After A Quarter-Century Making Music, The Waifs Are More In Tune Than Ever

It seems thoroughly implausible, but with some long-running bands, it almost seems a case of one day you turn around and suddenly realise that they have been around for 25 years. And let's look at that another way: that's a quarter of a century. Such is the case with Western Australia's favourite folky pop/rock trio The Waifs. According to the band's guitarist, vocalist and co-founding member Vikki Thorn, speaking from her home in Albany in the wild west, one of the trippiest parts about it is the fact they play to fans that weren't even born when they first put the band together.

"That's hilarious," she says wryly. "That's happened to me - a young guy comes up to me and says, 'I love your music, I've been listening to it since I was four years old, my parents used to play it.' It's almost like, 'You've got the wrong person!'" She laughs. "It's become an inter-generational thing, we're the band you can bring your parents to."

"We want this tour to look a little bit different to our other tours in terms of, I think we're going to come out and do some stuff as a trio which we've not done for a long time."

At this juncture in the band's career, Thorn feels it's just about time for the band to reflect a little on what they've achieved over the last 25 years: "Because with all of this leading up to releasing an album and touring, we haven't done that yet," she states. "I just sent an email the other day saying 'When the tour's over, when do we celebrate?' We need to have a party, we need to have something where we sit down and celebrate, just have a toast."

The band have a brand new studio album set to be released, an epic double album entitled Ironbark. The 25-year milestone helped shape the album's content as well. "We ended up recording 30 tracks," she reveals, "then we said, 'What are we going to do with that? Why did we record that many songs? That's a bit silly.' So we decided to make it a double album and make it the whole 25 songs for 25 years thing. That's not the sort of thing we've ever done before, and we've never had that much material before, so it just made sense."

The band are very happy with the results of their efforts this time around. Thorn believes that it was more of a collaborative effort and that it has something new and different to offer from their previous few studio albums; she feels their existing fans will find much to like within the grooves of Ironbark.

"There's a lot more harmony stuff," she says. "The tracks on the B-side of the album were the ones that felt more like individuals' solo efforts, more representative of the individual writers in the band, whereas the main album is a lot more harmony, and we were more involved in those songs. That's what we all felt like had been lacking a little in The Waifs' direction in the last few albums — the albums started to sound like three individuals. So for our 25th anniversary album we decided that we needed to be all-in on this music."

The Waifs head off on an extensive tour of the nation at the release of the album, and Thorn is very much looking forward to hitting the road again, although she has a slight touch of trepidation about playing the brand new tracks live. "The thing is, we've only ever played these songs when we recorded them that time in the studio," she says. "We're going out on tour, so we have to meet in a couple of weeks to rehearse, and that will be pretty much re-learning how to play those songs for the first time."

For fans awaiting their return to the road, the band have some new and different stuff planned for these coming shows. "We're gearing up, we've got lots of ideas. We want this tour to look a little bit different to our other tours in terms of, I think we're going to come out and do some stuff as a trio which we've not done for a long time. So we'll start the gig maybe playing retrospectively, and then bring [touring members] Jade and Ben on to play some of the new material."

25 years down the track, Thorn is quite confident that the band have plenty left in them, in a creative sense. From a personal perspective it's slightly more touch and go, but overall the future still looks pretty rosy for this folk rock institution. "Creatively, absolutely. I can't speak for the others, but we just have to see. We actually really enjoy it, but we have long periods off in between, to be with our families and just live our lives, and as long as the career can sit around that then I think we're all happy."