Having spend well over a year in the studio working on their latest release, LITTLE SCOUT appear to be now spending the bulk of 2013 on the road. LOUISA BULLEY spoke with guitarist / bassist PATRICK ELLIOT as the band prepare for their next run of dates.
You’ve just come out of touring with Hungry Kids of Hungary, and with the release of your new album Are You Life, you’re now heading into your own tour in October. It seems like it’s been a busy couple of months and now you’re heading into another busy couple of months!
Yeah, well you’re right, it is a very busy couple of months, but then again we’ve sort of been holed up in the studio for the past, you know, 18 months preceding that. So I think we’re looking forward to getting back out there and doing our thing, you know? It’s a lot of time spent in tour vans and waiting in airports, but at the end of the day I think it’s what we’d prefer to be doing at the moment.
So you’re ready to break out into it I guess?
Absolutely, yeah yeah.
Can you tell me a little bit about how you guys formed and started writing music together?
Yeah, sure. It’s probably a little unspectacular, but yeah. Melissa (Tickle, vocals) and I have known each other for a long time, sort of going back to school days, and we’re from Toowoomba, about an hour West of Brisbane. We sort of both ended up in Brisbane playing in everyone else’s bands, which tends to be what happens in Brisbane, and we both had a whole bunch of songs kicking around, and we were playing instruments in those other bands that we weren’t very good at anyway. So we just sort of decided to collaborate, and I always wanted to be in a band with a female singer, I’m a bit of a sucker for some female vocals. So yeah it was a good mix and guess we haven’t looked back from there.
So you guys knew each other back in Toowoomba and then met back up ?
Yeah, that’s right. Look I’ve always been sort of a surrogate member of the Tickle family. I went to school with Mel’s brother and you know, I got to know them very well growing up. So yeah there’s years of history there that make their way into our song-writing chemistry.
Yeah, I guess that would have an impact on you guys as a band, just having that kind of closeness and familiarity?
I think so, but it’s always a little bit like, you know how you’re really close to your siblings, but you’re more inclined to squabble with them as well? I think that yeah, we are very close and you need to be when you’re spending that much time with people. And also when you’re doing something where you’re laying yourself bare quite often? So yeah, I should really think of a more interesting way of how we met, like, I dunno, we were both scaling a building or something, but I didn’t really think about that before the interview [laughs].
I’m sure the majority of bands are the same though, didn’t Radiohead just meet at uni? That’s boring.
Yeah I know [laughs]. I’m really gonna work on that, and next time you read about Little Scout in an interview it’s gonna be something like, “oh yeah, we’re all part of the same kayaking club and…”
We bonded whilst going over a waterfall or something [laughs]
Yeah exactly, “we had a life-threatening incident and we decided life’s too short” [laughs]. I think that would be a good angle. You know, something happened where we all almost died and we all just thought, “you know what? We’ve gotta make something out of this” and all learned instruments really quickly or something.
Well I look forward to hearing what that becomes in future interviews [laughs].
Yeah absolutely. I’ll work on that [laughs].
You’ve had the opportunity to tour with some pretty big names, supporting Sharon van Etten and School of Seven Bells, and more locally with Cloud Control and Holly Throsby, to name a few. What kind of impact do you think this has had on the way that you perform and write?
I think it’s a couple of things. Like the first one is obviously an inspirational thing, you see first-hand how much hard work has gone into their show and their performance, and how professional they are. And also, you’re often quite surprised about how down-to-earth these people are, and that sort of gives a bit of hope that normal people can do great things [laughs]. But secondly, the flip side of that is that I think it gives, for me certainly and I think for Mel too, it really pushes you along to try and lift your game. And any musician that says that there isn’t an element of that I think is lying because, at the end of the day, you’re always striving to better yourself, and that internal pressure is what keeps pushing you along in a lot of ways. So yeah, touring with Sharon and playing with people like School of Seven Bells and New Pornographers and people like that, they’re all masters of their craft of song-writing, and I think you walk away from an experience like that and you sort of go “wow, that was incredible to meet those people, and what am I going to take from that that I can use in my own song-writing” and that sort of thing.
This album is self-produced and recorded in large part by your drummer, Miro Mackie. What do you think are some of the benefits of doing so much of your recording and everything in-house?
