If this sounds a bit like the ramblings of a new-age nutter, I should warn you Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros look like a cult. I don’t mean cult as in great but underappreciated, like Arrested Development, I mean more like “police have surrounded the compounded,” kind of thing. Ebert has the long flowing hair and beard of a Jesus wannabe, to round out the musical Manson family picture. To make matters worse, the band name is taken from a book he tried to write about a Jesus-type figure sent to earth to save mankind but gets sidetracked by girls. “Magnetic Zeros was a mathematical concept,” he says. “In this novel I was trying to write, called The Rise And Fall Of Edward Sharpe, I got really into string theory, because the main character, Edward Sharpe, was able to manipulate matter with strings – they would all make noises – it was sort of like music. Then I got really into physics and magnetic zeroes was this gravitational addition, like a pendulum, it doesn’t make sense but I could draw it out – I thought that was a cool name.” So to paraphrase Ghostbusters, there is no Edward, only Alex, and he is an interesting dude. His first musical idol was Pavarotti and as a child, he thought he had a statue of Pavarotti that he kept up on the mantle, only it was Buddha. He was into Vangelis and is mother enrolled him into Suzuki Piano school, but part of their teaching method is that you have to bow to the piano. A young Alex was not a fan of this edict so that was the end of that.
Having grown up and sobered up he disbanded his pop band Ima Robot and felt in need of a change. “I was in a place where I felt I had lost my instincts, I had ignored them for so long,” he says of his desire to push off in a new direction. “I tried to write a song deliberately without a chorus, because I was so engrained with the idea of writing something that the A&Rs (artists and repertoire) would appreciate, so I wrote something they wouldn’t. It took a lot of force, but that got me back in to the joy of just writing songs. I thought back to the stuff I was into when I was a kid, and started writing what I viewed as sing-a-long children’s music, which turned into the demos for [first EP] Here Comes and carried on, all these sing-a-longs. So I made the album and slowly compiled the band. I had known Christian since I was three, Jadie I had met and we would hang out, we wrote Home together. I needed to record the album, so my manager introduced me to a couple of dudes who ended up being in the band. It just sort of spun out from there. The songs were written to be played by about 12 people. There are strings, horns, piano, synths, all these extra instruments, so they were designed for a large group of people to play, which is another reason the band formed in the way that it did.”
The band is doing the rounds of Australia in October, but strangely they are not the headliners. “We don’t particularly like opening for people,” Alex confesses. “But because we like Mumford [& Sons] so much, we became so close we just can’t help ourselves, you know? I am looking forward to it, I think Australians were always on board with what we are trying to do, which is cool. It’s not always the case, like in the UK and whatnot. The live shows, well for me they are transcendent and electric and ecstatic and rambunctious and emotional and dark and light and all that shit.”
BY JACK FRANKLIN
