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Starky.
Is it perhaps slightly fitting, considering the subject of our conversation would revolve around their brilliant album 'Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre,' that when Starky's bass player extraordinaire Nick Neal called this magazine's office he was in fact driving his car? "I'm just driving; I'm trying to pick someone up from the airport I'll see how I go, alright?"
Of course, he must have a hands-free kit for his mobile in order to make this conversation even remotely legal. "Er, no - but I'll pretend I do! It seems my life revolves around driving and getting into traffic accidents and stuff like that, yeah..."
That having been said, what have the Starky boys been doing since they gave us one of last year's most critically acclaimed Australian records (at least where this publication is concerned)? "I guess now we've just sort of followed up from the last record, we've just started to get some tunes together. We're about to finally embark on a national tour for 'Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre' which we have, for various reasons, held up on doing for a while."
He's been very pleased with the response the record has been getting. "It's been really good, radio's got behind it, better than we expected - well, more than we'd hoped, I guess - and you know with Triple J and the feature record, and they've continued to give various songs on the record plugs over the last couple of months so it's really been good, to keep that sort of exposure going."
And as for the future, Neal sees broad horizons. "In the future, I guess for the last album what we're doing at the moment it sorting out some releases over in Europe so in the short term, over the next six to twelve months, we kinda hope that we'll be back touring in America and that will be our first time over in Europe, that's kind of our big thing. Then we'll continue writing some songs so we can start getting onto a new album, so for the future, I don't know: just getting back into a good studio either here or overseas and record an album that's progressed on from the last one, I suppose!"
As he pauses to turn a steep corner, I ponder over what we may find from a future Starky release. "I guess maybe [we'll] just introduce some new dynamics into the band. We're really happy with the last one, but I guess the thing was we didn't really have a permanent line-up at that time, we were fortunate enough to have Graham from Peabody, who actually lives with our lead singer, to play drums on the record, but I guess there was a pretty strict time for when we had to get the songs together for the album. This time we've got a permanent drummer and everything's working out really well so we can really just sort of sit down and pick apart the songs, just deconstruct it, I guess... As far as style and sound goes, I don't think we're really going to know what that's going to be until we get a few more songs under our belt. But we've just been throwing ideas around as to what we think we should be listening to as far as songwriting is concerned.
"I've kind of been actually trying to encourage the listening of lots of Motown records and stuff. I mean we don't want to come out with some kind of soul or funk record, but I guess when you're listening to that kind of stuff you realise how many ideas you can take influence from, even from The Supremes and The Four Tops and stuff like that, but we'll still always keep listening to The Clash, The Ramones, Elvis Costello and what not, the all-time favourites. The thing is now, what we're trying to discuss, is what we think we should be thinking about to draw a bit of extra influence from, without losing our originality - if we have any!"
On the subject of Starky's originality, Neal's stumped when asked where they themselves fitting into the wider Australian market. "That's a good question, I think - we're trying to answer that ourselves! It's hard to tell at the moment, we're just trying to work through a few label things and release issues at the moment, but I'd like to think that we could gain and maintain some sort of commercial success, without going overboard, and having our face up on the Pepsi billboards. I don't know about Pepsi," Neal muses, adding "Maybe Jolt Cola!"
I guess in rock'n'roll, you gotta get behind something you can believe in.
Ben Revi
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Starky play at Jive on Sat 17 April. See Prize Frenzy™ for giveaways.
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