Vika & Linda: Wing It.

Vika & Linda launch Love Is Mighty Close at the Tivoli on Friday.

    Vika and Linda Bull are two of this country’s most celebrated singers. Their previous releases Vika & Linda, Princess Tabu and Two Wings have found them critical acclaim and chart success, not to mention the time they spent as one of Australia’s most loved acts, The Black Sorrows. Their new album Love Is Mighty Close finds the pair moving to fresh fields after no longer fitting the marketing strategy of their former record label. The labels loss, one would imagine.

    “This is an independent release. Festival Mushroom let us go, and we were a bit silent for about 15 seconds, until we though, ‘Great! We can pay for it ourselves and just do everything we wanted to do’. We were really excited about doing it ourselves. We wanted to do just as well as if we were signed and we using record company money.”

    “It’s a risk, because if you get out and it doesn’t work you lose your own money. You’ve got to put a lot more effort in. When it’s your own thing, you’ve got to make it work.”

    Love Is Mighty Close works very well indeed. Vika & Linda have pulled together a collection of tracks from some of Australia’s finest songwriting talents, including Paul Kelly, Stephen Cummings, Dan Brodie and Dave McCormack.

    “We had some pretty good songwriters,” Vika understates. “We listened to about 500 different songs. We tried to write a few, but we were really lousy. Just because it’s out album we’re not going to put ten crappy Vika & Linda songs on the album, especially when there’s such good songwriters out there. Beautiful songwriters. World class.”

    “We didn’t have these people in mind, we just liked their songs. We picked about 25 songs from the 500 and recorded all of them, and twelve made it on the album. We had a few heated discussions about what to put on, but we’ve got 13 songs now done for the next one. This is kind of an album of love songs, with a little bit of country, the rock songs we did we’ll save for the next one.”