I have always said Leroy Francis is the Julian Casablancas of Australia.
But I guess he is also the Pete Doherty. Leroy always has a weird haircut and a black eye. Once I was hanging out with him at his place in Newtown and I was sad about a break up, and Leroy cheered me up by letting me smash all the bottles in his house against his kitchen wall with him.
“Feels good, doesn’t it!”, he yelled at me while I threw bottle after bottle at the kitchen sink from a few metres away.
When Leroy was writing his S.O.R.E. EP, I would chat to him now and then, as he disappeared out of the city and became deeply mysterious. “Where are you?”, I’d say, and he’d replied at the time, “Hanging out with cows, man!”, in what I assumed was totally a joke. He then proceeded to send me videos of cows wandering around in Camden, in rural NSW.
The EP is at times longing and romantic, and at times breaking through with rays of restrained frustration and lust. It’s got garage rock-like waltzes that are a bit like listening to The Cramps and Rowland S. Howard. His lead single ‘Carry Me’ is very much like something by The Ramones or The Strokes, and makes me think so much of a year-long period Leroy spent living in Manhattan at the behest of his record label ‘to write songs.’
Leroy used to play in Sydney band Cabins, who wrote tender love songs about spooky girls, forbidden romances, and books like The Catcher in the Rye. He has a song called ‘The Moon,’ where he really just howls like a werewolf – the guitars are weird and lazy like smoky vapours. It’s like a song by The Doors? Once I saw Sydney cabaret dancer Baby Blue Bergman strip inside an inflatable ball to this song.
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Image via Mucho Bravado
At this time in his career he did a cover of Edwyn Collins’ ‘Never Met a Girl Like You’ that used to make usually bone-still indie dance floors start swaying rhythmically; every girl in the crowd was always in love with Leroy, and Leroy always looks so exhausted with being so gorgeous and so talented.
So I’ll say it again. I have always said Leroy is the Julian Casablancas of Australia.
Leroy has told me many times over the years that he loves being in a band, but he gets frustrated by the way drinking and sleeping around hampers his bandmates’ output. He always has been able to create his own opportunities from his indefatigable creativity. He is a party animal, sure, but he is also primarily a prolific songwriter, and a loner.
He recounted to me a lost weekend of his, where a label put him and some bandmates up in a country house and they frittered the time away getting drunk and partying. Leroy walked away from the experience with a bunch of songs that belonged to the band but he was frustrated. He told me, “I went through experiences like that where I felt like I wrote a lot with other people but it was a lonely experience. I realised then I could do all this on my own.”
The S.O.R.E. EP is out now.
