James Lyall is one half of Flight Facilities and responsible for the earworms that are Crave You and their most recent smash Foreign Language. Crave You broke the top 20 in Triple J’s Hottest 100 and catapulted them from local DJ gigs to touring the world.
James caught up with us a as part of Jameon James Week to talk about their upcoming singles featuring members of Hot Chip and even John Paul Young. Yes as in “Love is in the Air”
So are you guys working on an album at the moment? We’re still doing singles at the moment, we’re looking to belt out a few more decent singles and then maybe look towards an album but it’s not a huge priority at the moment just cause of how the music industry is. If you see an album you can just pick out whatever track you want. So we’re trying to put our money where our mouth is and try and make those one or two songs from an album every time. Which is probably pretty much impossible but we’re giving it a shot.
So there’s more hits on the way Yeah definitely we’re about to release a new single probably late January with one of the guys from Hot Chip. He’s their drummer. His name’s Rob Smoughton and he’s released an album on his own and it sounds like new age Phil Collins. So we just wrote a track with him.
Can you talk us through how you hooked up with him originally? He emailed us or twittered us or something and said I really like your stuff I’d love to work with you guys and we were like um are you sure you’ve got the right guys? We’ve still never met him because he lives in England. We’ve just kind of gone back and forth via correspondence. It’s been a really interesting process.
Are there any other collaborators you guys are working on at the moment? We’re in the middle of our Australian tour and we just got back from Newcastle a couple of weeks ago and we went up there early to work with John Paul Young.
No way… We were like speechless. I mean think about telling John Paul Young how to sing. It scared the shit out of me! So we’re working on a collaboration with him. We made the song a long time ago and then Hugo had the crazy idea to use an old Australian well respected singer and he’s obviously the first person who came to mind. So we sent it to him, he took a little while to get back but he loved it and we organized to go to his studio and work with him which was really cool.
You just played the Primavera festival in Chile, how was that? That was one of the funnest days or nights of my life. We kind of got to hook up with a lot of artists that we respect like Jacque Renault and Uffie. Uffie’s DJ at the moment is one of the guys from the Bumblebeez, Chris Colonna. We all just vibed it was such a cool place , we were playing at this pool party and the Andes are just surrounding the whole festival. We were Dj’ing and I just kept looking back at the Andes going “are we really here?”
How long’s Chris been DJ’ing for Uffie? As far as I know a year max, I don’t think even that. They’re a good pair together. They’re really really eccentric to say the least I guess.
We’re interviewing you for our Jameson James Week. For all the non-James’ out there can you let us know what it’s like living life as a James? Well as you know a lot of people call me Jiimmy, but when I actually do hear my real name like from my mum or a friend I had when I was growing up it kind of sounds like I’m the chauffeur of a really ritzy person. Y’know like “James, home James” that kind of thing. It’s a very proper name, it’s maybe why it’s become Jimmy now because I’m a bit of a joker. Everyone’s a bit weird about their own name.
Finally James picked us his top three easy going tracks which would be perfect to either relax in a comfortable chair while pondering the world or potentially even calm you through some in-air turbulence.
Jameson is looking for Australia’s most easy-going James (Perhaps it’s you or someone you know?)
Lovebirds feat. Stee Downes – Want You In My Soul
Metronomy – A Thing for Me (Breakbot remix)
Michael Jackson – I Can’t Help It
Flight Facilities are currently on tour presented by Pedestrian
You can catch them at:
11 Nove Elsewhere, Gold Coast
12 Nov Roxanne Parlour, Melbourne
19 Nov Bowler Bar, Brisbane
27 Nov Buddha Bar, Byron Bay
Title Image Provided by Flight Facilities
