And then there’s British India. Declan Melia, Matt O’Gorman, Will Drummond and Nic Wilson have been touring Australia and releasing music since 2005, with their most recent album Controller debuting at number ten in the ARIA charts in March this year – that is their third album to have such success, with Avalanche (2010) and Thieves (2008).
However, one thing that Controller represents for British India, that none of the others did, is a coming of age. This Friday at The Hi-Fi, the band launch their fourth single from Controller, the jangly and swinging pop rock ditty Blinded.
Vocalist Melia and drummer O’Gorman caught up with an old friend (your correspondent) at North Melbourne’s grungy hipster home, Prudence, to discuss coming of age via Controller, being left in the lurch by their old label, their falling-out with Shock Records, getting a second chance from Liberation and Wilson masquerading as a film-maker.
Their single I Can Make You Love Me came out in May 2012. Melia explains that though it was a relief to get the song out, there it was still fraught with uncertainty. “It had been a long-time since we released anything. Nearly three years. We needed the motivation to finish the album because this was during the time British India was really in the doldrums and directionless. The release of I Can Make You Love Me is what we needed to release the album.”
O’Gorman, takes up the story at this point, “So after the whole Shock thing, we’d written that song and a couple of others when we had no label and then the Liberation people heard it and they were really excited which was awesome for us to get that kind of feedback, particularly from a label like Liberation.”
Melia continued, “If you’re asking what it was like having the album out before the single was finished, it wasn’t good. It was tough knowing we had to follow-up with an album – you see, we didn’t have any more than a couple of other songs written. We were used to a situation like with Guillotine where we had an album and it was like take the best song and release it.”
For these four guys under thirty – whose only real job since high school has been playing in and releasing music – the period from when Shock Records came upon hard financial times with its publishing arm going into liquidation, to them signing with Liberation, was tough.
“Everything in this industry is unset; you live and die by your next single. If your single is a crappy single followed by a crappy album, you’re done. So even though we knew I Can Make You Love Me was a good song, it was something totally different for us because we didn’t have an album written yet to back it up,” explains Melia.
As the story would play out, British India did back the single up with a quality album. When Controller was released, the single that accompanied it was the grunge heavy Summer Forgive Me, a track that harked back to British India of old, and Blinded, the latest and fourth single from the album, is a confessional yet up-tempo song – almost a ‘road song’ to evoke energy on a 12 hour drive. The diversity of the album demonstrates a band at one with their creative output after going through tough and uncertain times.
BY DENVER MAXX
