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The Grates.
"What I love about it most is that it's in a cardboard sleeve,"
says The Grates' over-enthusiastic chanteuse Patience of the
band's first EP, 'The Ouch, The Touch'. "We never wanted to
go over the top, because we recorded these songs in a shed and
we used to make all our other stuff out of cardboard. I remember
our first [demo] EP, we sewed and used double-sided sticky tape.
So we wanted to keep it the same, and we wanted it to be really
modest. And it makes me giggle so much when I think of our CD,
being in a cardboard cut-up but being sold around the world:
it's really funny! That's got to be one of my favourite things
in this whole situation."
The whole situation of which she speaks is the band's amazing rise to near-stardom. From the humblest of beginnings The Grates have toured the world, signed to different labels in different countries, and are now ready to release their debut long player to a rapidly expanding market.
"It's been great, it was so good, recording with Brian was amazing. I just hope that more Australian bands get to have the opportunity to go overseas," she declares. The Grates, by the way, recorded their album in Chicago. "And if any of them are looking for producers, I would look at Brian Deck. He's great. I love him to bits. He did Ugly Casanova, some early Modest Mouse, Iron & Wine, he did Secret Machines... he's just a fabulous producer, a great engineer [and] a really creative man. He's got a wonderful personality. It was sensational, the whole recording process. The studio was just tops, where we stayed was about ten metres walk. It was in the same building! We just had this dodgy little suite that we stayed in, ten metres away from the studio. But we had cable and we just went nuts watching cable the whole time."
Let me briefly interrupt this narrative. If you can't tell, Patience (no surname provided) is a rather excitable soul. In direct contrast to the standard fare of nihilism, false modesty and self-mocking generally proffered by successful musical types, Patience is keen, gracious ("I don't know which God to pray to to thank for the best three and a half months we could have asked for!") and overall quite overtly proud of her achievements. Yet in spite of this, she never descends into arrogance; rather, her unbound exhilaration is quite infectious. Take this comment about her on-stage dance routines (which, she tells me, are becoming increasingly choreographed), for example.
"If I'm not going to be moving around what am I going to do, stand there? I kind of can't not do it, it makes me feel better. I feel most comfortable when I get to express how happy I feel on the stage, because I'm really happy playing."
Or this, a brief synopsis of The Grates' formation: "We never practiced... It was really just an avenue for hanging out. We never took it seriously, we never went to band practice. We'd go to band practice and it was fun, bashing out tunes, and then we'd go have some barbecue, because John's parents have a barbecue every Sunday, and then we'd eat, and then we'd go back into the shed and muck around. We still do that - even when we practice now, it's not practicing."
The narrative journey of kids-having-fun to major label success
is at the heart of every minute of this interview. Although
I have no doubt that the debut LP will be a highly professional,
brilliant release (to which their only truly professionally
recorded single Sukkafish can surely attest), it seems
that its entire being was centred around those three kids (Patience,
drummer Alana and guitarist John) just having fun.
"We recorded [most of 'The Ouch, The Touch'] with two mics onto
a digital eight-track. Considering what we did go and record
with just now, that's extremely, extremely modest. What we'd
normally do is have two mics recording the drums and plug in
John's guitar, and then I'd take one of the mics and start singing.
That's how we did Trampoline and Rock Boys...
But we've always recorded at home. And it wasn't really that
we were trying to go for an aesthetic, but we had to work with
what we could do. We're very do-it-yourself; we did it out of
necessity."
Surely that experience gave the band a level of expertise before hitting the studio? "No, not really, not at all! We still had no idea. We didn't do anything [on the EP] even remotely close to what you'd call engineering or production. All we did was record really shitty versions of our songs. But we loved them, we put a lot of heart into them. [On the album] we were forced to think about our songs in ways that we'd never thought about them before, and never imagined we'd think about them. And I suppose in the beginning, we didn't want to think about them. The sounds of a drum, production, other people's production on other CDs..."
That said, they did have a few ideas. "We wanted to stick brass into songs, and fiddle, and triangle, and also little girls..." Little girls? "And he [Deck] happened to have two daughters - sorry, one daughter and her best friend - and we got them in as well!"
Ben Revi
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The Grates are playing at the sold-out Falls Festival, but luckily they also play at Jive on Thurs 15 Dec with Expatriate and The Unspoken Things.
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