Keeping Their Hands Off The Honey Pot

Thom Moore from Sydney's Wild Honey talks easily about the multitude of line-up changes to the group since their inception early last summer, when he and Julian Sudek worked in Moore's bedroom to produce their breezy self-titled debut EP. Sudek left the group to work on his duo World Champion. Moore, suddenly solo, picked up their current guitarist Adam Della-Grotta when he "saw him at a party and he was really snappily dressed. He looked like what I envisaged the ideal Wild Honey audience member to look like." The process that led to the final line-up of five is something Moore calls "a fluid project", but in actuality sounds slightly stressful.

"We asked him if he wanted to join and the reality of paying $350 rent in Sydney meant that he couldn't afford to be working one or two nights a week with the band."

"We initially had [Thom Eagleton] playing keyboards, playing organ, and now he plays drums which is his main instrument... [Previously] we had another drummer who was like a session drummer," Moore explains. Their original bass player "who isn't in the band anymore, thought [Eagleton] was a bit slow, like, not the right vibe on the kit," when the band "went to audition new drummers just before [the other drummer] joined." Once the bass player "was out of the picture" and the session drummer became unavailable for a few dates, Moore passed the role on to Eagleton.

"The drummer was definitely hard... because he wanted to stay in the band but he wanted to be paid per show... And we basically got to the stage where everyone in the band wasn't taking any money - everyone was pulling that in to pay for things like petrol, to pay for things like photo shoots and video clips and things like that. But every show we were paying him, and that was adding up. We asked him if he wanted to join and the reality of paying $350 rent in Sydney meant that he couldn't afford to be working one or two nights a week with the band and not being paid for it… The reality of the situation was that he couldn't make the sacrifices that all of us were making."

As a new Sydney act Wild Honey were getting paid "$150 to do a show. And there will be five of you. And so if you go and then pay a drummer sort of $50, then you're left with $100." With Sydney's current lack of venues in comparison to Melbourne — a move the band contemplated with the hopes of "play[ing] more frequently in better venues with more audiences" — it was a tough decision to make. "It's a very hard thing to make work, so you kinda have to all take your hands out of the honey pot," he laughs at the pun.

"In order for there to be opportunities [for new bands] there needs to be audiences as well. And I feel like it's an interesting one with all those protests and things like that - I saw so many people when we went down [to the Keep Sydney Open rally] and I wish I saw that many people at the gigs I go to! Not just ours, but other bands starting off that you go around to and they're having trouble getting 150 people to a gig.

"We really do work hard at it and, you know, a lot of the time you're kinda hitting your head up against a wall trying to make opportunities present themselves."