Well, financially it’s a lot better [laughs], but yeah creatively I think there’s the obvious thing of having a lot more freedom of doing things that you just want to try out. And for us in particular, we’re one of those bands that has a version of a song that we record or do three different ways and then end up going back to the original one anyway. So there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, so I dunno actually, maybe a producer or an external influence would help you achieve those outcomes quicker [laughs]. But it’s certainly a very organic process for us, and I think probably there’s the fact that you can keep it very natural, free-flowing process is what we value the most out of doing it that way. I guess, even though we have self-produced and recorded, at the end of the day there’s a lot of people that have helped us out behind the scenes. And a lot of that comes from, like, our band brothers here in Brisbane, The John Steel Singers, who we share a rehearsal room with, and we’re always bouncing ideas off people like that. And I think our trick, a lot of the time, has been supporting ourselves by surrounding ourselves with a really creative and inspiring bunch of people. Because at the end of the day if it was really up to us to make decisions on everything, I’m sure it wouldn’t have come out as interesting as it did.
Is there a real passion or drive for you guys to stay independent as a band?
Well, it’s difficult when you haven’t experienced life on the other side of the fence I suppose. We love being independent, and I suppose it suits us really well in terms of how all of our lives are set up, I mean we all do other things in terms of having to work and that sort of stuff. But that being said, we still have a very high degree of self-discipline. It’s very difficult I guess to know these days with the music industry changing so much and how people both create and distribute music, so knowing how much better off you’d be being part of a label or that sort of thing? I think there’s certainly labels that we would like to be associated with, because they’ve got great rosters and artists that we really look up to. But yeah, it’s really difficult to know. So I guess the short answer is that, we’re happy with the opportunities we’ve been given so far as independents, but also the attitude we’ve taken thus far is to take advantage of opportunities as they come along. So yeah it would just be something that we’d have to consider at the time.
But you’re not dead-set against it or anything I guess.
Nah, not at all. And the thing you’re doing as an independent band the whole time is looking for ways for people to help you, because it’s such a huge operation. And luckily Mel in particular is very savvy in terms of social media promotion and things like that, which I’m absolutely hopeless at. Like if it was up to me, literally nobody would know about us, because there’s so much more to it than just, you know, getting in the room with a couple of people and writing songs. And that’s the easy part in a lot of ways. It’s the whole other part of promotion and organising and things like that which I can’t do in my normal life that are the difficult parts.
I guess that secondary stuff just takes a whole other kind of energy as well.
Definitely! Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think that’s probably one of the most difficult things about being in an independent band is that it does suck a lot of your energy out, like all the extra curricular kind of stuff you have to do on top of the creative side of things. And you do have to be careful to try and separate the two, because I could see how it could easily become, you know, like running a business rather than actually having a band, because the principals are alarmingly similar. You know, you’ve got a product there that you’re trying to market, and that can be really tricky.
American producer Lars Stalfors of The Mars Volta and Cold War Kids approached you guys about collaboration after hearing you on the radio. Firstly, is that true, coz that’s amazing?
Yeah, I’m not exactly sure of the exact origins, but I think he found us through the Triple J Unearthed page. He was kind of scouring through that and came across us. So yeah, that was a bit of strange one. In fact it was so strange that I thought it was, it smacked of like a Nigerian Prince hoax or something like that…
You’ve won a million pounds…
Yeah, exactly. Just provide your bank details and you’ll wake up with a million bucks kinda thing [laughs]. So yeah, after we’d sort of pinched ourselves and established contact with him, we verified that he was in fact very into our music. He was another one of those people who, you know we self-produced and recorded and everything, but he had an impact on the direction that some of the songs went, and little sort of production-y things that we would’ve done differently had it not been for his influence. So yeah, that was really lucky, and we’ve developed a really great relationship with him now and we hope to meet up with him.
And secondly, was that a boost, getting recognition from someone who has worked so successfully with these high-profile bands?
I think it was, well maybe it was subconsciously a boost from a publicity perspective, but I think it was, for Mel and I, we were more excited about the prospect that the people, the acts that he’d been associated with were quite, not radically different, but different to our music on face value. So yeah, we were really excited about the direction that he would be able to take it in a musical sense because, especially with Are You Life, I can really see the direction that a particular personality can have on the end product at that mixing point. So yeah, it did sound a lot different from when it went to Lars to afterwards. So yeah, he really left a mark on it, his own sort of personal style on it, and that was probably the most exciting thing about the whole process.
Little Scout perform Thursday October 10, 2013, at the Beach Hotel, Brisbane; Friday October 18, 2013, at the Black Bear Lodge, Brisbane; Friday October 25, 2013, at the The Spotted Cow, Toowoomba; Saturday October 26, 2013, at the Sol Bar, Maroochydore; Friday November 01, 2013, at the Brighton Up Bar, Sydney; Saturday November 02, 2013, at the Transit Bar, Canberra; Sunday November 03, 2013, at the Shadow Electric, Melbourne.