Faker Appearing in Newcastle This Week - Interview + Win Tickets!

by Anja Vogel on November 8, 2011

Australian band Faker are more than ready to kick off their National tour this month. After releasing their EP How Did We Not Get Loved on the 7^th October, the excitement is building for the release of their first album in three years, Get Loved. It is their most daring and anthemic work - but also their most personal set of songs to date.

Urban Insider caught up with the band’s Nic Munnings and had a chat about self-producing their new album, touring with the Wombats, preparing for their own national tour and their plans for the future…

You’ve recently released your EP How Did We Not Get Loved. How does this EP tell a different story to your upcoming album?

Um, that’s a good question. It’s kind of a prequel in a way because the album is more about getting loved and how did we not get loved is more about not getting loved basically. These things are always sort of loose, I don’t think we ever really stick to the program that much. There are songs about bicycle safety as well, just to keep changing it up.

Have you got any favourite songs on the new EP?

Oh they’re like our children, they’re all our favourites.

So there’s not one in particular?

Well, they’ve all sort of come about at separate times and under different circumstances so it will be different at different times. At the moment I have a particular fondness for the song how did you not get loved just basically because of the experience of making the song because it’s kind of about our new band and the four of us working together. But that song is kind of a good encapsulation of where we are at the moment because everyone in the band has a hand in how it’s turned out. There’s a bunch of ambient sounds in that recording that come from fairly loose recording tapes that were made in Brazil and there’s all this crowd noise and fun stuff happening. We didn’t actually do any work putting it into the track, we just kind of threw it into the computer and how it turned out in the song kind of just feels really fun.

After the release of How Did We Not Get Loved the anticipation is building for the release of your new album. Tell me about Get Loved?

Basically we initially set out to record two EP’s because it’s been a little while since our last record came out. Well its actually been f*%$ing ages since our last record came out (laughs), so we wanted to just sort of get a move on and then put out an EP then put out another EP but when we were recording it, it kind of spun out to actually being an album anyway. Then we managed to occupy ourselves with a whole bunch of things like producing it ourselves and we had a hand in the artwork as well so it’s kind of taken on a life of its own.

So why did you decide to self-produce the album?

I think it just kind of came very naturally from our experience with the last record and I think we just wanted to approach it differently.  At the time we finished touring Be the Twilight we kind of burnt ourselves out a little bit and really wanted the next record to be a revolution, but we didn’t know how to coordinate that with having different members and all of that. We basically just stripped it back to me and Nathan and just did everything ourselves. Like, I kind of learnt to play drums and it was actually easier to do that than actually finding someone else to play drums. Everything just sort of happened in little increments and we’d go “oh, well we’re doing this, so we may as well do that”, so we’d ended up just doing the whole thing. It was a massive learning curve but it was also really eye-opening to do it that way, because we did take control of certain aspects that in the past we’d just let other people do.

Well it sounds like it’s worked out well for you!

We do genuinely love what we’ve done, so in that sense it’s worked out really well. It’s out of our hands now whether other people like it or not (laughs).

This has been your first album in three years. How does it differ to Addicted to Romantic and Be the Twilight?

In some ways it’s kind of the same; Nathan still writes the majority of the songs and it’s still kind of largely about the form of his songwriting and his voice but I guess that because it’s kind of only two people playing it most of the time. It’s a very different approach to instrumentation and we played with a lot of sounds around our house and synthesisers and stuff like that. There are still lots of guitars but it doesn’t necessarily seem that way and to Nathan maybe that was sort of making a point of difference, because the first two records are very guitar driven. It’s more interesting to do things differently.

Do you think that stripping the band back to just you and Nathan after your 2009 tour has had an important role in how Faker’s evolved since your previous albums?

I think if we’d stuck with the original program of a bunch of dudes in a room writing songs than it probably wouldn’t have evolved. It was really important to us that this record be an evolution and continuation of the story. So yeah, I mean that’s pretty much it exactly. I don’t think it would make any sense to get back to basics for a third record because it doesn’t really leave you anywhere to go. We intend to be doing this indefinitely, so it was important for us to do it that way.

You’ve recently finished a national tour with The Wombats! Are you excited to kick off your own national tour on the 20^th October in Byron Bay?

Yes! That was really intense. It was a lot of fun but we haven’t been on tour recently and that, as tours go, was pretty fast paced. You know, we were literally in a different state every single day and it was amazing. It was wonderful actually to be back out in that world again because that’s basically where we belong as far as we‘re concerned, and we’ve starved ourselves of that over the past few years essentially. So it’s really kind of exciting. The other thing is, usually at the end of the tour I kind of get the sads a little bit because it’s kind of like “oh, I’ve got to go home now and be normal” but it’s great to finish a tour and be looking down the barrel of another few weeks of it. It’s quite exciting to me, going back to places that we haven’t been to for a while. It’s definitely one of the perks of the job.

What do you get from performing live? What can fans expect?

The thing about playing live is that it is kind of an instant thing and you don’t have a safety net exactly; if you fuck up you’ve got to work out how to deal with that, you can’t just do it again. But also you’ve got this kind of energy exchange between the band and the audience and that’s something that’s kind of hard to define. It’s a kind of euphoria and I’ve experience that from both the stage and from the audience watching other bands so to me, seeing a band live is where things have really clicked. I couldn’t even number the amount of bands that I was kind of either way about when I heard the record but then I’d see them live and I was like “oh, alright, so that’s what it’s all about”. I feel as though that’s pretty consistent with our band; playing live is kind of our natural habitat.

So what’s next for Faker?

I think we’re just going to keep writing more songs basically. After being in hibernation for a few years, you develop different perspectives on how it works and what you want to do. One thing that’s happened a few times in the past is that we spend a few years, more or less, on one kind of angle because you make an album and then you tour it for a couple of years and then you have to make another album .I think we feel now that we more want to just be making music the whole time. So we’ll probably basically be writing whenever we can and releasing whenever we can so it’s not, you know, three years in between records all the time. It seems more sensible to do things that way and it feels that things stay more relevant that way. Our songs are basically our communication and we still want to have a connection to a song when we’re actually playing it, so playing newer songs for a band is often where it’s at. Which is totally selfish and we respect that too, we don’t torture our audience by only playing pieces that nobody has heard. I’ve seen bands do that and it’s not really all that enjoyable.

Well it can be, but I suppose that as an audience you tend to want to hear at least a few of the songs that you really know well and really connect with…

Yeah, totally and it is a communal thing. It’s not just about us stroking our own egos, there’s definitely an energy exchange with the audience. That’s what it’s mostly about and what makes shows really special.

Don’t miss Faker at the Cambridge Hotel on Thursday 10^th November! We’ve got 2 double passes to give away! To enter on…

…Facebook: Go to the Urban Insider Facebook Page, like it (if you haven’t already) and post: “I want to win tickets to see Faker this week!”.

…Twitter: Tweet “I want to win tickets to see Faker this week @Urban_Insider“.

Entries close 5pm, Wednesday, 9 November. Winner announced soon after!

Tickets also on sale now through Moshtix.

Get Loved is available 27^th January 2012.