Little Red - Doo Wop Punks!

“Isn’t that kind of against their ethos? Weird”

Tom is referring to the Radiohead Best-Of sitting on my desk at this point. Before I can begin a tirade on Radiohead and the record company-shaped cesspool surrounding them, Tom launches into the birth, the launch, the dawn...of Little Red.

“Before we had Little Red, we had a couple of other bands, I won’t bore you with the names but one was darker like a Nick Cave-kinda thing, the other was, actually, a Radiohead kinda thing... And then we put the two bands together and came up with Little Red”

Though still quite young and unsullied in the Australian scene, Little Red have already done a handful of notable festival appearances, including V Festival earlier this year; “When we were touring with the V Festival, we were staying in the same place as Smashing Pumpkins and Queens of the Stone Age, and all these bands we’d been fans of as kids, it was amazing to see them walking around; “hey billy” (laughs). But you get used to it pretty quickly; the rock star life, someone’s gotta do it! Although the drawcard is the international acts [with festivals] I usually end up watching the Australian bands, bands we’ve crossed paths with”

June 2008 saw Little Red release their debut long-player, the effectively titled Listen to Little Red. Tom explained the process of a little Melbourne band making a big record; “We hadn’t had much recording experience [bar a three-track demo and a 5-track EP] but we did it in about 3 days, mostly live, some of them first takes, I think. It captures the live energy better. It’s quite long in terms of number of songs, but they’re quite short, and sharp, we’d been sitting on this album for a while...not literally (laughs) so there’s old and new material, a pretty coherent garage-soul sound, punk-doo-wop (laughs) but we’re really happy with it. We’ve always been ambitious, and so far that’s been justified, I think the main challenges are the ones we impose on ourselves, we just wanna make great music but we don’t have any major external pressure”

And the name?

“Dom and Adrian used to write that in concrete around Ivanhoe [in Melbourne]. Go look for it, it’s probably still there”

So, five young lads, there’s never any heated diva-like confrontations? You all get along pretty soundly?

“Absolutely. There are minor bickles like who is going to park the car, who’s gonna drive home after the gig, petty stuff like that but were all great mates, that’s why we started the band together. The more time you spend with people, the more time you have silly arguments like that, we don’t argue about music though. Generally we agree; if something’s shit, it’s obvious, it’s something good, it’s obvious”

So what can one hope for from a Little Red Live Extravaganza?

“We’ve gotten used to just not worrying about what people expect and going there and putting on our 45 or so minutes of high energy rock and roll (laughs self-depreciatingly) After the tour we’ll have a rest and we’ll aim to take it overseas eventually but we’ll always stay here. We wanna get the album out and maybe tour in UK, and Japan. I know all these cool bars I’d love to play in over there (laughs)[interesting sidenote: although Little Red are catapulting to fame like a rock in a slingshot, the boys still have day jobs like us regular schlubs; Tom works as a Japanese translator!]

Distracting myself momentarily with a Jane Austen-esque picture of the funkin’ Little Red boys gallivanting in fields and chatting over cheese and wine (and they’d be wearing coat-tails and top hats! OK, Lisa, get on with it), I ask Tom if he has any sign-off words.

“I hope everyone enjoyed the album and I hope they come to see us on the tour”

I can’t help but retort; “What you could’ve said was ‘listen to little red’”

“Ah...do you wanna edit that in? Listen to Little Red!”

“I’ll pretend that that was spontaneous”

“Thanks”

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