The sound of the cloud

It’s a lesson for young bands everywhere: be careful what you put in your first press release because chances are it will come back to bite you in the ass. “Nobody had even heard of us and we decided to include all sorts of crazy shit in our biog,” says Alister Wright of buzz powered Australian country progsters Cloud Control. “We foolishly took the advice of a guy who was older than us who said, ‘Put in whatever you want, nobody will remember’. Boy was he wrong!”

The biggest misdirection contained in their inagural media bulletin was that the quartet, from Blue Mountain near Sydney, had got together whilst rehearsing for a performance of Pirates Of Penzance. Actually, they met at high school. But with the Penzance story firmly embedded on their Wikipedia page, they’ve spent the past five years explaining to journalists that Gilbert And Sullivan played no part in the their formation. With a big media push underway to coincide with a recent relocation to Europe, frankly it’s starting to get to be a pain.
“Wherever we go, it’s all we get – the Pirates Of Penzance thing. How naïve we were to think that if we put it in the release nobody would notice. It’s funny ‘cos our biog pre-dates Wikipedia. It’s up there now and we can’t get away from it.”
The other Cloud Control nugget in widespread circulation is that the band’s debut album Bliss Release won the 2011 Australian Music Prize, the equivalent of the Choice Music Prize (though with a slightly heftier winner’s cheque of $30,000). Conceived of as a Southern Hemisphere equivalent of the UK’s Mercury, the Australian Prize is regarded a major deal in the antipodean music industry. Which cracks Cloud Control up as, outside of the media-record label bubble, few have actually heard of it.

“It’s funny – we told our friends we’d won it and they were like, ‘What’s that all about mate?’ It’s only been around for five or six years. Really it isn’t that established yet. It takes a while for this thing to become influential the way the Mercury is.”
They were also nominated for the Australian equivalent of the Grammys, the Aria awards. However, their failure to win didn’t exactly plunge them into deep despair.
“The Arias have undergone a funny transformation. They used to be quite respectable. But lately the ceremonies have been horrible and everybody dreads it and hates it. It was kinda as if, when the music industry starting going downhill, so did the Arias.”
Coming from a small nation with a finite music market, the plight of the midsize Australian band will be familiar to their Irish counterparts. As in this country, an interminable treadmill of support slots is part of the cred-acquiring-process for Australian musicians and, having played alongside Foo Fighters and Vampire Weekend, Cloud Control are past masters at the art of opening for a band approximately a zillion times more popular.

“Foo Fighters... that was really bad,” Wright winces. “ We did one show with them, a charity gig. It was just a Foo Fighters concert really. We were the second of four bands. It was a different market. I don’t know who those people were. They were all wearing black T-shirts. They were middle-aged.”
Vampire Weekend, he reports, was an altogether more positive experience.
“We never had a massive radio break or a big single. But that tour was important. We played to about 40,000 people over about seven dates. They did 5,000 capacity arenas and 2,000 capacity theatres. There was a lot of pressure. People worked really hard to get us those shows. Our booking agent was like, there’s no way you are going to get this. Why would they let you open for them? Dream on. By the end, we just killed it. We had some of the best shows of our career. We grew a lot.

Did the fraternise with the prepster headliners?
“We went out with them for a few beers in Sydney. On show days they’re extremely focused. They do their media, stuff like that. They are pretty methodical. There isn’t a lot of chilling time. At that level, all the risks have to be attended to. Everything is scheduled with military precision. It’s a bit of a funny place. I don’t know if I’d like being in that environment. It would be kind of weird. Everybody would act like they were working for you, like they were your maids. It would be creepy. I remember one time during the Vampire Weekend tour there was all this fuss. I was like, ‘What’s going on? ‘ And it was like, ‘There isn’t any room temperature water. They’ve only got chilled water!’ I just imagine it was one of the guys in Vampire Weekend going, ‘Can we get some room temperature water?’ And then everybody freaks out. All he wanted was a bottle of water.”
Recently relocated to London (“it was that or New York – London was easier to get to”) Cloud Control are ambitious but realistic. They see the slow-burn, touring based success of Melbourne’s Temper Trap as a template for Australian groups trying to break the overseas market (it helps that the two outfits share a heartfelt, wide-screen sound). In other words, they’re ready to work hard and don’t expect anything to come easy.

“It gives you hope when you have other Australian bands doing well,” he says. “Journalists and what have you are more interested. There are also groups such as Tame Impala and Empire Of The Sun having success. It’s funny – right now a bunch of Australian groups are breaking overseas. It’s a pretty good time for us, I reckon.”

The album Bliss Release is out now. Cloud Control play The Academy, Dublin on October 7. Listen to 'This Is What I Said' on hotpress.com now.