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Junior.
 "Wait,"
interrupts Peter Arthur, vocalist and guitarist from Adelaide
acoustic based band Junior, "there's a HQ Statesman going past.
We're actually in a phone box outside number three Stranger
Street, Brunswick. We've just driven from Canberra today, we
played there last night and there was even a line up out front.
It was awesome!"
It's now about 9pm Adelaide time on a night where the television news reported much of NSW and north-western Victoria's roads were disrupted by snowfalls. "No, we missed all that but it was like two degrees and bloody freezing. In Sydney the weather was alright, but we've really been spending our time in cars and rooms. It was good to get a gig in Sydney, and we've had some great shows in Wagga Wagga and Albury as well, so it's going really well."
Just then I hear a loud rattle of wheels and a gleeful sounding, "Whooo-ooaah!" "That was Justin [Slater, vocals/percussion]," Arthur informs me, matter of factly, "...riding past in a shopping trolley."
Junior are midway through their latest east coast tour, a journey to help promote their second album, 'Time In The Sun'. "Well, we didn't get [the CDs] in time but we're hoping to pick some up while we're here in Melbourne where it's just been printed," he explains, "which is okay because we're touring again in October. But [previous CD] 'Restless' is still selling hand over fist, and having Danny McKenna [Those Bloody McKennas, on drums] and Andy Johns on bass has been great too; having a backline in there is really bringing things to life and has been great fun.
"We just gave the songs their head and produced them up the way we heard them," he says of the new album. "We worked really hard, first in the shack at Middleton and then in the studio to try and get a good performance and a good feeling from the songs. We recorded all the bass and drums in the first five days. We had twenty-one guitars in my room, so I just crawled into bed around all these cases and shit. We had to take all the furniture out and draped stuff all around the shack to block out the sounds of magpies, the local traffic and the sea breeze. We started tracking electric guitars and some vocals, and then we came down and finished it at Mixmasters, then a little bit at Broadcast Studio and then we mixed it all back up at Mixmasters. So it was a different process to 'Restless' where we had two weeks from start to finish."
Slater now takes over the phone: "Well, there was just one sitting here so we thought we'd give it a quick run," he explains about his earlier joy-ride, "and I've seen 'Jackass,' I know how this stuff works. But then lights started to come on from the building behind me so I thought we'd better put it away." Then, no sooner do we get back to business, "Aaaugh! Now the boys are playing soccer with a burst soccer ball they found in the gutter. Oh man, this is getting crazy, they're using the phone box as the goals," he laughs, before... "Ow, you got me in the head, you prick!" he snarls at guitarist, Steve Pederson. "Look, we've been stuck in a car today for about six hours," he reasons, "so this is good."
Inspired by contemporary Australian singer/songwriters, along with the likes of Counting Crows, Ryan Adams and the Gin Blossoms, Junior have now found themselves clocking up many thousand Tarago miles, as well as a north-east tour of the US and Los Angeles (where they not only played the infamous Viper Room, they got escorted from the car park for being too noisy and drinking their own stockpile of Cooper's Pale Ale). So far on this trip, the most exciting things to happen outside the gigs were when Pederson endured a tense stand off with a shoe thief and his mates, and Slater accidentally paid $4.50 for someone else's parking bay in Sydney. "Yeah, it's pretty lame," agrees Slater, "but if I had ridden that shopping trolley any harder I might've lost an arm and that would've given you something there, mate."
Steve Jones
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Junior launch 'Time In The Sun' at the Governor Hindmarsh Hotel on Sat 31 July with Liam Gerner.
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