BDO: Youth Group

"We've been driving around in a twelve-seater van, and there are five Youth Group members, three redsunband members and all of the crew as well, so we're totally choc-a-block," explains singer/ guitarist Toby Martin, regarding their recent co-headlining tour with Sydney trio theredsunband.

It's certainly good to see bands bringing the tour bus back into fashion, though by the sound of things, they're content on making it a fairly laid-back adventure. "I've been very impressed with theredsunband's collection of books," Martin laughs "They've been reading some pretty heavy stuff, and Youth Group's normal reading material is the sport page in The Daily Telegraph, or maybe an amusing sign that we see on the side of the road. I guess it's been an interesting mash-up of tour activities, for sure."

Just as Dappled Cities and Red Riders co-headlined a national tour in 2007 with the use of a coin-flip to decide who headlines each show, Youth Group and theredsunband have chosen a similar path. "We flipped a coin at the start of the tour, but it was all pretty fair. If we won Sydney then we would give Melbourne to theredsunband, and if they won Brisbane, then we would get Adelaide. It's been pretty democratic, I guess." For the girls from theredsunband, spending a month on a tour bus with 5 members of Youth Group may seem to be a pretty daunting task. For the Youth Group boys at least, it looks like they had to behave themselves on this tour, and as I question Martin on the topic of tour bus etiquette he sincerely replies "We have good manners all the time, anyway."

"We've been doing a finale at the end of each show, where we all get on stage and play a couple of songs together. We've being doing a Jesus & Mary Chain song, along with one of our own, and a redsunband song too. So far it's been a great way to end each night. Pretty much we just get eight people to jump on stage and run around hitting shit."

The band's latest album 'The Night Is Ours' has been out for a few months now, and has been well-received by the Australian public. For skeptics who doubted the band after their last album and the release of Forever Young, it might be interesting to note how much this group has changed since then. "I think everyone's sick of hearing Forever Young, don't you?" Martin claims. "I think it's really been played to death. Our policy now is that we'll play it if we feel that there's a desire for it to be heard. We still have a soft spot for it and we might play it every now and again but it has definitely been over-exposed."

I think that I speak for everyone when I say that Forever Young has been played to the point that I cringe whenever it pops up on the radio. Surprisingly though, this is a band with more than just one song; something that a lot of Youth Group fans have been trying to say for a while. "I tend to play the music to my friends before anyone else, and most of them mentioned how different it is compared to other Youth Group records. To me it was an organic process and an organic development, but I guess other people have picked up on some changes in our music."

"We recorded 'The Night Is Ours' in a mess hall. We set up our studio in an industrial area of Sydney Harbour and it could have been anywhere, but we wanted to find somewhere that we could spend a lot of time in. I think that choosing to record there definitely had an effect on our sound, but it was an effect that I didn't realise until after the album was finished. That being said though, I don't think that we could have made it sound any better. Our whole reasoning was just to find a place where we'd have heaps of time to work on the album, and the environment where we were working turned out to have a great effect on the end result of the record." Unfortunately, Youth Group's national tour has already been wrapped up, but fortunately they'll be back again fro the Big Day Out.

Ashley Prigent

'The Night Is Ours' is out now through Ivy League
Youth Group play at The Big Day Out at Wayville Showgrounds on Fri 30 Jan alongside Cog, The Grates, Fantomas, The Living End and Serj Tankian, among many others.