The Clouds

The Clouds have announced that they are hitting the road on a national tour in November to support the release of a brand new single Beautiful Nothingness and to answer the call from fans around the country.

Following the recent resurgence in interest for Clouds’ music and the great success touring nationally as support to Blondie and Cyndi Lauper earlier this year, The Clouds plan to fulfil their promise to fans with a headline tour to all major Australian cities this November. They’re bringing new music to their set list too, we’re very excited at Hi Fi Way: The Pop Chronicles HQ about this tour. I spoke to the lovely Trish Young about the tour and plans for an album.

The Clouds touring this November, it doesn’t get any better than that?
Yep, we’re pretty happy about that and very excited.

Was the pressure from fans overwhelming to the point you could not resist any longer?
Ha! Yeah, that’s what it was! We have been getting quite a bit on Facebook asking when we were going to play again and when we played earlier this year, we did a wineries tour with Cyndi Lauper and Blondie, people would come up and say it would be good if you did your own shows. I don’t know what those tickets cost, probably two hundred bucks or something and people said it would be great if you played somewhere local and play longer. When you do those festivals you play a shorter set. There definitely seemed to be a bit of interest from fans to do it.

Has that rejuvenated the band and got everyone excited about music again? It is almost a mini resurgence in a lot of ways?
We’ve hit the road about four times now since 2011 and back in the nineties we were not expecting that we would be doing this again. We are really excited to have the opportunity to be able to do this. All of us have done a bit of music here and there on and off but it is hard to get the momentum, sufficient momentum to be actually able to tour. It is an incredibly fun thing to do to be able to travel around and be in different cities and get up to play music. We enjoy play music together the four of us, well forgotten, it had been a long time and the first time we had a rehearsal for that first tour back in 2011 we worked out that we all had not been in a rehearsal room together for something like sixteen years. Playing all the old stuff felt so natural and fell back in to it. When we said would we do anything new that’s when the realisation came back that there was still magic there and that we could still do something creative. The spark between the four of us had not gone.

Was it always the intention that when you started playing shows that you would start working on new material?
Jodi and I write the songs and the boys play a big part in putting them together but we are always writing anyway even if we are not currently playing. To have the opportunity to be doing new stuff with the clouds again, at one stage we were asked if we would do a Penny Century tour, Jodi and I were thinking we wouldn’t be able to do anything new. We always want to do new things and we always have something bubbling away, one or both of us will play it to the rest of the band then we’ll just come up with something. Dave would just noodle away in the corner coming up with something magical and then there will be a harmony somewhere.

Do you specifically with The Clouds in mind?
No, at one stage I was doing quite a bit of solo stuff. I have no musical training and no jazz training at all whatsoever, anyone who knew anything about jazz would kick me to the curb. I had another project that was purely sixties stuff and stuff that I never envisaged The Clouds would do and Jodi had a vocal quartet who do close harmony stuff, kind of like war time like The Andrews Sisters, swing band, big band kind of stuff and that is certainly something that The Clouds would not do. Jodie has been studying composition and writing classical music. So, certainly we are not always writing with The Clouds in mind.

When you wrote the awesome single Mabel’s Bookshop did you start high fiving yourself knowing that it was like pop perfection?
Yeah, the first time I heard it Jodi said I have written this new song and she thought it sounded like Queens Of The Stone Age and I thought oh ok! Gee, that was a long time ago, Jodi and I had a duet in the early 2000’s called The Girls From The Clouds and that was way back then, she played me the song and I was like this is brilliant! It was the catchiest, bounciest, most sing-along feel that she had ever written. I just loved it instantly and when The Clouds got in to the rehearsal room, I don’t know if the boys had already heard it before they loved it immediately to. We knew straight off it was a great song.

Are there plans for an album?
We’ve got enough songs at a very raw and unformed stage for an album but it is matter for the four of us because of distance we like to be together to start a song. It is a matter of being able to be in a room together to swap ideas and bounce off each other. We would definitely like to do an album and we are hoping we can but it is a matter of logistics.

Does happen much on tour when you are sound checking that new songs emerge?
Yeah! Absolutely! The last tour we did we had a couple of days in Perth, we could have gone sightseeing but we organised a rehearsal of new material.

The tour coming up is that all about greatest hits and memories?
It is a broad selection of the catalogue for sure! The last time we played at The Gov we had such a fantastic time. We were just high when we came out of there, the audience we so amazing and we got as much from them as they got from us. I think we probably got even more, it was a fantastic night and we took all these goofing around photos of ourselves afterwards because we were in such a good mood because we had such a good night. It is really hard getting back in to normal life!

Bringing the Falling Joys along for the ride is really great also?
We are so much looking forward to hanging out with them, I don’t know when we are going to sleep because I can see all of us getting excited and carrying on, yakking and yakking all night. I guess we’ll have to sleep when the tour finishes.

What’s the plan beyond this tour happening now?
Back to normal life and hopefully we may have had an opportunity to jam on some ideas. We’ll be sending files and stuff around just seeing when we can get together to do some recording.

Interview by Rob Lyon

Take note of the rescheduled dates…