Skye Harbour

Former Adelaide five-piece Skye Harbour made the move last year to the big smoke, packing up and throwing themselves into a crowded and competitive Melbourne music scene. But, for singer/keyboardist Josh Hardy, it wasn't about it being easier to 'make it' over there - if anything, it was the opposite.

"In Adelaide, we were just kind of faffing about, it was more of a hobby, and that was the way it was always gonna be," he explains. "In Adelaide, it was all achievable, where as we knew if we moved to Melbourne it would be a lot more daunting, and I really craved that challenge, and just to throw ourselves in the deep end."

And a daunting proposition it was - not only in terms of finding their feet musically, but getting a roof over their collective heads. "Basically we had absolutely no idea where we were gonna live or what we were gonna do when we got to Melbourne. We found this one place which looked really good on the Internet, and was surprisingly cheap, and it was in Footscray. I flew over, saw the place, and it was amazing - the suburb was a little bit weird, didn't really know what was going on there - I walked around, and I was, like, smack bang in the middle of the ghetto, but I didn't really see anything else in Melbourne, so I didn't have anything to compare it to. So when I made the decision 'yes, there is where I want to live,' I made it having not seen anywhere else. So we moved into this converted warehouse in Footscray with four floors, and we all had our own room, and we just trashed the place, broke windows, didn't fix anything. We held parties downstairs where we charged entry, we were selling beer for tokens, and we had a gang kick down the door, a next door neighbour turn off the power when we were playing a gig downstairs on a stage we made out of milk crates. It was pretty crazy. We lived in Footscray in this crazy place where you wouldn't want to walk around at night.

"It wasn't that conducive creatively, but I think it was a good experience for my creativity overall, to just get put in such a crazy situation for a while," Hardy explains of the move's effect on his songwriting. "And not just the house and the people and the parties and that stuff, but the suburb itself. Like, being able to walk around, and just see no one who looked anything like you, no one you can relate to."

After nearly a year of trials and tribulations, Skye Harbour returned to Adelaide earlier this year, spending a month in the studio with producer Matt Hills (Wolf & Cub, Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire!) working on their second EP - the fittingly titled, 'Houses'. Hardy concedes that coming back to record might have been based on comfort more than anything else. "Being able to just go back home and have my mum cook me dinner and just be able to concentrate solely on the recording was a tempting proposition," he laughs. "We booked ourselves a month to do six songs - we knew something outrageous was gonna come out."

Outrageous is right - 'Houses' is as eclectic as they come. Over the clean, Smiths-inspired pop of the title track or the filthy swagger of party anthem Our Love, electronic breakdowns merge with soaring guitar harmonies, peppered horn parts, layered vocals and bountiful elements of percussion. Then there's the strings that fill out ballad Paying Debts, driving the track from 80s pop to something altogether more sinister. It's certainly an impressive opus, but if there's any problem, it's perhaps that there's just too much on there. "It's probably our one main paranoia. We're writing stuff now, and we're constantly trying to cut stuff back," Hardy agrees. "But on this CD, I think what we did manage to get away from was all playing at once, and all just banging away. Even if we're gonna have a lot of stuff, we managed to make different types of parts weave in, as opposed to just one solid big black line, just nailing you in the face."

After giving it their all in the studio, however, the boys found themselves a little strapped for cash, and as such have gone the way of Radiohead, releasing the EP digitally - it's available free, right now, on www.skyeharbour.com.

Matt Vesely

Skye Harbour play at The Jade Monkey on Friday 19th September with The Keepsakes and Tyger Tyger.

'Houses' is available for free download at www.skyeharbour.com.