains. "So you can be seen by these people and form connections and get booked at festivals and the like. So we went across for that and that's where it really all happened. We got an agent for Canada and America; we got booked for a lot of the big festivals and basically just got a foot in the door from that. I think we realised that in the folk/roots world that we perform in, it's really possible to do a lot of that stuff. A hands-on kind of thing; you don't really need a big machine behind you to crack the market, the market is there, and basically it's just a lot of people that really love good music. They're not really interested in the hype that these machines produce; they just want to hear good down-to-earth music, so it's worked well for us."