Just Famous

How things can change in a year. It’s almost 12 months to the day that Scene last caught up with New Zealand’s The Naked And Famous. On that occasion, Alisa Xayalith was bubbling with excitement, looking forward as much to a run on the beach near her North Shore home as she was a busy festival season.

The group’s debut album, ‘Passive Me, Aggressive You’, had just been released in Australia, and to say it was turning heads both here and abroad would be an understatement. The band have since gone on to platinum and gold sales of their single, ‘Young Blood’, in New Zealand and Australia respectively, and managed to take out the Philip Hall Radar Award at the Shockwaves NME awards in London in February.

An almost endless series of tours has followed, and when Alisa slips back onto the end of the phoneline she’s busy preparing for a show – in Seattle, of all places. It’s immediately clear that the excitement has been worn away a little, replaced instead by what would best be described as an astonished contentment. She sounds like a pro as she ticks off some of the band’s recent achievements.
“We’ve had such a blast,” she chuckles. “We went to Japan and played Fuji Rock – that is an experience in itself; the fans are so passionate – and then Glastonbury, and Lollapalooza in Chicago. It’s just been an absolute blast.

“That NME award was completely unexpected … There were all these famous UK pop acts and rock bands, and we didn’t really know what was going on. We got really bored. We wanted to leave!” Alisa laughs. “Then the next thing we knew there were cameras on us and ‘Young Blood’ started playing, and we just had no idea what was going on. We had no idea what we were accepting. It was just this big flurry of confusion, and we were absolutely grateful but we didn’t know what we were meant to be grateful for. It was pretty funny.”

The Naked And Famous have acted like a virus on the international music scene, slowly taking over the world, one country at a time. Once a territory dies down it seems to pass the baton on elsewhere. At the moment it’s the United States that’s been taken with a fever for the Kiwis.
“In the US, things have really started to take off and I guess a good indication of how well things are going comes down to the shows. Every single show has been immense and the crowd’s just been really into it. You know that they have the record and they own it, because they sing along to every single song.”

All this touring begs the question, though: when can we expect another album from TNAF? At Parklife last month – a year on from the release of ‘Passive Me, Aggressive You’ – the band were still sticking to their older material. Surely the constant demand for entertainment means it’s hard to find the time to work on the artistry.
“We work on new material all the time,” Alisa explains. “We make a real effort to continue to be creative. No matter where we are, however small or large the output is, it’s still a little bit. If you end up doing little bits over the next couple of months, you’ll end up with a lot of stuff at the end to work with. We don’t want to be one of those bands that get to the end of their touring schedule and get really overwhelmed with the pressure of having to write a second record from scratch. I think we’re well ahead of ourselves … Once we finish touring in April and look at what we have, we might be able to make some sort of shape out of what it is that we want to make in terms of a record.”

And at the tail end of that touring schedule is Future Musical Festival. The March event will put a cap on the summer festival season, and Alisa and the band are looking forward to letting loose for one of the last times before retiring to work on their second LP.
“It’s like being home again, so we love coming back to Australia. With Future Music Festival, I’m really looking forward to seeing Aphex Twin and getting involved in that really electronic music side of things. I feel like we’re the kind of band that’s able to split between electronic and rock and pop music. I don’t know, but I feel really comfortable being billed with those kinds of acts. We add a touch of difference, because we have that element of rock to us as well. It’s going to be great.”

THE NAKED AND FAMOUS PLAY FUTURE MUSIC FESTIVAL, DOOMBEN RACECOURSE, MARCH 3. FUTUREMUSICFESTIVAL.COM.AU