|
|
 |
|
Operator Please
 Up-and-coming teen sensations Operator Please have come a very long way since forming in high school in early 2005. Back then, all they wanted to do was enter a Gold Coast Battle Of The Bands in order to win a box of doughnuts.
"The battle of the bands, we just did a few covers and that was just one five-song set," explains bassist Ashley McConnell. "No one was expected to do originals. Most people played covers so that the crowd knew what they were playing. We did a couple of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Dresden Dolls and Kings Of Leon songs."
The band won the doughnuts, although they never actually saw any of them - someone stole the card they needed to pick them up - though they would have technically been the school's doughnuts anyway. Nonetheless, the group continued on, writing nine songs in "a couple of weeks," before they started seriously gigging around Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
"We played originals for the better part of a year - we were playing small gigs in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast for a long time before anything happened," McConnell says. "It started around July or August; we got an agent and he put us onto our managers and they started helping us get more into the industry."
The band recorded an EP, 'Just A Song About Ping Pong', at a studio owned by their drummer's father, laying down most of the tracks live in just nine hours. Soon after, interest in Operator Please began to grow. "A few overseas labels expressed interest in seeing us and wanted us to come to New York, so the American labels could get there easier and it would be easier for a couple of UK ones to get there too," McConnell recalls. "So they just put in for us to fly over there and play for them.
"New York is probably one of my favourite cities. It was really great to be in a country and a city that none of us had been to before. We knew that the people who wanted to see us would be there, but it was a bit weird being in a country where you can't count on anyone knowing who you are. We had basically no fan base in America at that time, so we weren't expecting people to just come in off the street. But we did that show and then the manager of the venue liked us and wanted to put us on another night."
That wasn't the only benefit, though: a week later, the band received an offer from UK label Brille to release '...Ping Pong' as a 7" in that region and started fielding calls from more and more labels later that week. Eventually, Operator Please accepted an offer from Virgin/EMI. "They gave us a licensing deal which gives us a lot more control and they're all really nice people," he adds. "We have control over our art work and we can choose what songs go on our releases. Sometimes artists don't get that kind of control. That's the thing we care most about: what songs we're playing, what songs we're releasing and what our artwork looks like."
After recording with producer Magoo at Brisbane's Blackbox Studios - an experience that came about because the band thought "he'd do some cool stuff" - their second EP, 'Cement Cement' has hit store shelves and the lead single Get What You Want is proving popular on Triple J. McConnell notes that while "It's not like there's a huge backlash," there are a number of detractors who find the group's rise to major label success a little grating. "There are people who think we've lucked into it," he comments, "but we've put in the same amount of effort everyone else has."
While McConnell suggests that a full-length album later in the year is a definite possibility, right now the band aren't focusing on anything more than their latest series of gigs. They've got a quickly growing audience and, considering just how young the band is, it's only going to grow more, McConnell notes.
"Our friends who live in and around the Gold Coast area who are over 18 usually come to every gig they can," he explains. "Most of the things we play are 18 plus and not all of my friends are over 18, so there's obviously a lot of people who would like to come, but they can't."
Cement Cement' is out now through EMI
|
|
The latest issue
available now!
|
