Ballarat indie-dance collective Gold Fields have had a hectic year following the release of their first EP, with an American tour behind them and a debut album almost ready to go. Denis Semchenko chats with guitarist Vinci Andanar.
DENIS SEMCHENKO: You guys have recently returned from a US tour. How has America treated you?
VINCI ANDANAR: We did a couple shows in LA and New York – those went really well. It was an experience playing in front of a different kind of audience; I think we got a reasonable reception from everyone purely because we weren’t from around town and we had different accents!
The show at The Mercury in New York went really well – there was a lot of energy in the crowd – and at SXSW, we played the Virgin Mobile house party, and it was one of those standout shows for us: a lot of the crowd came up afterwards, congratulated us on a good show and wanted to talk to us. For me, those two shows would be the highlights.
DS: Are you excited about doing a headline Australian tour?
VA: We’re pretty excited – we haven’t done one since our EP tour in November last year. I think it will also be a while until we do another tour – at least until the album comes out. We’ll have to wait until the first single’s released, tour that around Australia and then tour again.
DS: First time I saw you guys at Parklife 2011, you did a rather frenetic version of Underworld’s “Born Slippy”. When I saw you in May at the Rdio launch party in Brisbane, you performed it again – when did you first start playing that song?
VA: We actually first started playing it at Parklife – I think the guys had a conversation in the van coming back from one of our tours. I wasn’t in the van at the time, but we always wanted to do a really good cover of the song. Mark [Fuller], the singer, suggested we do a Gold Fields version of the track – it’s a good, upbeat dance song and I think we made it even more upbeat by adding percussion and speeding it up a bit. That’s how it all started and we can’t stop playing it now [laughs]. It’s a song people love and musicians respect – and it gets the crowd going.
DS: Speaking of crowds, would you say there’s much difference between Australian, British and American live audiences?
VA: Not really. In our hometown, people don’t get into it as much because they know us, but our crowds are generally similar all across the board. You’d always get a city where the crowd would just watch you, but still appreciate it. It was a bit more interesting in the UK and particularly America, because we were not from around there.
DS: Your hometown of Ballarat has got a lot of prominence in the Australian music scene over the past couple years. As a local, what’s it like being a musician there?
VA: It was great growing up there with our friends here and watching them develop as musicians. We’ve got Hunting Grounds and Yacht Club DJs, we’ve had Epicure and The Mavis’s before that… There’s also another group called Saskwatch, which is doing really well. I think because there’s nothing to do in Ballarat, people turn to music or art. There’s video as well: one of our friends from Ballarat did the Hunting Grounds and Snakadaktal’s video clips.
DS: When can we expect the first Gold Fields album to come out?
VA: Sometime next year, but I’m not too sure when yet. It’s all done; we just need to get it mastered now. We don’t have a date yet, but we’re going to find out because it’s been a long time coming for us – we just want to get it out.
