“I’d be worried about Marlon,” Pool warns, eyeing her partner suspiciously.
He ducks for cover behind his book. “I’m innocent! I’m just reading!” he says.
Pool and Williams are an affable duo, both quick to laugh and unpretentious in their conversation. Though Pool tells me afterwards how nervous she was that the interview would be a disaster – she hadn’t slept well the night before – the pair are remarkably attuned to each other’s answers, bouncing off jokes and responses in quick succession. You suspect that their stage banter must be quite incredible.
“There’s not particularly a conscious theme or plan that we’re trying to get across up there,” Williams explains.
“And while there are certain similarities in how we sound,” Pool adds, “I think we’re different enough to make it work, to showcase our individual sound and have fun with that before performing anything together.”
Given the scope of their co-headline tour, it is surprising that the pair have only met relatively recently. After doing a show together and realising just how compatible they were, the tour basically grew from that one fateful encounter. Williams suddenly seems oddly apologetic about that.
“Really it was management who organised things,” he tells me, and Pool nods.
“We really need to work on a better story than that,” she says. “Give it some more excitement. But we just found ourselves thrown together, and it really struck.”
Not that either of them are strangers to comprehensive (one might say, exhausting) tours. “I did two weeks of solid touring, with shows every day,” Pool says, “but this is easily the longest tour I’ve done.”
Williams, however, has her beat.
“I did 30 shows in 34 days around New Zealand. That was a real eye-opener,” he laughs, shaking his head. “Finding out what it’s like to actually put your body through something like that, you soon realise that you can’t get absolutely wasted every night.”
While the pair have released a handful of videos demonstrating the extraordinary combination of their voices – their duet Heaven for You is gorgeous – they have yet to find the chance to sit down together and pen lyrics, and any stirrings for a potential album together are still on the backburner.
“We only see each other now for the odd gig, or interviews,” Williams reflects, “but that’s never the best kind of space to try and write something. Maybe on tour.”
“We’ll write a little ditty in the car,” Pool suggests.
“Or just get drunk some night and try it then,” Williams grins. “I can’t think about it too much. Just every now and again a song comes along somehow, and I’ll try to get it out of the way.”
“I’m much the same. I don’t like to set time to write. The expectation is kind of in the way. Usually,” Pool laughs, sounding embarrassed, “songs will start to come to me and I’ll try to put it off as long as I can.”
One suspects, however, that talk of an album has come up in conversation between the two before.
“Let’s just see how we feel about each other at the end of the tour,” Williams says. Until then, they have a crazy five weeks of performing to go, and many ditties to write along the way.
BY ADAM NORRIS
