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ON THE COUCH WITH: Kid Confucius

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ARTIST INTERVIEW

Access All Areas.net.au: How are excited are you about the upcoming tour?
Andrew (Kid Confucius): Very excited about it, but nervous as well. You’ve always got to have a healthy dose of nerves before doing these things. But no, very, very excited – I think it’s been the best prep we’ve ever had for a tour. We have Triple J’s support and great coverage so hopefully it will be the best tour we’ve ever done.

Access All Areas.net.au: Will this be the most extensive tour run to date?
Andrew (Kid Confucius): I think so. Everywhere we’re going on this tour we’ve been before but never all in the one tour. So this is the first time we’re going everywhere we can go in Australia and all at once. And then there’ll be festivals near the end of the year which technically aren’t part of the tour but will make use just as tired and the regular tour dates (laughs).

Access All Areas.net.au: I heard you guys will be literally playing on the streets before every gig?
Andrew (Kid Confucius): I guess it was the obvious thing to do after calling the tour ‘The Street Corner Soul Tour’. We thought of how cool would it be to get out on street corners and play and film it and put it on Youtube and just generate a whole new audience out of that. A lot of people don’t see live music they just sit in their bedrooms surfing the net and then they can have a chance to see some live music too. We thought it would be a good little stunt and just something to relax on tour. It’s pretty nuts when you’re playing in a different city or town every weekend. You kind of just fly in/fly out or drive in/drive out and never actually stop and just soak it all up. Yeah so hopefully we can pull it off.

Access All Areas.net.au: How important is the live aspect of the band? As opposed to working in the studio…
Andrew (Kid Confucius): I especially love recording in a studio and the whole recording process. It’s a chance to get every detail completely correct and that’s its own aesthetic. But playing live for Kid Confucius is probably the most important aspect to the band. I know a lot of people who never really took the band seriously until they saw us live and then it was like ‘Ok, now I’m going to buy your album’. So for us, the live show has always been the cornerstone. It’s the best way to promote ourselves and the live show is pretty solid in that regard.

Access All Areas.net.au: Your second album, Stripes, was released earlier this year. How has that been received so far?
Andrew (Kid Confucius): Good. I mean, it’s an independent release and so what comes with that is time and patience and it’s almost like you’ve got to work every sale, and you have to work for every track to get on radio. Nothing is easy and everything has to happen over a long period of time and it takes a long time to get to everyone when you don’t have major label dollars to just saturate the market in one hit. It’s going well but we’re still wanting it to do better and get to more places. We’re starting to send it overseas because ultimately I think if this record ever sells like, millions of copies, or ever just multiple thousands of copies, it’s going to happen with a bit of help from overseas. So we’re still kind of working it even though it’s already been out for six months already.

Access All Areas.net.au: Was there any conscious decision to remain independent?
Andrew (Kid Confucius): Not really. There’s obviously the perks of being independent in the sense that you run all the shots and your creativity is never constricted by a major label agenda. The band did get very close to being snapped up by a major last year or just towards the end of the recording process for Stripes, and it was definitely something that we all wanted to happen but it didn’t eventuate. We’ve just got to keep moving on and doing the best we can on our own. But we do have a small label and great distribution through Inertia nationally, so it’s not like we’re selling CDs out of backpacks (laughs) although that can be quite effective. We’re doing well as an indie [band] but ultimately I think any band wants to get to as many people as possible and in this day and age it’s becoming harder and harder to do it independently but you know, you do what you can.

Access All Areas.net.au: How does Stripes differ from the debut record?
Andrew (Kid Confucius): I guess the second album is more of a live album in the sense that it’s more of us playing together at the one time; there’s lots of energy in every song on there. It was recorded in five or six takes so everything is very fresh and of the moment whereas the first album we didn’t really know what we were doing until we met up with our producer Buchman. So things are recorded in bits and pieces and in different studios and done months and months apart from each other. It was a real ‘record it when we could’ kind of album. Whereas [the recording of] the second album was like a well oiled machine from day one with four months of solid pre-production. We got into the studio and pretty much nailed the whole album down in about three weeks. Every step of the way we just knew exactly what we were doing and exactly what we wanted. We wanted to make a big studio album with lots of strings and orchestration and lots of vocals and a really lush sounding album. It’s definitely a very different album and I think we’re already starting to muse about what the third could be - I think it could be very different again.

Access All Areas.net.au: In what ways?
Andrew (Kid Confucius): I think towards the end of the first record we were all moving very far away from the songs we had just recorded and the same thing was kind of happening with this second album – we had already started listening to different things. I think now the band is in a slightly different musical space and I think the third album musically is going to be different – rougher and rawer around the edges. Because Stripes was such a long and involved recording process I’d like to make the third album more of a in and out quick, frenetic affair and try and do more of it live and raw – just something completely different to keep us excited and keep people who have both albums excited. We don’t want to ever release the same album twice.

