Georgia Fair
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Georgia Fair

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Jokes aside, Georgia Fair are becoming a bigger fish in the Australian pond, having supported increasingly bigger names to bigger crowds as they’ve progressed. Yet, even though they signed up to mega label Sony early on in the careers, they haven’t felt pressure to make a zillion dollars overnight, as Wilson explains.

“When we first started out, we thought signing to a label was what you do, and after that you’re fine. But it’s been hard work. We’re doing what all young bands should do, working your way up from the bottom. We have pressure on ourselves to work bigger rooms as we go, but other than that, it’s just writing music.”

Still, the last few years have been a steep learning curve. “We’ve learnt a lot about business,” explains Riley. “Our musical drive hasn’t changed, it’s constantly evolving naturally, but we’ve learnt a lot about people. We’re very much into taking control of our creative world after some of the experiences we’ve had.”

Despite any outside challenges, at the heart of the band is the friendship between Wilson and Riley. “Every now and then you’ve got to come back to each other and be like, ‘Still want to do this?’” says Wilson. “It’s like every relationship. Sometimes we haven’t been able to play gigs, or we’ve been waiting around to put an album out, and that’s been testing. But we’re gonna fight the good fight.”

When it comes to working through the difficult patches together, Georgia Fair have exactly the kind of solution that comes from knowing one another since high school. “We bonded over System of a Down! We can still listen to that shit and get off. Some nights we do a case between us and listen to them and Blink-182, Nirvana, all the stuff we listened to when we first started hanging out.”

Fortunately, there isn’t that much of Toxicity in the way they write music. “We were influenced by punk CDs, but we didn’t write songs until we found our parents’ record collections,” Riley explains. “There weren’t many songwriters from our generation we were looking at; for us it was all Dylan, Young. Where it all came from.”

It’s lazy to lump Georgia Fair in with new-folk borecore like Mumford & Sons who are happy using the names of Dylan and Drake in vain, because there’s a depth of dreaminess to Trapped Flame that comes from a far less cynical place. “The more you play the music you want to play, the more people tend to put you in a box, which is fair enough, but you do what you do because you like doing it,” says Wilson. “It’s going to be way less authentic to try and do something else. Even though we’re open to experimenting, we’re not trying to invent new things musically; I try to invent imaginary worlds far, far away from here when I write songs. With an acoustic guitar you can do that anywhere you go, and there’s a certain resonance to that. I’m not thinking about the instrument when I’m playing it.”

BY ALEX GRIFFIN