Adam Olenius is gathering his thoughts. He’s half asleep, possibly a bit hungover, and not overly thrilled with the Scandinavian efficiency with which an operator is putting through phone interview calls to him which he seems to have had no idea were coming. Nonetheless, he’s soldiering on. As the band prepares to leave the Nordic winter to come out to Australia to play a number of festivals over New Years as well as a few club shows, he reveals that it won’t be his first trip to Australia since the band had their first tour of the country back in 2007.
Indeed, he spent part of 2008 living in Melbourne in a flat above a 7-Eleven on Fitzroy St in St Kilda, ’with tourists and junkies – it was quite charismatic’. Unsurprisingly, knowing our fair maidens, the main reason for living there was ‘about a girl’ – a Melbourne girl captured his heart on tour and he moved to town to be with her. Olenius found the time he spent in Melbourne refreshing, being away from Sweden and European people in general, saying that he’d ‘consider moving there more permanently if it wasn’t so far from home’.
He observes ‘I found the city really beautiful, I like it how all the parts are so different. He didn’t have to go far to find one of his fellow countrymen and acquaintances, Jens Lekman, who also found life in Melbourne to his liking. He also didn’t have to go far to see one of his favourite Australian bands, managing to catch Tame Impala at The Espy and Swedish psychedelic band Dungen. He’s also a big fan of the Australian music canon: ‘I like The Go-Betweens, I like The Triffids’.
The band’s current album, 2009’s Work, had most of the basic song structures written by Olenius in Melbourne, but they haven’t been played to audiences in Australia, the band having spent this year in Europe and North America touring this year. He says ‘there are some lines here and there in the songs because of situations in Melbourne’, but most of all it was about ‘being so far away from everything, away from home, being away from the band … both geographically and free from obligation, more relaxed. And also there’s the time difference – it’s really hard to have contact with friends back at home. So I spent a lot of time during the day by myself, working up the songs – and it really helped.’
Digging in to the album track 1999, Olenius agrees that the feeling of liberation in the lyrics is related to the sense of freedom he felt in Melbourne, but it’s also about re-visiting his youth. He also somewhat hesitantly reveals that the line in the song ‘Your band came to town/I was too young to know/You were younger than I’m now in 19 80 83/You came on with a black eye’ was based on an actual incident. Saying that he’d never told anyone this fact before, but ‘the fact is, it’s actually not the most exciting band – when I was … In 1983 I was four years old, no … five years old, but five years later when I was 10, 12 … in to heavy metal as a kid, I read that James Hetfield of Metallica at a show in 1983, got badly beaten up by Swedish punks’.
Olenius reveals that the band being on the excellent Merge Records –also home to Arcade Fire – (and released on Dew Process in Australia) was less a happy coincidence than receiving fortuitous advice: ‘we were on another label and touring with other bands on Merge and they were telling us to sign with them!’ Apart from really looking forward to coming to Australia (he jokes that the band should set up a hotline to take fan requests before they begin rehearsals), he’s got one thing firmly in his mind as they play a number of festivals including the Pyramid Rock Festival on Victoria’s Phillip Island. ‘Phillip Island – that’s where they have the penguins right? I didn’t get the chance to see them last time, I want to this time’. No doubt the tour manager will be pencilling in some penguin time.
Shout Out Louds play
29 December – Peat’s Ridge Festival, Glenworth Valley
30 December – Pyramid Rock Festival, Philip Island
31 December – No Year’s Festival, Brisbane
2 January – The Annandale Hotel, Sydney
3 January – East Brunswick Club, Melbourne