Access All Areas.net.au: What was it like working with Russell Elevado (Alicia Keys, Al Green, Jay-Z)?
Andrew (Kid Confucius): He is a genius for people like us who read every single line of liner notes, his name just popped up on all of our favourite records. When he told our producer Buchman to come on over to New York and work on a couple of tracks it was just like ‘You’ve got to be kidding me’. Unfortunately not all of us could go over it was really just our producer who got to fly over there and work at Electric Lady studios but he kept us in constant touch. We spoke to Russell on the phone which was kind of cool for a guy who is mixing and recording the world’s best rock and soul hip-hop artists. He kind of almost demanded that he speak to us and actually have some kind of contact with the band and that’s just the way he works; which was pretty amazing. Hopefully next time around we can get over there and maybe even record with him which would be... I dunno, I can’t even think about it, I might implode (laughs). On first listen to the tracks he mixed on the album it was quite obvious why he is Grammy award winning and regarded as a bit of a genius.

Access All Areas.net.au: It must make for some interesting times playing in a nine piece band…
Andrew (Kid Confucius): It’s tough. It’s one of the those things; it’s awesome and it’s also tough at the same time. The dynamic of having so many people in the band is pretty unique. The sound that we can generate and the dynamic that we can have on stage is second to none. But when you’re dealing with nine or ten flights around the country and organizing vans and gear hire when you’re playing inter-state, all of a sudden you look at every other three or four piece band and envy the shit out of them (laughs). At this stage of Kid Confucius we’ve just played with each other for so long it’s almost that feeling that you can’t pick who your family is (laughs). That’s kind of how I feel about everyone in the band.

Access All Areas.net.au: I’ve seen the label “Australia’s first soul hip-hop band” floating around a lot, can you elaborate on that?
Andrew (Kid Confucius): I think in some respects to say that we’re Australia’s first soul and hip-hop band… It’s kind of like there’s not really a scene for that. In our opinion it’s like ‘first and only’. And we don’t make that comment out of arrogance to anyone else it’s just quite literally like… we’ve tried for years and years to find the perfect support act or the act we think kind of complements us and it’s just not there. And that’s not a bad thing because everyone’s doing their own thing and there’s so many awesome bands that we play with but when it comes down to it, there are a lot bands out there – hip hop acts and rock acts – that have other acts that do exactly what they do. But I think we are quite alone in what we do and that has its negative side and its positive side. Ultimately we like to pride ourselves with coming up with something new and different in sound that most Australians aren’t familiar with. Like I was saying before, we’re conscious of the fact that we’re going to have to get overseas some how to keep going and doing what we do because I think we’re going to run out of people in Australia, if that makes sense. At least at this stage with the people that we’re playing to, you kind of feel like we’ve got to get to more people and Australia’s so small at the end of the day, I guess.

Access All Areas.net.au: One last thing, I think this interview would be incomplete without the infamous speeding story…
Andrew (Kid Confucius): Which one man? (laughs) Nah, that was during the national tour we did for our first album, a couple years back. We were trying to get back from Melbourne to Sydney in some ridiculous amount of time. Our lead singer was at the wheel at the time and he doesn’t have the most glorious driving record and we got stopped by a pretty rough and tumble highway cop. He chatted to us for a long time and gave our lead singer the third degree about having such a glorious driving record. And the next thing you know, the CD comes out, the Rolling Stone article where they’d given us four stars for the first album comes out; and this guy was just standing on the side of the road listening to our album with a discman and reading Rolling Stone. By the end of it he was asking for the CD to be signed and I think by that point we thought, yeah we’re looking pretty good at getting off this one. And yeah, he just told us to keep it under a hundred all the way home and let us go. I have a feeling that he kind of does that, like he just sits on the highway waiting for bands to come past and he’s got himself an awesome collection of Australian music and it’s all free (laughs).

Interview by Jarrad Seng

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Kid Confucius release their sophomore album, Stripes, heralding a new sound for the band and a pioneering step forward for soul and hip hop music in Australia.

Eight-piece Sydney band, Kid Confucius boldly go where few groups have gone before: they deftly bridge the gap between old school soul and modern hip hop, while remaining wholly within the live arena. Forming in 2001, the members of Kid Confucius came together from all over Australia’s most diverse international city joined by a common allegiance to soul music’s royalty who held court in the 60s and 70s, and their musical descendents who reign over the hip hop nation today.

www.kidconfucius.com

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MY FESTIVAL EXPERIENCE

Michael Franti
I remember at the Falls Festival a few years ago after we played there we got one of those little train vehicles and jumped out in the middle of night to this creek bed and went to this little revien and sat there and our eyes started to adjust to the darkness and what was creepy were these things... on the walls they were filled with these glow worms and it was the most fantastic thing... all these different colours- purple, green, white all glowing and that was the most amazing festival experience I've ever had!

When I see a band I always have a moment in show when you have an epiphone at some point when this band is kicking, or the band is about to hit a peak, or something that the drummer does like knock this bottle of beer off the stand [laughs] or something crazy when there is just this sudden abrupt thing and everyone just lets go and that’s what I love of that experience... people not worrying about the past or the future.

Ideal Lineup?
On a historical sense, definately love to have Bob Marley of course, but apart from that I really love going to festivals because you see bands that you’ve never heard of before and you know that’s how I met Blue King Brown, Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, R.E.M., John Butler, The Public Enemy... throw any of those bands on a festival and it will be good but its about finding something that you never imagined.

Tips for attending Music Festivals?
My tips [laughs]... Always bring your own roll of toilet paper and the other is only look at the festival schedule if absolutely necessary... like if you know that the Black Keys are your most favourite band in the world and you need to know what time they are playing, then look at the schedule but otherwise just walk around!