Timber and Steel

Image Courtesy of The Falls

The past couple of years have been a strange and exciting adventure for Sydney duo The Falls. The definition of the “self-made artist”, The Falls’ Melinda Kirwin and Simon Rudston-Brown have cut through the doom and gloom surrounding the music industry at the moment and have found success along the way – regularly playing Wednesday nights at the Hotel Hollywood in Sydney’s Surry Hills for their Folk Club nights scoring some really exciting support slots and crowd funding their first EP Hollywood. Their first single “Home” is a wonderful piece of catchy folk-pop full of The Falls’ trademark harmonies and is being launched at The Vanguard tonight where they are supporting Jack Carty. We sat down with Melinda and Simon over a couple of beers in their native Darlinghurst to chat about the single, the EP, the crowd funding process and recording in (possibly) Sydney’s oldest men’s toilets.

Evan Hughes: Let’s start with the new single “Home” which has just made an appearance on triple j Unearthed, you’re launching it as part of Jack Carty’s show at The Vanguard and it’s being officially released next week…
Melinda Kirwin: Yeah, it comes out on iTunes on the 1st May. It’ll be actually available to buy so that’s pretty exciting.
EH: You’ve got to be excited about that.
MK: We’ve never had anything available before so this is really huge for us.
EH: How have you found the recording process? Did you record in a studio?
MK: We recorded with Tony Buchen at BJB Studios which is now closed. We were really lucky to be one of the last sessions there. We recorded with him there and did some overdubs at 301 where he has a suite. It was amazing recording at BJB.
EH: Is “Home” part of a wider recording like an album or something?
Simon Rudston-Brown: It’s part of an EP that we’ve done which has six tracks. The EP’s called Hollywood and it’ll be coming out soon as well. “Home” is the first single from that release.
EH: And you’ve been filming a video for it as well – do you feel like rock stars yet?
MK: [laughes] I think I’m going to feel more like a rock star when we finally hit the road and are on tour and flying from city to city. We’ve got a pretty hectic schedule over the next couple of weeks because we’re touring with Jack Carty and then we’re doing a tour with Evan & the Brave to support the release of “Home” and start promoting the EP. The EP will be released on the 1st June. I actually just want to get all of the songs out there. I’m not enjoying waiting – I just want to put them all out.
EH: I guess that’s the standard process though – single first and then the EP.
MK: We did get some rock star treatment on the video clip which was pretty good. I liked that.
SR-B: Did we? I had to make sandwiches. I catered the video clip – I didn’t feel like a rock star when I was buttering bread at seven in the morning [laughes]. It’s all worth it.
MK: It was nice, we had hair and make up and stuff like that so for me it was quite unexpected to be completely looked after at the shoot. It was pretty hectic as well – it was good to see what that’s like. We had some pretty big days and we had a really great team of people on board. I’m excited to see the results.
EH: Are you guys still self managed?
MK: We are.
EH: How do you juggle the creative side of things with organising all the other aspects of managing a band?
MK: With great difficulty. It’s really hard trying to juggle all the different roles you have to take on and make sure you don’t neglect any of them. I think after we release this single and the EP I really want to put some time aside just to focus on songwriting again. The gig side we really enjoy – the gigs are the fun part and it’s really nice to just get out there and play – but the bit we’ve got to make sure we don’t neglect is the songwriting. It’s the really important bit.
SR-B: Melinda is managing the band so she’s juggling those things. We haven’t spent a lot of time writing.
MK: Since the beginning of the year
SR-B: We had some new songs for this EP and then because other things have needed to be done and organised we haven’t really had a chance to get together and write together. We’d like to get this out and set aside some time again to do that. We’d love to put an album out.
MK: There’s lots of songs and lots of ideas that I’m itching to finish and work on together. We’ve just got to put that aside for the moment. It’s really important that we focus on the release right now because it’s our first, the first thing we’ve ever released. We want to make sure we give it everything we’ve got to try and get it out there.
EH: What was the process to decide what was going to go on the EP this time around?
SR-B: We included try a lot of new songs. There was a couple of songs, particularly the song “Hollywood” which is the last track, we were still actually writing the night before we went into the studio. It seemed the right song to include.
MK: It tied to whole thing together because we’ve been playing at The Hollywood for so long. It became the EP – that one song – because it was so nostalgic. It’s a part of everything we’ve been working so hard on over the last two years. It just brought everything together and now the EP is called Hollywood and we recorded most of the reverbs on the EP in The Hollywood.7:49
SR-B: In the toilets. The men’s toilets.
EH: Isn’t it the oldest men’s pub toilet in Sydney?
SR-B: I don’t know.
MK: I wouldn’t be surprised.
SR-B: It’s pretty smelly down there.
EH: I’m sure I read somewhere that the Hotel Hollywood has Sydney’s oldest urinals.
MK: I know that they just pulled out the old urinal and weren’t sure what to do with them because they were so old. I don’t think there were any takers for them.
EH: There should be a Sydney pub museum or something that they could be donated to.
MK: Totally! Because of the urinals and everything that’s down there we’ve been calling it “pee-verb”.
SR-B: It was tricky choosing the songs because there was a lot to choose from and a lot that we really liked but we just kind of chose a batch that worked really well together and that were a good representation of what we do as a duo. That’s how we perform and we wanted an EP to sound not like we’ve suddenly got a twenty piece band – it still sounds like us as a duo but with some texture and colouring from other things. I think that had a bit to do with the songs we chose and obviously songs that were fresh and exciting to us at the time.
