Singer and guitarist, Sean Caskey, is getting excited for their latest European tour, reminiscing on some of the pivotal moments of their last trip. “When we played in Paris, there was this stereotypical Parisian attitude,” Caskey begins. “They enjoyed us and they would clap a lot after the songs but during the songs I was looking at girls rolling their eyes and I was like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’, but then they’d clap heaps. I was genuinely confused. Amsterdam was nuts though, we had no idea what to expect. We played at this day festival in this building and everyone was off their faces and it was just the best. I really wanna go back again this time, for obvious reasons.”
Coming from the enthusiastic and dedicated yet extremely cliquey Brisbane scene, Europe was a sort of reassurance to the band that they were on the right track. “It’s interesting,” he ponders for a moment. “In Brisbane, and even in Australia, it’s extremely fun, we just try to make it as fun as possible, whereas in Europe we’re trying to win over a crowd. They don’t know the songs at all and it’s refreshing to play to an unknown crowd and win them over. When we play in another country and people come to see just use it makes us realise we’re actually doing, well, something.”
While Caskey was plodding along in another successful Brisbane band, The Cairos, using Last Dinosaurs as a casual musical endeavour, indie tastemakers triple j hit the band with an Unearthed win which came as a complete surprise to them. More importantly, support from the youth network has been ongoing. “They don’t have to do what they’re doing but they are,” he says with genuine gratitude. “When they called us up for the Unearthed feature thing, I was playing in The Cairos and Dino’s was like the band I practiced in once a month. There was no reason they needed to call us up for that and it was just crazy, it started so many things for us. They’ve really kicked us off and they keep us going. It feels like they’re parents or something. Just in the way they’ve done so many, well not favours, but they have the power to guide you and it’s an honour they picked us.”
The support the band has enjoyed stretches far beyond that one small network though. Festival spots, rave reviews and opening slots for Foals, Matt & Kim and Foster The People all add up to industry enthusiasm. “It’s awesome,” he says. “Especially like, Russell [Lissack] from Bloc Party saying nice things about us, that’s insane, it’s weird. There are all these things that we can’t believe; it’s hard to explain.”
It seemed to be a long time before the band released their debut album and Caskey is brutally honest about why. “I was just fucking lazy for, like, a whole year,” he admits. “I just didn’t do anything. We’d written hardly any songs that year and we realised we needed to put our heads down. Eighty per cent of the album was written in the last six months before recording, which is strange considering we used to write songs once every three months, if that. We had the option to record the album earlier, overseas as well, and there’s no reason why it would’ve been worse but I’m glad we made the decision to hold off and write some more bangers, so to speak. The album was gonna be with Eliott James [Bloc Party, The Rakes], well that was the idea but we just didn’t have the songs.”
In A Million Years ended up being a local recording with a producer they love in a studio they adore (BJB Studios). It enabled a more calm process with all of the equipment they were used to using. “We elected to record in Sydney, it was comfortable, we had amazing accommodation and JP [Jean-Paul Fung] is a kick arse producer,” he says. “We had the mentality that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It was such a good thing, it was the best experience, and because it was in Sydney, we took all of our gear and were able to be at home in a way. From even just an engineering perspective, JP is one of the best engineers; he is so technically proficient, I can’t say enough about him. We are all extreme perfectionists so we all work well together. The four of us can almost never come to an agreement on things either so he was there to help us come to a point where we were happy with every song.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
