Anything Could Happen

Since 2009, St Jerome's Laneway Festival has been a highlight of the yearly musical calender. In fact, in the nine short years since the festival's conception, it has grown into one of the prime festival slots for the country; an amazing feat in less than a decade. One of the big factors in this meteoric rise is no doubt the regularly eclectic line-up of artists and musicians on each bill, with the event carving out its own niche as a presentation for alternative acts. Melbourne's Twerps certainly fit that specific bill.

Bred on a healthy love of bands associated with New Zealand's famed Flying Nun label, Twerps have the layabout, lo-fi charm that has seen groups like Bored Nothing and Wavves take over the airways in recent times. It's definitely an association that's not new: you can quite obviously hear bands like The Clean and The Triffids in Twerps' songs. The laid-back charm doesn't just effuse through their music, though. “It's hot as fuck,” Marty Frawley, the band's guitarist/vocalist says over the line after the usual greetings. “Luckily I've got a day off. So I'm just re-stringing a twelve-string acoustic that I bought. It's all good, man.”

Frawley is no stranger to the world of music – you may notice his surname; he is the son of late Paul Kelly & The Dots member Maurice Frawley – but Laneway will be his first venture to the western side of the country. “I've never been over there, but I have a few friends from over there. The Pond guys and the Tame [Impala] guys, we play with them and have a jam whenever they come over here. And the guys from The Growl. We love playing with those guys, and we have really since we all started.” The genesis of the band, as one might expect, comes from fairly normal beginnings. Frawley met bassist Rick Milovanovic while working at a video store. “We worked at a pretty cool store where we could just play our own music and stuff,” Frawley explains. “He'd always come to work with all these new bands he wanted to show me, and he kind of introduced me to a lot of music, I guess. I was playing in another band, and he was just like, 'Well, let's have a jam'. We never really wanted to be playing Laneway, you know? It was just something we were doing with our time. We just started mucking around, and as it goes, it's just gotten more serious as it's gone on I guess.”

Wit the enlistment of ex-Batrider guitarist Julia MacFarlane and drummer Patrick O'Neill, the band produced a debut EP in 2009, and things quickly came to a head. With their self-titled LP release of last year, Twerps have become one of Melbourne's favourite pop bands. And we all know how much of a challenge being referred to as 'one of Melbourne's favourite pop bands' can be. “We just started playing a heap of shows, I guess,” Frawley deadpans on the success of the group so far. “Me and Rick talk about it all the time, because we see our friends' bands all doing it now. You play your first year, year and-a-half where you just say 'yes' to every show, because it's fun. Then I guess you start getting better, and you get better offers. And then you have to face everything!” He laughs. “You kind of go, 'Oh, I want to slow down a bit'. But then everyone else is like, 'But we wanna see you play!' And then you have to pick your gigs, so you always try to pick the fun ones. We think we do a good job of picking the fun ones. Hopefully that's what people think when they come and see us, too.”

Twerps will be playing the following dates:

Friday 1 February - Laneway Festival, Brisbane QLD
Saturday 2 February - Laneway Festival, Sydney NSW
Sunday 3 February - Laneway Festival, Footscray VIC
Friday 8 February - Laneway Festival, Adelaide SA
Saturday 9 - Laneway Festival, Perth WA