After conquering their native New Zealand, Kiwi act Midnight Youth have their sights set on Oz. The band are currently in Australia preparing to support Birds of Tokyo and release their album The Brave Don’t Run, which debuted at number one in NZ. Today I caught up with the band’s lead singer Jeremy Redmore to talk about the album, life on the road, and why he loves to tour Australia.
You’re here to tour with Birds of Tokyo. Are you looking forward to that?
Yeah, it’s huge for us really. We didn’t really expect this, and it’s come at a really good time with the album coming out this week as well. To get on a tour like this, out of nowhere, was a big score for us so we’re really excited.
You’re regular visitors to our shores, having played last year’s Come Together festival and four Aussie tours. What keeps you coming back?
It just feels like a real place to tour. You tour New Zealand and it’s all over in a week. You feel like a real band touring for a month or six weeks. And you can drive for eight hours to a gig. It just feels like you’re really working and you feel like a real band and you can have those stupid bonding moments where you’re fighting or totally going crazy over something, so it’s cool.
What’s life like on the Midnight Youth tour bus?
It’s pretty sweet actually. We actually prefer driving to flying. We get to play our own playlists; we kind of pass the iPod round. I think it goes in waves of taking the piss out of each other to being fast asleep. We tend to have a lot of little stops here and there for pies. We like the odd mince pie.
After you supported INXS in New Zealand, they called you one of the best band they’ve played with in Australasia. What’s it like to hear compliments like that from such music legends?
That was crazy actually because we’d only been together, in the line-up that we played with, for about three or four months. So that was pretty crazy. It was the first time we’d played in front of a decent crowd, a couple of thousand people, and you’re totally in a way out of your depth because you don’t know what you’re doing really. But to come out of it with people saying that you did a good job is pretty cool.
What were they like to tour with?
Well we didn’t see a whole lot of them in between shows, but they were real nice to us and gave us advice and came and saw us before and after we played every show. It’s different to any other international act we’ve opened for, that’s for sure. They actually sort of seemed to care about us, making sure we were looked after and feeling alright about it all. So it was perfect really. I couldn’t have asked for a better band to do that big sort of show first up with.
We mentioned some of the massive acts you’ve toured with. What have you learned being on the road with some of those bands?
I think you do learn different things from every band, whether you hate them or love them. Whether it’s stage presence or a way to interact with the crowd, how you warm up and warm down, how to drink and not to drink, some good drinking games, some bad drinking games, good pranks, bad pranks. One of the guys from Trial Kennedy was going to get customs onto me because I was touring on a tourist visa instead of a working visa. A friend in customs was going to get them to prank a raid on our hotel, and that would have been beautifully horrible. You do learn stuff every time you go out, and if you don’t I think then you don’t have your eyes open.
You spend a lot of time on the road. What do you love most about being on stage?
Just feeding from the crowd really. You’re always trying to put a feeling or a message across, and when you see that feeling or message taken in and given back to you in whatever way it comes back to you, which is totally unpredictable, that’s the feeling that you’re totally going for.
How do the crowds here respond to your music compared to back home where you’ve got a number one album?
As you say, we’re starting from the ground up here. Like we did, we’ve been together for about four years in New Zealand, so we’re starting again in a way. But Australian crowds so far have loved us, and really embraced us. We do pride ourselves on our live performances and I think that comes across. We don’t have the mass sing-alongs that we do in New Zealand, but we’ll get there.
You’re releasing your debut album The Brave Don’t Run in Australia this week. What can you tell me about it?
We recorded it off our own backs. We flew to New York and spent six weeks there recording in studios in New York, and then we came back to New Zealand and did another couple of songs with another producer. And then we took it around to all the labels in New Zealand and Australia to see who’d want to deal with us, signed a deal with Warner and went on from there really.
It’s quite a dynamic album. I think it’s because the songs are from a three year range of being a band. And also, we’re not really afraid of expressing ourselves in different ways. We all like a range of music styles. We’re not a straight acoustic band, a straight rock and roll band, we’ll do whatever we want and we’re not afraid of that. So we do have acoustic songs on the album, we do have prog rock songs on the album.
You recorded the album in New York. What was it like basing yourself there?
Totally insane. We knew about a month before. Our manager said “Do you want to go to New York and do an album” and a month later we were there. And I totally thought “OK, I’m going to get some culture shock here. I’ve never been to a city like this.” But we got there, we spent a night in the dark, we didn’t see much. And we got up in the morning and it was a perfect spring morning, not a cloud in the sky in Brooklyn. And I walked out on the street and I felt more alive than I’ve ever felt before. And that feeling kept within me for the whole time we were recording. So it was so cool being in a city that’s so alive and being able to make that feeling part of your album.
You did a few shows in the United States in the last year, including South by Southwest. Do you have plans to take the album there next?
Well we’ve just released an EP, this week actually, over there because we’ve just had a song on a TV show, One Tree Hill. So we’ve got some people working for us over there, but on a completely independent level. We were actually back in the US a couple of weeks ago for a showcase thing called MuseExpo, and we met a bunch of people around there, and also drank a lot of booze around Vegas. But we’ll get to it, we’ll see what presents itself. The US is a huge place and it’s hard to crack into. We think it’s a slow build kind of thing. For now we’re really focused on Australia and releasing the album here and making a good fist of it.
You started as an independent band before getting signed with Warner in 2008. How have things changed for since getting that major label support?
In New Zealand it was all about releasing the album and the singles and it was a dream ride really. Nothing changed the way the band operated, we just had another person to give us advice and do some work for us. Everything went really well. Australia, we’re just building that relationship now but it’s all going well do far. Obviously it’s a different situation here in Australia with us not very well known, but it’s a building process with the label. I think the kind of relationship that we have with a major label and the kind of band we are, it works really well. I don’t think we’re an independent style band, the dynamics within the band, the dynamics with the music.
After this current tour, what’s next for Midnight Youth?
Keep touring. We want to tour the shit out of this country to be honest. Just play shows. We’re based in Sydney for the rest of the year so we’re just going to tour and release singles, and then we might do some more recording near the end of the year.
The Brave Don’t Run hits Australian music stores on May 21. Midnight Youth will join Birds of Tokyo at the following shows.
27 & 28 May 2010 – Hi Fi Bar, Brisbane
30 May 2010 – Hobart Uni, Hobart
4 June 2010 – The Palace, Melbourne
5 June 2010 – Enmore Theatre, Sydney
6 June 2010 – The Gov, Adelaide
10 June 2010 – Metro, Perth
Image used with permission from Warner Music Australia
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