“I’m sitting in the back of a camping store as we speak,” he says. “I’ve worked at Aussie Disposals in Melbourne for ten years. This is my bread and butter, this is what keeps the rent paid, but I wouldn’t keep making time to play music unless I didn’t absolutely love it.”
Wood, along with guitarists Josh Voce and Steven ‘BV’ Angell, have spent countless hours perfecting their craft alongside well known acts such as The Pierce Brothers and Tash Sultana.
“If you put in a half-arsed performance when you’re performing in such a public area, you’re not going to win the crowd over and you’re not going to get the momentum that you want,” he says. “It’s definitely been a great experience for us as live musicians. We’ve learned a lot about how to engage with the crowd and hold their attention, and we’ve certainly pushed our limits as far as musicality and musicianship is concerned. It’s helped us add another dimension of energy and playfulness to the performance.”
It seems that all their hard work may be paying off, after receiving a nod from the folk behind The Age Music Victoria Awards for their self-titleddebut release earlier this year. “It’s been a tough slog for all of us, but just to be nominated was an absolute shock,” Wood says. “We couldn’t believe it when we got the email from The Age saying that we were nominated for the Best Global/Reggae album, because we’re definitely not reggae and we had never thought of our music as being global music until the nomination came through.
“We knew that we were a bunch of guys from Melbourne with this interesting blend of styles, taking flamenco and mingling it with rock and metal – so that recognition really solidified things for us. We realised our style was being received well and there were people out there who thought of it as being creative, new, global music. For anyone who knows the origin of that album – financing it ourselves, busking on the streets of Melbourne, putting whatever we could towards it and then producing it ourselves – it’s a miracle.”
Wood, who studied music production at university, took on the daunting task of producing and mixing their entire first album himself. “We recorded it at a studio in the country called Echidna Studios, out near Lilydale. We spent three or four days there tracking everything, and then I brought it home and spent the next few months doing additional tracking at my house – mostly because our busking wage wasn’t really enough to pay someone else to do it,” he says. “It was a fun experience – I got to listen to a lot of Spanish-style music while trying to emulate the sound of flamenco and tribal world music on a recording of our own. It ended up working out really well and hopefully it will be the way we record and produce our albums in the future.”
In fact, the three-piece have already begun working on a follow-up. “That’s particularly in the wake of the [Age Award] nomination. We were like ‘Oh my god. We need to make another one quick.’ Now the onus is on us to work hard, and hopefully we will release another album early next year.”
In the meantime, the eclectic trio are focusing all their attention on a video launch for their latest single, Palais. “The beauty of this gig that we’re putting on, is that every band on the bill has at least one connection to another. There are so many people that we’ve known in the other bands for many years. We realised that although the bands are all quite different, there’s an overlap in friendship groups and we thought we could make it a bit of a community event, with a lot of old friends involved to bring a really diverse range of music styles to the table. Then at the end of it all, we’ll get to launch our new music video as well. That’s the icing on the cake.”
By Natalie Rogers
