The Pierce lads flew in from touring on Monday at 8pm, went to bed at 12pm and will be out busking the very next day. Despite having sold over 30,000 EPs independently, these fellas still busk at every given opportunity. It’s how they honed their skills (and sold so many CDs). “I’d best get better by tomorrow because we have to go busking,” laughs Pierce, sounding like death on a stick. “We still want to keep busking as much as we possibly can. Everything’s on a grass-roots level… We’re flying a lot of places, so busking definitely helps.”
Cash for flying is something they’ve definitely needed. The Pierce Brothers have played at the Netherlands Lowlands Festival (on a bill including Queens of the Stone Age and Snoop Dogg), all over London and Edinburgh Fringe. They were the second-highest selling artists in the merch tent at Lowlands – yep, they out-sold Snoop.
“We were first on stage at Lowlands, so we didn’t think we were going to get a big crowd, but when I looked out about an hour before we were supposed to start, there were already about a 1,000 people,” he recalls, appropriately chuffed. “At the half an hour mark, that had blown out to about 2,000 or 3,000 people and by the time we walked on, it was absolutely packed. While we were playing, it only got more packed and everyone was going mental. It was completely surreal. The fact that The Corner Hotel is nearly sold-out is another example. It was my life ambition to sell out the Corner one day.”
The Pierce Brothers are following their passion, but were both were on a pretty steady wicket before living the dream. “We actually had a really pivotal moment around the same time mid-last year,” Pierce reflects. “Jack had just finished up an internship straight out of university at DDB, which is a massive advertising firm and I had just come back from France being second camera on Luke Nguyen’s France trip show on SBS. We’d both finished that and they were talking to me about working on another show and at the same time they offered Jack a full-time job, which never happens. Around the same time though, we both just said, ‘Let’s go and chase music.’ We only live once so we may as well do what we really want to do and it’s come up really well, we’re stoked with the choice that we made.”
It all sounds pretty idyllic for The Pierce Brothers right now; however, they do have at least one creative difference. “When I was a kid, I used to say that the biggest difference between me and Jack was that I liked cheese pizza and he liked Hawaiian. Here’s the issue. It’s not that I don’t like country music, it’s just that Jack’s right into it and the more cheesy it is, the better. He eats it up. He reckons he just loves it and he’s always saying, ‘Let’s make it a bit more country and get some cheese into it,’ and I’m like, ‘Dude, let’s keep it cool man, try and take it easy on that.’”
BY MEG CRAWFORD