MK: And it’s cool because the first track on the EP, “Please”, is pretty much the first song we ever wrote together. And the last track is “Hollywood” which was the newest song we’d written at the time. So it’s like the little story of us.
EH: Like book ends.
MK: Yeah, totally.
EH: Did you test which songs worked and which songs didn’t at your regular Wednesday nights at the Hotel Hollywood?
SR-B: Not so much testing them out but more just getting them up to a level where we could perform them really well.
MK: I think The Hollywood is where we really figured out who we were and what we wanted to sound like. When we first started playing at The Hollywood we tried doing some stuff with a band because we thought we needed a band. And when we first started playing acoustically [as a duo] at The Hollywood we felt like there was something missing. But then as it went on and we were playing their every week we started to really figure out our sound, just the two of us, and figured out that that’s actually what our sound is – two vocals and acoustic guitar and stompbox. It’s kind of what’s led to the current recordings is that we took that sound and built around it and didn’t go too far.
SR-B: You ask 20 people, for example, what the single should be and you get them all saying something different. On the same day we had one person say “it’s definitely got to be this song” and somebody e-mailed us five minutes later and said “I wouldn’t even put that song on the EP”. At some point you just have to go “well what do we want to put on the EP, what do we want to put out?”
MK: “What is us?”
SR-B: You’ve got to just decide yourself. We did ask people what they thought but in the end we just decided to go with our gut.
EH: And Hollywood was crowd funded right?
MK: Yes
EH: Talk us through the decision making process around that and how difficult that was.
MK: We kind of ran out of money and we’ve never released anything. We’d been investing a lot in our music and doing shows and putting on The Hollywood. We really wanted to release something and come up with a way to do it but we didn’t want to borrow money. Because we haven’t released anything before we thought it was premature to approach a label as we didn’t have a track record. I’d seen some friends of mine in America who had been doing some self funded projects through Kickstarter and that’s where I heard about the crowd funding thing and started looking for options in Australia. It didn’t really exist to a huge degree here yet – I looked at Kickstarter but you couldn’t do it unless you were based in America. And that’s when I came accross Pozible and thought we should give it a go. It was really nerve-racking – it was a big decision for us to make too for us to ask people to contribute to making our album, to take that leap. We didn’t want to ask people to help fund it and that’s why we liked the idea of Pozible because you’re not just asking people to give you money, it’s like pre-selling an album. We put together all these different packages so people could do something as small as just purchase a digital download or an actual physical album. Then we put a lot of packages together that were associated with our studio time like a set of polaroid pics from the recording process.
SR-B: And gigs. We also sold us to come and play a gig and we did a few of those.
EH: Like lounge room concerts.
SR-B: Yeah, lounge room type concerts
MK: And we did a wedding.
SR-B: It was great how many people supported it and got behind it. And also a few local businesses in Darlinghurst wanted to help so they put on a raffle.
MK: The Bunker cafe on Liverpool St, they helped us out. So did Blender Gallery in Paddington and Miss Chu as well. There’s no way we could have done this release without the support that we got. We were literally running on empty so it was amazing to see who would actually come out and help. It gives you renewed faith in what you’re doing that people what to help you get there, get across the line.
EH: Did you find the help flowed fairly easily once you were set up with Pozible?
MK: It kind of happened on its own. We didn’t want to be pushy either. We kind of just sat back and went “we really hope that you can help us do this” and it was amazing. We didn’t have to push it very hard. People were so helpful. It was incredible – I recommend it to bands because there’s so many people who want to help you get heard.
EH: People always talk about “the music community” in Sydney and Australia and I guess this shows that that community is there – that there are people who really care about getting music out there. The media beat up how illegal downloads mean nobody cares about the artist anymore but there really is a group of people out there who do care and want to see you succeed. You guys have proved that.
MK: I think once people hear the stories of what it’s like as an artist at the moment I think they’re even more willing and excited to help artists. The music industry is in a complicated place and it’s nice to see people haven’t changed that much. Downloading has changed the industry because people now have access to music like they have access to running water – you can just get whatever you want when you want it. But I think when people see that it benefits the artist if they buy their music I think they want to if they can.

Look out for Part 2 of the interview coming soon. The embedd of “Home” is below along with the full list of live dates for The Falls:

Thur 26th April – The Vanguard, Sydney, NSW w/ Jack Carty
Sun 29th April – Chino’s, Newcastle, NSW w/ Jack Carty
Sat 5th May – The Front Gallery, Canberra, ACT w/ Jack Carty
Tue 8th May – Northcote Social Club, Melbourne, VIC w/ Jack Carty
Wed 9th May – The Hotel Hollywood, Sydney, NSW w/ Evan & The Brave
Thur 10th May – Black Bear Lodge, Brisbane, QLD w/ Jack Carty
Fri 11th May – The Front Gallery, Canberra, ACT w/ Evan & The Brave
Sat 12th May – The Wesley Anne, Melbourne, VIC w/ Evan & The Brave
Saturday 19th May – The Waiting Room, Brisbane, QLD w/ Evan & The Brave
Sunday 27th May – Yours & Owls, Wollongong, NSW w/ Evan & The Brave