Winston SurfshirtA good old-fashioned celebrity endorsement never goes astray, never fails to call major attention to its subject, and when that celebrity is of the illustrious size and stature of Sir Elton John, it can certainly provide the artist with a major push. In June this year, John featured and interviewed Winston Surfshirt, main man of the band of the same name, on his radio show, calling them the stars of the show. Speaking from his record company offices in Sydney, Surfshirt is gobsmacked that his band has been singled out for special attention from the great man. "Yeah, why, why?" he half jokes. "It doesn't make any sense, it's crazy. It's probably the best thing about my life at the moment, that Elton knows about Winston."
Why is it so very unexpected? "I don't know, it's like — you've known about Elton all your life," he explains. "He's a national treasure and then here he is giving you a call to talk about your music. It's like, 'Mate, get your life sorted out!'"
Maybe it was simply a case of him getting wind of Winston Surfshirt somehow and just genuinely liking the music and the vibe. "I guess so, maybe," he allows. "It's so cool. He's one of the greats. He's got his radio show and he's just doing his own thing. He wants to promote new music, it's really amazing."
The main thing that Sir Elton is getting so excited about is the band's brand new, debut album Sponge Cake, which will be out in the world by the time you read this. And according to Surfshirt, the creation and release of this album was a long and arduous haul, for various different reasons, and actually almost didn't see the light of day. "It's been a long time coming," he says with some exasperation. "It was sort of done about three years ago. I was just going to release it straight-up, and then we got involved with management and stuff; we ended up just cleaning it up and getting it remixed by professionals and stuff. But I think it was all the right choices we made. And just in the last year or so, we've done another five songs and taken a couple out."
The decision to take the record from being a strictly independent release to putting it out on a record label was one of the main factors in the delay. "Three years or more ago, I just started writing with the thought of making an album," he recalls. "I'd done four solo EPs and I generally just thought it was a task I'd like to undertake: write a full album and see how it goes.
"So we finished it up in England, we did all the vocals over there — that's probably about two years ago now. Then we got it completely mastered, and we were just going to chuck it up online, and then we ended up getting signed and fixing it all up. So that added time to the process."
He is confident that many of the band's fans would have actually heard most-to-all of the album anyway during the course of its journey. "Anyone that's seen us live would have heard most of these tracks over the last three years," he accepts.
It's been such a long process that, in the meantime, the band must be well on the way to having their second album done. "You know it, brother!" he says. "We're about three years ahead of time on this one."
The music itself is a wild and diverse mix of sounds and influences, and even Surfshirt himself has a little difficulty summing it up to an uninitiated listener in order to convince them to check Sponge Cake out. The way he describes it is as left of centre as the music itself. "It's a tough one," he admits. "The only thing we can ever think to say is that's it's A Tribe Called Quest and your parents' band, really. It's sort of like hip hop with Beatles undertones and sometimes I feel like the whole thing is a bit like a Monty Python movie, in a way; just with the sketches and stuff like that, and the links — that was the initial plan anyway."
While many of the band's followers will have heard several of the new tunes in a live setting previously, it will make a world of difference playing them to an audience who have experienced the songs by listening to and ingesting them on an album, when the band go on tour from early November. "We'll finally get to play these songs to people when they know them," Surfshirt enthuses. "We've just been doing it for two years with unknown songs, essentially. This time [the fans will] be fully familiar with them."
