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End Of Fashion.
 End Of Fashion are resting up before they hit the road to rock your socks off. Singer Justin Burford explains guitarist Rodney Aravena used to live in Adelaide, and remembers it as a dark point in his life. Burford's own opinion of the city is different, though. "I like Adelaide," he says. "It's weird; I judge all of these places now by the crowds that we get, because that's pretty much the only thing that I get to see, and Adelaide [crowds] are always really nice.
"I keep saying stupid shit whenever we go to Melbourne," Burford continues. "Like the first gig we played there... I don't know what happened but [puts on Scottish accent] 'I think I had a wee bit too much to drink' and just kind of said a cheeky thing. I'm a cheeky guy, and Victorians do not appreciate it at all. And then I went back there really recently and I did the same thing, and I was sober as. I said something about 'these bloody Victorians' and most places in Australia would think that's charming. Not Melbourne. They're very serious when it comes to Melbourne."
The band are gearing up to start promoting their forthcoming album, but it's feeling a little new to them; the band has kept a low profile throughout their short career, letting the music speak for itself. "We haven't sort of been concentrating too much on 'raising the profile' and doing all those things that bands are meant to do. I think last year was dedicated to just solidifying in people's minds that here's a band that writes good pop songs. We gave people a couple of EPs last year and sort of let people form their own opinions of it. We had people coming to our gigs not because we were the next big thing or this new, great, fantastic hype band. That was the vibe I got, anyway."
Their clincher was a slow, pop-rock love song with Jeff Buckley-esque vocals, but Burford reveals that the band feared Rough Diamonds would be the only song they'd ever be remembered for. "That song probably caused more arguments in the studio than any other song. Because I think in keeping with the record, we ultimately obviously decided to go the way we did on the record, which was just a good representation of what the band's capable of doing live and what we're about live," Burford offers. "And ultimately what we're about live, for the time being, is what we're about. The way we kind of executed it [Rough Diamonds] on the EP was a young band who was full of ideas and was ready to throw everything at a song. We kind of took this as an opportunity to show that song in a new light, not just for people who had heard it before but we were giving them something different. It is one of the slower songs, that's why it's towards the end of the record. We didn't want to come out with that song as our flagship - again," he laughs.
The band recorded in the US with producer Dennis Herring. "We went over with Rough Diamonds kinda being the song that everybody had associated [with us]," he says. "That was in our minds when we went over there and recorded it. And I remember we'd been working for about a week and hadn't even talked about Rough Diamonds, and I brought it up with Dennis, kinda like, 'what do you think of this song?' And he was like, 'It's not my favourite song. It's a singer-songwriter song, it's Elliot Smith; it's this guy, it's that guy, but it's not what I think End Of Fashion are right now,' and Dennis had a remarkable way of just getting everything pretty much perfectly right," he adds as an aside, "'it sounds to me like a song written by somebody who wished they played in a band'. And that's exactly what Rough Diamonds is; it was written on the acoustic guitar and was a very mellow song that was ultimately rocked out with a band."
Herring's words clearly struck a chord. "I was relieved, because it meant for us, that this is not the song that we will always be known for. I guess in certain circles we will; I mean, Eskimo Joe will always be That 'Sweater' Band..."
Ann Marie Sosnowski
 | End Of Fashion play Jive on Sat 25 June with Tambalane and The Trafalgars. |
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