Winchester: Games Plan.

Winchester play The Healer on Tuesday, The Zoo on August 20 and the QSM Basement on August 22.

“Dan’s a songwriting machine,” enthuses Winchester drummer James. Dan being the band’s frontman and songwriter. A little over two years after first getting together, Winchester are looking to sign on the dotted line for a publishing deal for the band’s work. While the specifics are still being nutted out, the band found the time for a quick bevvy and a few words on their upcoming shows.

“It’s all happened pretty quick,” James explains of the publishing offer. “It’s still being negotiated, so we can’t give away the nuts and bolts at the moment, but it’s from a UK based publisher. Basically it should all unfold over the next month, I would imagine.”

“It just happened nicely around the time of this showcase that we had been planning. It was just being in the right spot at the right time, we took time off from the end of September last year and just concentrated on recording.”

The showcase, being held tonight at The Healer, finds the band on stage for the first time since late last year. Before taking this time off to get the batteries recharged some time to recharge the batteries, Winchester were involved in the Goodwill Games last year.

James: “We’d been playing around Brisbane and we went down to Melbourne and Sydney, all that kind of stuff. We got lucky enough to land a spot at the Goodwill Games last September. It was all bands like Superjesus, Invertigo, and all that kind of stuff. We were basically playing before them every afternoon.”

Dan: “It was every night for two weeks. We got exposed to a different sort of crowd, because we’d never played covers, it was all our own stuff. It sort of payed off because the events were getting flogged on B105 and radio.”

James: “It was funny though, we were an original band in a covers sort of environment, and we pulled it off. We were pretty lucky. People come up and say things like ‘do you know Better Man by Pearl Jam’, and it’s like, ‘yeah, we know it, but we’re not going to play it’. But this time people just accepted us.”

The recordings Winchester have been putting together range from full band studio sessions to simple solo guitar and vocals tracks

James: “The recordings has been all different levels of stuff. Some things have just been Dan and I getting it down, and other have been more polished with the whole band. We’ve recorded over 70 songs, and we’re just thinning them out for the guys in the UK.”

“We’ve been recording rather than playing live,” Dan continues. “Brisbane can be a bit funny in a way, because you can only play around so much, and then everyone has seen you. People just go, ‘we can see them next month’, or ‘next week’, or ‘I saw those guys last week’.”

“You go around the venue circuit in about two weeks and you’re back at the start again.”