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The Grates.
 If you listen to 'The Ouch, The Touch', the marvellous debut EP from Brisbane trio The Grates, you'd be forgiven for thinking that lead singer Patience might be a little, well, hyperactive. And she's certainly more than exuberant over the phone, even at nine o'clock in the morning!
"I'm going really well, thankyou," she says as she moves away from the sound of other voices. "I forgot I had an interview, and I'm at my parents' house. And I was downstairs, underneath the house, searching for pottery books. And I heard my phone go off, and I thought, 'Oh my God, I've got an interview this morning!' There's about one hundred people here today, like all my aunties and cousins. I didn't actually know they were coming. I came back here to recoup from overseas, just to chill out... and now I get to impress them, I think!"
It's not long before I'm shut out of this interview, as Patience takes over and tells all about the band's series of overseas triumphs... and disasters. "There's heaps of stories to be told. So much happened, it was just brilliant. The flight over was a little bit of a killer, especially for [drummer] Alana, we were told it was going to be really, really crap: that fifteen hour leg, we were told that was going to be hell shit. I don't think Alana quite understood, but by the time we got there it was great...
"I think the biggest thing that happened to us was when we missed our flight to South By Southwest. That was pretty ridiculous. It's because we had McDonald's. We had Maccas and then we went through this... it was the hugest airport in Chicago ever. It was massive. And then we went through this tunnel on this travel walk thing, like this tiled mirrored tunnel, and the roof's mirrored, and it's got all these amazing lights, and music! Music that sounds like you're in 'American Beauty'! And Alana was kind of really grumpy with us, and that was probably the day where we were all feeling a bit sluggish and tired, and we went on this travelator, and by the time we came out the other end, everyone was like, 'Oh, wow, I feel really relaxed now, that was great!' And it was about ten minutes, it was huge. And we got to our gate, and we had one minute left to board, and they said, 'This plane's weight restricted, and we're overbooked, and we can take two of you,' so Alana and John went on. But then the plane came back, because it was weight restricted. And Alana and [guitarist] John, because they were the last two people to board, they came off as well. So we were just standing there, shitting our pants, because the woman that was working said, 'All planes to Austin are totally overbooked, and you're not going to get anything today or tomorrow.' You can fly to San Antonio and then drive, like, the one hundred and thirty air miles, which I have no idea what that is on ground. So that was pretty stressful. And we waited around for like six hours, and we thought it was going to be fun, and a road trip, but through some stroke of luck our tour manager was downstairs and she begged them to weightlift us on this plane that afternoon. And there was like eight people weightlifted..."
You get the gist. And if you're still thinking, 'Well, who on earth are The Grates?', they may be more familiar to you than you think. In fact, the song Trampoline ('Use your bed like a trampoline, I said 'Higher! Higher!') was recently featured on, of all things, a clothing commercial.
"I think that was really good. One of the reasons why we agreed to do that was that we were so ridiculously broke, it was not funny. Like we just had nothing. And every time we went away on tour, we would lose money, and we just had no instruments, nothing. We still don't have hard cases or anything. And they said, 'It's only going to be a one week run.' And it's just worked out to be exactly what we wanted it to be. We don't want to get shitloads of press or make a big deal out of it, but it was so quick, I didn't get any e-mails or anything. We're hoping eight months down the track someone will go, 'Hey, I know this song from somewhere...'"
Ben Revi
 | The Grates play at the Jade Monkey on Fri 15 April with Bit By Bats. |
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