British India - Back From The Edge

British India are already known for their high-intensity live shows have garnered rave reviews since their birth as a band four or so years ago. Their singles ‘Black and White Radio’ and ‘Tied Up My Hands’ have been tearing up airwaves nation-wide with their addictive hooks and transfixing rhythms. The time is ripe for British India to unleash their first full assault on the Australian public with their first full-length release. British India have created an sonic niche that bursts with energy and it is obvious that they had just as much fun in the studio with their debut album Guillotine, which is out now through FP/Shock Records.

Despite their relative longevity as a live band, the band are all still in their early twenties. At 22 vocalist, Declan Melia, talks of how they are already looking back on their music and how their first full-length album is kind of a “collection”
“Well, this was about six months ago now, we went into a studio in Sydney called Flashpoint Studios, which, had never been used before. Well, it had been used before by like a string quartet or something.” In the making of Guillotine, they effectively popped its ‘rock cherry’ and were produced by perhaps one of the greatest names in the Parthenon of Australian rock, former Easybeat and one half of the most successful Australian songwriting team in history, Vanda and Young.

“We went in there with Harry Vanda and we had maybe thirty or so songs and we chose our favourite ones and pretty much just recorded them.” Melia went on to describe the hugeness of the studio and how the “mixing desk was used to record parts of the first Madonna album.” Given the temptation of having so many tracks and tricks to play with in such salubrious surrounds, British India took the path less traveled and decided to “kinda just do it as it is” not wanting to “spend six months writing new tracks, spending all Flashpoint’s money, putting synths and twenty tambourine tracks on each song” as Melia quite sagely put it, “(it) might fuck it up.”

As Melia further revealed, “This album was a long time in the making and I didn’t feel that we were the kind of band that could deny, not history, but what had kind of happened to us. We had to get those songs out, we had to lay them down and let people hear them. The album is like a big collection, like a Greatest Hits of all our songs. One of the songs was written a few months before but all the other were picked, not randomly but certainly from the stuff we’d been doing for the four years before that.”
Melia chatted to us on a “kind of limbo, fuck you day,” where the weather was concerned, this lead to the question: Is the weather Mother Nature’s way of being in control? To whit Melia wittily replied “I think flash floods and earthquakes are Mother Nature’s way of being in control and weather is just Mother Nature’s PMS!” adding “when people talk about the weather it is usually one of those dull, auto-pilot kind of conversations but this is the most interesting conversation I have had about the weather, ever!”

There appears to be a true authority on stormy weather that comes from experience in camp British India. Like most Australian bands, British India have been a victim of trends, but as Melia reveals the strength to continue has come from where it had to, from within the band itself. “For a while there [bandmates], became all you had… People tell you that you’ve gotta not worry about what they say in reviews but, you know, you do”. Melia continues “I feel like a veteran at 22, we’ve been through the mill together. We’ve been that really hyped band at the start, then we’ve been that, ‘they fucked it all up band’ in the middle and then we’re that ‘oh maybe it’s just gonna be okay’ band now.”

No doubt their hopes for success have been built up and torn down, even in these early years. Refreshingly, Melia reveals the truth of the situation that most bands deny “It stresses you out, man, I’m not gonna say ‘its all water of a ducks back.’ We all freak out, all bands freak out.”

Melia and British India have been through enough to have some gained some modicum of self-respect, cohesiveness and a rabid conviction to stick together come hell or high water as a group. Despite the perils of stormy weather both in the past and possibly ahead one thing is for certain - British India have been through enough to show us all that they are in for a long ride no matter what

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