“We are performing in front of this set that we’ve created,” Bentley says. “There are four windows that are hovering above the band and there will be four different stories happening in each window. We are providing the soundtrack to everything that is happening in this apartment building. The windows have been built to look like they’ve been ripped out of an apartment building. The style is very Greenwich Village. It was actually inspired by the Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window.”
Turning the typical live show on its head, The Paper Kites are aiming to provide a unique experience for their fans. “You can only really play – in Melbourne in particular, but a tour in general – so many times before you start thinking, ‘I feel like I can do more with this and I feel like I can really bring the audience into something’,” says Bentley. “We had this idea to try and bring this midnight idea to life and make people feel like they are staying up in those hours as well. It’s really about bringing a completely new visual level to a show and, I suppose, trying to get people to walk away and think, ‘That was different.’ I love the idea of being immersed in something that’s more than a show.”
Given the antisocial hours of its construction, Bentley says the process of putting twelvefour together was challenging. “It came through a conversation that a friend and I were having about the artistic peak of the day, or the night, and he was saying he had seen an interview with some screenwriters who were saying that they did their best work between midnight and 4am,” he says. “I did it for about two months and ended up with about 30 songs. I had to pretty much flip my sleep schedule on its head and sleep during the day. I love that time of night. I think it’s really romantic, it’s very moody, there’s just a real sort of melancholy feeling about writing music at that time and it sort of seeped into the record. It birthed this beast of an album.”
Having recently returned from a UK tour, Bentley reflects on the progression of their international popularity. “At the start, all of our friends used to come and they were the majority of our crowds,” he says. “All of a sudden it just switched and we didn’t know anyone who was there. We’ve always had such a great crowd in Melbourne and Australia in general. We just got back from Europe – we’d never played there before and it was amazing. We ended up playing a place called Paradiso in Amsterdam, which is a very famous venue. The Rolling Stones played there and Keith Richards cited it as one of his favourite shows ever. We were originally supposed to be playing a 250-sized club, but it sold out so quickly that they moved it and we had about 1500 people there, which was really weird – we didn’t think anyone even knew us in Amsterdam [laughs].
“In a lot of those European cities people stayed around for ages, they just wanted to talk. A lot of the people I spoke to wanted to tell me about how our music had influenced their lives and they were really emotional. You don’t realise the scope your music has, the reach. When people become attached to your music it becomes their song; it’s no longer yours and it’s ingrained in their lives. I didn’t realise some of the music we played had that affect on people. To move someone that much is pretty special and it’s a real honour to meet these people and hear that you’ve had some sort of influence on their lives.”
Renegade is the latest single lifted from twelvefour, and the third song to give rise to an afterhours-themed music video. “Dan [Huiting] is the guy you go to when you have an idea that’s really difficult to pull off. I went to him with the Renegade concept and he said, ‘I’d love to do it, I’ve got just the right group of kids in mind.’ They were a local skate crew. He got them on board and then we had to create La Cinequatic. We had to get a cinema screen inside a tiny little pool venue and get the neon signs made. These poor kids were riding in the middle of the night in the snow – they did so well. They were such a group of grommets, you know – really cool little dudes but kind of a little intimidating.
“There’s definitely that ‘80s vibe soaked through all three of the videos. I’m calling it ‘lateighties’, like late-night-eighties. If anyone asks what genre it was, that’s what I’d say. I’m coining it.”
BY PHOEBE ROBERTSON
