While in the early days Nikko seemed to be playing almost every weekend in their hometown, they have moved up from a band that’s playing for the rider and a bit of fun and into a band that want to make a solid career within this crazy industry. Bass player, Sam Whiting, now lives in Melbourne and his absence has made their respective musical hearts grow even fonder. “I guess for us, because one of our members lives in Melbourne now, we can’t just always play the same shows,” he says. “We have to book everything in advance and plan ahead so we know what’s gonna work. All of us came down to Melbourne in November of last year and we played a few shows around the place in December. Slowly, over a few months, we all came back to Brisbane one by one, but Sam stayed down there. There was never a question things would end there; it didn’t cross our minds. At that point, the album hadn’t come out yet so it would’ve been pretty suicidal to end it all then.”
Sometimes, the more a band plays live, the less prosperous they seem to be, stuck on the treadmill of nominal, local success. “We definitely like to think everything right now is a professional step forward and not the other way,” he says. “It forces us to be productive whenever we have the opportunity and it forces you to look to the future instead of just thinking, ‘Oh what day should we practice next week?’”
Recorded in heritage listed Brisbane venue The Old Museum with producer Cameron Smith (Velociraptor, No Anchor) at the helm, the sound of Gold & Red was ultimately sculpted by engineer Aaron Cupples (The Drones, Paul and Dan Kelly). “All of our other recordings were live recordings done really quickly and I think when you do it live you have an idea in your head of what it’s gonna sound like and there’s no real surprise,” he says. “It was good to give it to a real mix engineer who hadn’t been a part of the process to see what they come up with. When we first listened to it, it was completely different to what we expected and we were really happy with it.”
Vinyl – do people really love listening to it or is it merely a persistent hipster trend? For Nikko, it’s a genuine love of the sound of vinyl that has prompted them to re-release Gold & Red on that format. “We recorded this as an album and the best way to listen to it is in one go, vinyl encourages that,” he says. “Also, we pressed the 7” on vinyl and that sold really well. We’ve sold more vinyl copies than we have of the CD. People seem to really like having that personal piece of music. I guess it’s also a little goal that we feel we can tick off now.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
