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Sommerset.
I've still got the t-shirt from the last time I saw Sommerset play live. I think it was about four years ago and the main thing that I remember about the show was that the singer had lost his voice. The New Zealand based four piece have just released their new album 'Say What You Want' and will return to Adelaide shortly, less than a month after their blistering national tour supporting Gyroscope. Guitarist Milon Williams is thoughtful when ask how their popularity compares between the two countries.
"NZ is definitely our largest following even though we have been to Australia seven times now," he explains, in his heavy New Zealand accent. "We started from scratch [in Australia], really. It was only on the last tour with Gyroscope that we had a substantial impact. That was a really good way to get out name out to a completely different demographic. All of the other shows we played over there were headlining shows and were relatively small, so it has all been baby steps up until now."
Given Pacifier's example I was curious as to whether Sommerset might have aspirations to move to Australia permanently. "The idea was floated around with the boys a couple of years ago and we weighed up the options and decided that it was just as easy to go over to Australia and play shows whenever we wanted," Williams shrugs. "It's not hard to get from NZ to Australia, and if we did move over to Australia we would all have to start our lives completely over again. We have got it set up pretty well over here. We have our singer's house all set up for rehearsals and if we moved to Australia we would have to go through the pain of finding another practice room, paying for it and then hauling our asses through a lot more traffic to get there."
Not only have Sommerset travelled to Australia numerous times, but they have also travelled much farther abroad. "We have already been to Europe twice and we are leaving to go again later this year. The first time was like a first stepping stone, and was also a really good experience. We went to Germany, Italy, Belgium and the UK and did 35 shows in 42 days, which was quite a heavy touring schedule. Then we went to New York, which was a half-holiday-half-touring thing that ended up costing us a whole lot of money. We found out the hard way that New York is a pretty tough city to be in," he chuckles. "Then after that we went up to Canada because there was a Canadian booking agent who contacted us when we were in the States and had already set up all these shows for us. We thought eh, 'what have we got to lose?' and then we discovered that we did have a lot to lose because the guy we were working through didn't turn out to be that good and all of the shows were really bad," he laughs. "In Europe, though, a lot of the places we played were squats or houses that people were living in that had been turned into venues. They often had unlicensed bars running and there was very much a DIY ethic over there. We may have played the odd legitimate pub, but over there we played primarily underground shows. We played a lot of small towns in Germany that even other Germans hadn't heard of. A lot of people generally came out - I guess there wasn't much else to do in a small town in the way of proper gigs. We had no idea what we were doing [on the first European tour].
"I remember one show in a town in Germany when we played at a house that had two permanent members as well as intermittent squatters. They were running shows in their basement, the room was absolutely tiny and then they set up a counter in another room that acted as a bar. It was crazy! It was like walking into a place that looked like it had been hit by a bomb in the war and meeting a bunch of new people, most of whom couldn't speak English. But looking back, some of those small squat shows constitute the best times I have ever had."
Sam Vinall
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'Say What You Want' is out now through Shock and Sommerset play the Enigma Bar on Fri 6 Aug with Shotpointblank, Away From Now and The RIP.
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