Charles Sale did some crazy stuff at Uni. Or so says Michael Tomlinson, his brother-in-arms from Yves Klein Blue, and a fellow Queenslander. Tomlinson did Arts/Law, while Sale “did like Baroque, and stuff… I don’t know, crazy stuff!”. Whatever they learned, they’ve taken their artistic influences and hit the road, having played at Big Day Out, Splendour and Laneway, as well as being part of the upcoming Big O Tour – the Univesity O-Week shenanigans set to tour the country within the upcoming week.
Having just returned from recording their debut album in LA, Michael chats with Music Feeds about the peeps that really got their rock rolling.
“Dew Process is such a great label,” says Michael, expounding on the whole ride. “LA was amazing. It’s such a dream to be paid to go to America and record music. They really have given us such great opportunities.” Or perhaps that should be opportunities to overwork? Michael sighs, lamenting the hard yakka that needs to be put into making your first album just that little bit more perfect. “We didn’t really want to go out and party. It was exhausting. I haven’t really experienced that, a producer sitting on my back pushing me so hard all the time. I got very little sleep for about three weeks”.
However, Michael is quick to extrapolate on the benefits of having such a harsh taskmaster. YKB found it “great to have someone pull us up on stuff,” in a way that made their own material refreshing “even to us – to hear it back again and it was so different.” He explains how the changes pushed in production focused “not so much the tightness of the band, mostly the arrangements of things and they sounded so much better once we had changed them around.”
Not all bands are comfortable with recording their music. How do you bottle lightning? “Performing on stage is definitely a favourite, getting all sweaty you know? Recording is such a different game because it’s like “ok, now do that again, now do it again, again” but in the end there’s something a little more, I don’t know, tangible. You can hold it in your hands. I want to make a record that I would enjoy sitting down and listening to, but yeah we definitely rely on our live act too!”
YKB describe themselves as “Another ol’ band. But hopefully not too much.” That’s pretty much their sound in a nutshell. They’re Pop, but with enough artistic talent to keep you coming back. With a Pete Doherty-esque “fuck you” attitude to Michael’s performative stylings, and a simple-blues-pop Blur-esque sound to Charles Sales’ guitar, they end up sounding like a cross between The Libertines and Michael’s all time idols – “The Strokes, man!”
May is when their new album is expected to hit us, which is also when they’ll be touring the Great Escape festival in Brighton, UK with old friends John Steel Singers, also signed to Dew Process. “It’ll be like touring and travelling with our best friends all over again.” Working hard seems to have paid off for these lads, lets hope their passion for artistry that began at Uni will stay with them in what can be a ruthless industry, especially when they return to Uni once more for The Big O Tour, at Manning Bar, February 27th.
