“Yes, I was [sick of it]; well personally I was,” McGrath says with a laugh. “I also don’t think Escapades had a specific sound either. It was so diverse and the songs were written over such a wide expanse of time and in such different head spaces, and this time I wanted to do something different. I wanted to approach it differently and make it so it’s interesting for us, as well as for the audience.”
While You’re A Shadow has enjoyed a mass of critical acclaim, there was a time where the band needed to convince those on the inside that what they were doing was going to work out. “Our label were kind of freaking out,” he says. “We were like ‘it’ll all work out, don’t worry; people will like it and they’ll accept it’. We like it, so other people will surely like it. That’s kinda the thing too – for the last one, there wasn’t anyone telling us what we should do and it got licensed to the label after it was already made, so we were like, ‘well, it worked that time so let us do it again that way’. We said from the outset that this wasn’t going to be Escapades; we weren’t gonna do that again.”
This year has seen HKOH play a host of local festivals, The Great Escape Festival in the UK as well as their first headline tour of the UK. This tour will be their only tour of Australia this year, although they “might be somewhere on New Year’s Eve” according to McGrath. “We basically were over there to shop [the album],” McGrath says of their stint in the UK. “We’re there to kinda show people that we’ve got this album, please release it and play it on the radio. Sharp Shooter has gotten a far bit of play. Overseas is just one of those things; you really have to knuckle down and kinda put yourself there for an extended period of time. In Australia we’ve been going for six or seven years, touring so much and chipping away at it, but over there we’re still really new. We do try and get over there as much as we can and keep that market aware of our existence.”
A lot of bands seem to plan a fair way into the future these days – not Hungry Kids Of Hungary though. “I don’t really know what we’ll be doing next year,” he laughs. “I’m not the planning type of guy. I know my manager wishes I was but I just don’t think in that way. I know what we’re doing next month and that’s all I worry about.”
McGrath makes an interesting point on making music in general, with a self-deprecating and humorous take on the whole journey. While the band wanted to make You’re A Shadow stand apart from their previous releases, he knows that first and foremost they’re there to entertain an audience. “I think it’s fairly naïve to not realize that you have an audience that you have to, in some way, cater for. It’s pretty self-indulgent to think you don’t give a shit if anyone else likes it and you’re just doing it because you wanna play music,” he says and then begins again to laugh. “Writing music and playing in a band is already the most self-indulgent career you can have – doing the most fun thing as a job and being the centre of attention, it’s such an arrogant thing to do. But you might as well not leave the lounge room or garage if you’re not going to try and make something to be enjoyed by other people. We’re lucky, we’re a pop band and that’s inherently about making music to be enjoyed.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
