It’s been a swelling twelve months for Australian rock’n’rollers The Preatures. What with touring alongside the iconic The Rolling Stones, their own wildly successful tours of US and Australia, winning a GQ Band Of The Year award, as well as playing to packed-out crowds at some of last year’s biggest festivals including Glastonbury, SXSW, Coachella, Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits.
Luckily for us they’ll be stopping off at The Bodega on Friday 13th March and we are itching to see them live after having their album on repeat in the office for the past month or so.
We managed to chat to Izzi, the front-woman, about their success so far…
Hi Izzi! We are dead excited for the show at The Bodega. We love your album and ‘Is This How You Feel’ is a big favourite for us. When you wrote the song did you ever expect it to kick off like it did?
I wrote ‘Is This How You Feel’ fairly quickly and it always felt good, like something new was happening but we didn’t know quite what that was yet. It was unlike anything we’d done up until that point. It started as a groove in the band and then I sat down with it for a few days, finishing the lyrics and stuff off. I had scraps and pieces of writing I’d done as a teenager into my early twenties, and I basically just arranged them in a way that felt like a story. So the individual verses, the images, are all from different periods of my life. In that way it always felt grand and meaningful to me. I’m glad people like it. It was very cathartic to write.
You’ve toured with some pretty impressive names and also played some amazing festivals. Is there a particular gig/tour that stands out in your head as one of the best?
Glastonbury was awesome. Anton Newcombe from Brian Jonestown Massacre watched our set and hung out. Plus we saw Dolly Parton and had hot dogs. It was the end of a massive couple months on the road for us and we flew home the next day.
This won’t be the first time you’ve come to play in the UK. What’s your favourite thing about coming to play here?
We have heaps of friends there which always makes touring fun! Your pies are pretty good too.
We love the Vinyl pressing of Blue Planet Eyes. Did you all get a say in the design and are you happy with how it came out? Bring some to Bodega so we can get one!
Yeah we love it! We were pretty set on doing something special for our first vinyl. Tom and Jack picked the colours for the disc, which in Australia is a translucent splatter pattern. The American edition, which we’ll have at our shows in Europe, is an opaque two tone swirl. We haven’t done a European press yet. The photos are a big part of the design : it’s a mix of live shots by our friend Mclean Stephenson – there’s a fold out poster of Jack and I which I think is such a classic thing to have in a Vinyl – and the rest are by Tom, our bassist. He also took the cover photo of me in the water. We’ve been pretty surprised by the demand for it, we’re doing a worldwide repress right now and unfortunately stock is limited to 10 vinyl per show for the European tour because we had to ship them over from America.
There are some great tracks on your album but which is your favourite to play live? And when you come to play here can we expect to hear any new songs?
We’re just about to lay down a bunch of new demos for the next record. I don’t know if we’ll be ready to play them live yet though. Our set is pretty short and sweet. Our record’s only 35 minutes long. My favourite song to play live is ‘Cruel’ – it’s the part of the set I go mental.
Your gig here is taking place on the dreaded Friday the 13th. Are any of you superstitious?
Yes and no. We’ll see. I like a bit of ghoul with my rock and roll.
Tickets for The Preatures are available now from Alt-Tickets. You can buy them here.