“During the writing and recording sessions, my personal favourite was always the opening track Take Your Medicine,” says guitarist Matthew Harrison.“To me that just felt like the tone-setter for the rest of the album – the one song that led the structure for a few other songs to follow. But now, since we’ve started playing a lot of the songs live, one of the title tracks, White Bird, has been a really cool one and is always a climactic moment in the set.”
Since forming at the end of 2012, Palace of the King – completed by vocalist Tim Henwood, bass player Andrew Gilpin, drummer Anthony Troiano, keyboardist Sean Johnston and guitarist Leigh Maden – have barely stopped for breath. The album was written in an eight week period and recorded across one weekend. The band have now embarked on a nationwide album tour, which stops into the Cherry Bar on July 4. Having already played 200-plus shows around the country, being on the road is nothing new. Heck, they’ve even been to Darwin.
“We’ve done shows there a couple of times over the last few years,” says Harrison. “I think the music scene and rock fans up north, more so than anything, they simply appreciate a band making the effort to go there. The shows we’ve had in Darwin in particular have been really crazy and we’ve been treated like absolute gold.
“I guess the main thing that we try to achieve out of our live shows,” he continues, “aside from just putting on an energetic rock’n’roll show, is to make each show itself quite unique – not only for the punters but for ourselves as well. We try to change the setlist as frequently as possible and, now that we have two EPs and the album, we have a larger pool of songs to draw from.”
Palace of the King’s extensive touring schedule has included all kinds of gigs, from small headline shows to festival appearances and some highly esteemed support slots. “We certainly take the opportunity to do support gigs whenever we can,” says Harrison. “For a band as new as us, they’re great for getting in front of a larger audience and getting in front of people who, in most cases, haven’t previously been introduced to our band. We’ve done a bunch of shows with a lot of really cool classic Australian rock’n’roll bands.”
Those bands include The Angels, The Screaming Jets, Airbourne and Kingswood. They also supported Canadian three-piece The Tea Party on a run of gigs late last year. “[The Tea Party shows] were awesome for us, just in terms of getting in front of a larger audience and the right audience for us as well,” Harrison says. “The type of people who are going to be there for The Tea Party are certainly the type of people we want to be winning over and converting as fans.”
After spending the past few years driving up and down the east coast of Australia, the band are looking forward to making their maiden trip to Europe this October. “It’s quite a short tour,” says Harrison. “I think it’s only about three-and-a-half weeks or so, but we’ve got something like 24 shows in 24 days, so no nights off or anything like that. It will be a nice hard slog, but great fun I’m sure.”
BY KELSEY BERRY
