The Paper Scissors

The Paper Scissors are a group best summarized as sounding a little like a combination of rock, folk and soul, says front-man Jai Pynes. "I was thinking funk instead of soul, but funk is a bit of a sleazy word. Funk always makes you think of 70s bootleg jeans and pimps." Keep these three genres in mind, combine them with a steadfast Sydney street rep, a number of dynamically energetic live performances and a two-time Art School dropout for a vocalist and you have Paper Scissors. In the past few months this budding post-indie foursome hailing from Sydney, consisting of Jai Pyne, Thomas Hespe, Xavier Naughton and Ivan Lisyak, has begun to bloom.

The group were first discovered in 2006 by Sydney's FBI, Triple J and Rage, where their single We Don't Walk was played for five consecutive weeks. When their second single Tipped Hat became the audio backdrop of a Viva Coffee advertisement (the awesome one with the shopping trolley dancing), as well as We Don't Walk featuring in an episode of Channel 9's 'Underbelly', the Paper Scissors found themselves in a new limelight.

"It felt really good, really rewarding to see something we'd worked so hard on being showed on 'Rage' and being played all the time," says Pyne. "I used to spend a lot of nights up at 3 in the morning watching 'Rage', so now when I see our music being played on there during those times I think it's awesome. All the best stuff is played at that time of night," he laughs.

When their debut album 'Less Talk More Paper Scissors' was released in 2007, this only further accentuated their move into the public eye. "My Dad has a recording studio in Byron Bay, so we moved up there for a while and spent about two months mixing and recording the album. You'd go in the water all day then come back and make some music." An album with a carrier pigeon brandished on its cover, ("I became really interested with the idea of carrier pigeons and how they carried messages in World War One," says Pyne) this year the EP has literally started to take wings.

With a touring schedule that will take them around Australia, the Paper Scissors are about to step up out of the local Sydney clubs and into a bigger scope of national touring. Yet Pyne is still modest as ever, embarrassingly assuring me that the band aren't "that national." Our conversation then shifted into Pyne's passion and appreciation of other groups in the music industry.

"Right now I'm listening to Vampire Weekend and White Rose Movement. There's some really good stuff out at the moment." As a man who draws his musical influences from a combination of both new, emerging tracks and golden oldies, it becomes clear that Pyne is somewhat of a rock kid at heart. "At the moment rock is making a comeback, we're having a rock 'renaissance'. Which is good, because in the 90s, hip-hop and pop music and all that started to get really cheesy," he says. "But then we had albums like 'Is This It' by the Strokes which was such a great album, they really endeavoured into a completely different sound there. I think that album will be one of those ones you look back on in the decades to come that really changed music - that one and other albums by The White Stripes and stuff."

Pyne attributes much of the band's public success to FBI, a local Sydney alternative radio station. "Those guys are awesome. I mean, like 50 per cent of their music has to be Australian and the other half of it has to be from Sydney, so it really gives local bands an opportunity to have their music be heard."

Kicking off a national tour in April, the Paper Scissors will be giving the local Sydney clubs a rest for a while and performing in fourteen locations across Australia, starting in Adelaide. "Yeah, it'll be good to give those guys in Sydney a break. I mean, we fucking played there like two times every month, so it'll be good to get out and travel around to other cities," Pyne laughs. "We just recently got back from Western Australia, which was really nice, so we're definitely looking forward to getting out there and performing."

So what's on the agenda after the tour for the Paper Scissors boys? "After the tour we'll come home and sleep off the four-week hangover we will have from touring," he says. "Then start working on the new album, try and get some recording done." We can expect the new album to be out sometime next year in 2009. "But that's just a rough estimate. I want to finish recording the album in a shorter time span this time, try and cut it down to two weeks instead of two months." The eternal music labourer, we can expect much more from Jai Pyne and the rest of troupe later on in the year.

Miranda Freeman

The Paper Scissors play a co-headlining tour with Bluejuice that stops in at Jive on Fri 11 Apr.