“We’ve been here for about a week now. Just enough time to settle in and start getting over the jet lag, but it still feels pretty weird, I’m not gonna lie. LA is big, and there are many kinds of LA. Parts that are much dodgier than what you’ll see in Sydney and Melbourne. So it’s crazy, but it’s not like we’ve been eating caviar and drinking courvoisier. Coming here, I don’t have too much experience in LA. It was more the people who are involved. We’re working with Ron who did all of Green Day’s albums, and having spoken to him last year, that was kind of the deal-maker. If you’re lucky you meet the right people to take the band forward, and it just so happened that led to LA. It wasn’t about coming here to make that life, it was all fortune.”
The Ron in question is Ron Cavallo, who they met at last year’s Big Sound. Polish Club had already begun carving a ubiquitous name for themselves with their self-titled EP (for those who haven’t checked out Able, do yourself a favour) – it was a no-brainer that the renowned producer took an immediate interest in the band. They will be returning to Australia soon for a quick run of gigs, including CherryRock, before heading straight back to LA and their windowless bunker.
“The album will be out sometime this year, but we don’t want to rush it. We started with sixty songs to choose from, and whittled it down to eight to work on now. You can’t help but write every time you get into a room. What would happen is, we’d work and work on a song for a few hours, and then the last hour we’d mess around and more often than not, we’d have five new songs. So we just kept adding them to the list, and yeah, it’s been a pain to whittle them all down, but you know, too much is better than too little,” he laughs.
These days, Melbourne has become something of a musical Mecca for the duo. There is a sense of adventure and camaraderie in the industry here that they respond to quite strongly, differing greatly from the musical relationship they currently have with their hometown.
“I think Sydney is a bit different to the other Australian cities, in that the music scene doesn’t have as much of a community to it. I don’t know if I’d say it’s harder to be in a band in Sydney, but it’s different. Melbourne, the bands all know each other, they play all sorts of venues at all hours and ply their trade. In Sydney, it’s getting more difficult to do that as a starting band, and all of the venues we played coming out of high school, they don’t exist any more. And that’s due to the lock-out laws. I understand that something needs to be done to curb that culture of violence, but it’s not going to be a quick fix. It used to be that you needed a bit of luck just to be in a band, period. But now, you need a whole lot of luck. It’s tragic, because I’m sure there are plenty of bands who are just as good or better than we are, but they just don’t get the chance in Sydney any more.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
