When you least expect it, The Fergusons are going to sneak up on you. One of the new breed of Perth bands to be tackling the country, this indie quintet took themselves by surprise last year for scoring a spot in the Triple J Hottest 100 with the brilliant Everything's Gone Bad, and are now preparing for a national tour and an album release while supporting their latest single, Sinner Is Red.

One day very soon these guys may well find themselves into your CD collection, as they climb their way to the top of the Australian music ladder.

"We couldn't believe it," guitarist Wayne Beadon exclaims about the Hottest 100 place. "You know how they have the shortlist of songs you can vote for? We were just hoping to get on that list!"

Since then the band have been going from strength to strength, writing a batch of songs that will become their first album. In the meantime, before they have started recording, they have given us this first taste, in single Sinner Is Red. Even without my asking, Beadon quite happily tells me a little tale of the song's origin.

"It's about a story over here about a guy who got chucked out of a pub - he was drunk and wanted to get back in so he went upstairs and broke into the upstairs part of the pub, not knowing that the owner of the pub lived upstairs. So the owner of the pub has heard this guy breaking into his house, and beats this guy up, and the guy who broke in sued the owner of this place for a fortune."

And while the title track is a rather fine slice of indie-pop goodness, it is actually the intricate Applying The Formula, the single's second track, which caught my attention. "Yeah, people have been saying that. We have quite a few songs in that kind of vein as well. [However] Sinner Is Red is definitely kind of representative because there are three guitars going around."

So what can people expect from the band's upcoming full-length debut? "I don't think it will be a conceptual album, but we're definitely not doing a straight down-the-road pop album either. People who are expecting ten Everything's Gone Bads, I don't think they're going to get that. We've always prided ourselves on our arrangements, so I think we'll keep going in that direction. Things are getting a lot weirder as we write."

Is that weirder lyrically? "Yeah, lyrically definitely. I think lyrically also we've always been a bit weird. We don't have one lyric writer either. Whoever feels like they have something to say in a song goes away and writes the lyrics."

Having such a group dynamic in songwriting must make it a lengthy process. "That's the worst part," Beadon considers. "I think if there were one songwriter in the band, none of us would be in [it]. We couldn't stand it - we all like to have our input. That's how it was in my old band - the bass player Grant and I used to be in a band, and we used to do all the writing. And it was quick, but whether the songs were any good is another thing. And when you've got five guys writing songs, at the end of the day you'll come up with a product everybody's happy with. On the negative side, when you're writing you've got five people who can all envisage a song in a certain way and you've got five people all pushing it in a different direction. And that might take longer, but I'd rather have that than write fifty songs a week that nobody likes."

With their upcoming tour with Sekiden and a few festivals and shows, what can punters can expect from a Fergusons' live show? "I think people who've never seen us have a perception of us, and we'd like to show everyone that we're not a pop-rock band like our radio songs have shown. So we want to get out there and play as much as we can. I think musically we're a lot more diverse than the radio songs show. We're a lot louder live; I wouldn't say we're heavier, but we're a lot louder than we are on record."

And what of the latest single's colourful artwork? "I just remember saying to the label, 'I want goats, goats are cool!' They came back with a couple of drafts and we told them which one we wanted. Tell me who doesn't like goats!"

Ben Revi

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