“It’s been amazing,” confirms Dean McGrath, lead vocalist and guitarist of the hotly-tipped pop outfit. “We’ve toured fairly extensively in the last two to three years. It’s been pretty full-on. The album launch tour was massive, bigger than we had anticipated. The response was bigger and everything exceeded our expectations.”
Thrust into the limelight, the sheer rate of band’s ascension toward the public eye appeared unprecedented. The band would suddenly need to adapt to the marked recognition of their craft. “Everything that we’ve learnt and had to adjust to has been kind of trial by fire for us,” he muses of their journey so far. “We didn’t have that period where we were just sort of getting together and learning the ropes. It was kind of like we formed, stuff happened and life changed fairly dramatically, I suppose. I guess we’ve handled it as well as we could expect ourselves to!” he chuckles. “We’ve adjusted and we all enjoy what we do very much, so I guess we’re lucky in that way.”
Hungry Kids’ growth has proven an organic process, its origins dating back to McGrath’s friendship with Ben Dalton and Ryan Strathie, the band’s bassist and drummer respectively. “We were all kicking around and playing in bands back then… when we were very young and our bands weren’t very good!” McGrath laughs. “We met through playing shows around the same places and we became friendly through that. It was years later that Ryan was in a band with Kane (Mazlin) our keyboard player, who actually lived in London for a little while. While he was there he was writing and demo-ing songs and e-mailing back to Ryan and saying ‘When I get back, do you want to do something?’”
This simple correspondence between friends soon extended to McGrath, the muso in turn encouraged to voice his interest, a new project in bloom. “It took one listen and I got straight back to them saying ‘Yeah, let’s do this!’ – based on the strength of the stuff that Kane was writing,” McGrath recalls. “As soon as Kane got back, we got into Ryan’s garage and started working. When we got together for that first rehearsal, it was the first time that Kane and I had ever met.”
McGrath and Mazlin would form the dynamic duo at the forefront of the Brisvegas band. United in their love of pop music, their intentions were clear. “From the very start, it’s kind of been our mission statement with the band, really: to make good pop songs,” McGrath explains. “We’re very much a songwriting-driven band, more-so than a style-driven band. We just try and write catchy songs and we’re really, really unashamed of that! The music we’ve grown up with has been our parents ‘60s pop records… it’s what we’re about.”
McGrath in particular spent his youth surrounded by the music of iconic bands. Typically, The Beatles were influential in his musical development. “I was lucky enough to be brought up n a house where their music was part of my growing up. Bands like The Beach Boys, The Zombies, ‘Zeppelin, The ‘Stones and all that classic sort of stuff was ingrained because it was playing in my house as I grew up.”
His enthusiasm for music would inevitably grow and a selection of pivotal discoveries would follow. “There were definitely certain bands and certain albums that have changed my way of thinking, or inspired me. There was this record by Spoon called Kill The Moonlight that was out when I was about fifteen or sixteen and it actually changed the way I thought about music and the way that I thought about songwriting.”
This and many other key factors have built the band piece by piece to the present day, as they now prepare to embark on one last run of shows in support of Escapades. “Essentially, we’re wrapping up the tour and a couple of guys in the band are taking some time to be with family and travel a little bit to go and see some places and be able to just relax and enjoy them, rather than work to a schedule,” McGrath reveals. “In amongst that, basically we’re going to be writing and demo-ing and possibly looking at studio time and looking at starting sessions for the next record – at the very least getting another single for release later this year.”
As if that weren’t tantalising enough, the band have already laid the foundations of their next project. “We’ve got about eleven songs written already that have been home recorded and sent to the rest of the band and we’ve just finished polishing two of them to play on this next tour. We really want to be able to bring something new to the crowds on this next tour.”
According to McGrath, the band’s next endeavour appears to be shaping up quite nicely. “It’s getting weird!” he laughs. “Kane and I – as the main songwriters – we’ve landed in the same spot with our writing. We’ve got this mixture of both our songs. I’m sitting at home listening to the demos next to each other and it feels like we’re in the same head-space, in the same zone with our songwriting,” he grins.
“Judging by the stuff that’s coming through, it’s going to be fairly cohesive. We’re really excited about the synergy that’s happening between the two of us. It’s really cool and really weird to listen to something that he’s written for the first time and feel like, ‘You know what? That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.’ It’s really fun.”
