PEDESTRIAN.TV has partnered with Summer Bright Lager to ensure you’re clued-in on their Summer Sessions tour. Over three weekends in Feb, Jagwar Ma, Jack River and The Babe Rainbow will be holding eight FREE (yew) mini-festivals at some of Staya’s best seaside venues. It’ll undoubtedly go off like a cut snake, so keep reading to find out where they’ll be / how you can get amongst ’em.
It’s hard to be ‘cool’ in the 21st Century. Why? Well, the whole sentiment of being cool is now perpetually un-cool. Trends become mainstream, and god forbid you adhere to how the main pack’s behaving / wearing. Doing something differently is impossible because the second you do it, someone else will spot it on your ‘Gram and start doing it too.
Truly devastating stuff, right?
All ramblings aside, if there’s one collection of people who are cool in the traditional sense of being cool, it’s Jagwar Ma.
We chatted to the crew’s lead vocalist / guitarist Gabriel Winterfield on what they’ve been up to.
PEZ: Mate, how are you?
WINTERFIELD: Yeah good, I’m just eating a KFC burger and I was listening to Triple M and they were playing Red Hot Chilly Peppers’ Breaking the Girl. It was a really good vibe. I was feeling every second of it.
PEZ: How has life been for you guys since you dropped your latest album?
WINTERFIELD: Yeah it’s been good. The second album came out in October but in that time we’ve toured quite a lot. We’ve done the West Coast of the US, then the East Coast. We’ve done all of the UK and done quite a big tour around France. So yeah, it’s been going really well – we’re trying to put together some videos and all that kind of stuff but we haven’t had any time.
PEZ: France is where you guys recorded too – how was that experience?
WINTERFIELD: It was amazing. It’s almost like living on a farm, doing lots of farm stuff – like literally feeding horses, looking after the property – and then going into the studio to start making techno at night. The days were very juxtaposed – I hate using that word but it kinda was.
PEZ: Do you think it’s important for your production to pull you away from your normal context?
WINTERFIELD: That’s just what works for us. If you can carve out your own little cave and manage to create your own little island of no technology, no phone and no nothing, than you probably could make an awesome record. But we find it really difficult, so we sort of just do it the old fashioned way and go to a place with no phone reception.
PEZ: Any cool tour stories?
WINTERFIELD: We played with Tame Impala in Tel Aviv during the Euro Cup, so we’d watch the football and then play a show. We were just supporting Tame – they were incredible – and then we had this after party in a run down old building. Apparently Quentin Tarantino was there. The next day we all had to fly back to Sydney or wherever at six in the morning, so it was literally an all nighter. I was in Israel for two days and I don’t think I slept once. Kevin was DJing and playing 50 Cent shit which was very, very, fun.
PEZ: It’s been cool playing with Tame right?
WINTERFIELD: We’ve toured with them a bunch of times and there close friends of ours now – we’ll I like to think so.
PEZ: I’ll get their take on that and then compare.
WINTERFIELD: Yeah exactly, they’ll probably say ‘we don’t even know them’.
PEZ: What’s your take on 2016 being shitty?
WINTERFIELD: I just think it was a year of a lot of change. Sometimes a small drift of wind is a harsh change, and it really was a very harsh ‘holy shit’ change. A lot of heroes were lost, but also the ability to get that information and spread it proliferated in the last few years. People post more when an artist passes away. Everyone has someone. It didn’t matter whether you’re a David Bowie fan or a Prince fan, everyone had someone that they felt like they’d lost.
If it’s a bad year I reckon it’s all about looking at the internal. Obviously things like Trump were a bit disappointing, but I just found out today that Mike Baird’s dropping his Premiership – so there’s your silver lining.
That was kind of the point for the artwork on our album – the silver cloud. It’s a storm cloud, but ultimately it looks quite beautiful. Sometimes tragedy and disaster can also be kind of incredible.
PEZ: Are you keen to hit the road for the Summer Bright Lager’s Summer Sessions tour?
WINTERFIELD: Yeah we’re really excited to be doing this tour. The locations are going to be awesome – they’re places we’ve never played before like Variety Island and Coolangatta, so I’m really looking forward to hitting those spots. We always do such short tours and we kinda just hit Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne kinda thing and it’ll be really cool to play places on the beach when it’s summer. It’s perfect, we can really get our summer feels on.
We’ve probably played more rural places in France and the UK than we have Australia, so yeah, it’s been a long time coming.
PEZ: How do you think your live shows have changed since you started?
WINTERFIELD: They’ve sort of become more unpredictable. We just try to do different stuff now. More radical and more thoughtful as well. It’s probably become a lot more electronic, like we have a guy now that does all our visuals and our lighting who’s worked for Santigold and people like that. Very exciting to have him on board.
PEZ: Are you working on new music at the moment or is that kind of on the back burner?
WINTERFIELD: We’re always kind of doing new stuff – I think most musicians are always working on something. You’re always working and not working at the same time. The only difference is when you decide to tell people. The record is out and I think that we’re fast workers in a way. We want to move quickly on the next record, but we want to flesh these songs out and let them evolve on stage because that’s what songs always inevitably do.
PEZ: What can we expect to see from you guys in 2017?
WINTERFIELD: We’re actually about to release a remix ep that I’m very excited about – got some very cool people on it. We’re playing Coachella, a festival in the UK and coming back to Australia probably mid-year.
PEZ: What’s it like to play those huge festivals?
WINTERFIELD: They’re sort of like an epic 90s film that kinda of looks like Braveheart – Glastonbury in particular. They’re incredible, they’re amazing. The year we didn’t play I still went – it was really fun. it was nice to be a punter. I had a bomber jacket, a hip flask of whiskey and 100 pounds in my pocket and that was it – that was me for the next two days.
PEZ: Dream place to play?
WINTERFIELD: I genuinely feel like we’ve fulfilled a lot of those dreams but if I could be honest, I would love – absolutely love – to play in Africa. I think that would be really fucking cool. I’ve been talking about it for ages. I really want to go there with the band and film because I’ve got quite a personal connection with Kenya. Well, Nairobi in particular, because my dad was a musician and my parents actually met in a club in Nairobi. They were both living in Kenya, my dad was on stage and my mum was in the crowd – I’ve always wanted to complete the circle and play a show there myself. The club is still there. It’s all still there just waiting.
I don’t know if the other boys would share that dream, they’d be all like ‘fuck that’.
While catching the gents in Kenya might be a while of yet, you can see them perform a lot closer to home at Summer Bright Lager’s Summer Sessions alongside Jack River and The Babe Rainbow. The best part? There’s eight mini-festivals going down along our East Coast and they’re all free.
Here’s where they’re going down / when:
FRIDAY FEB 10 – HERVEY BAY: Beach House Hotel
SATURDAY FEB 11 – BRIBIE ISLAND: Sandstone Point Hotel
SUNDAY FEB 12 – COOLANGATTA: Coolangatta Hotel
FRIDAY FEB 17 – KINGSCLIFF: Kingscliff Beach Hotel
SATURDAY FEB 18 – BYRON BAY: Secret Garden
SUNDAY FEB 19 – COFFS HARBOUR: Hoey Moey
SATURDAY FEB 25 – ADDITIONAL VENUE TO BE ANNOUNCED
SUNDAY FEB 26 – WOLLONGONG: Towradgi Hotel
Head HERE for more info.
Photo: Jagwar Ma / Facebook.
