Frente
Frente will be in town this weekend for the very first Supermassive Festival in Victoria Square with Sarah Blasko, Heaps Good Friends and a whole host of artists. It was a real treat to talk to the delightful Angie Hart about all things Frente including new music that they’re about to road test and the challenges of song writing.
It’s great news that Frente will be back in Adelaide again as a part of the Supermassive Festival.
It will be lovely! I love playing a festival and this one sounds wonderful even though it is a brand new one. It sounds like it will be well attended on the day and there’s lots of new artists I haven’t heard of. I’m really looking forward to hearing some of Sarah Blasko’s new material.
Being able to mix it up and play as a duo this time must keep it exciting for you both?
Yeah, it is nice to have an opportunity to do a big show like this as a duo because I think we work well together and will be quite intimate on the larger stage. It will be a nice setting for that.
Do you get to improvise a lot more and have a lot of fun with it?
Exactly! Ordinarily the thing about festivals is the vibe and you get a bit of everything going on and you feed of it as well. I think we’ll come away quite buzzed, being an outdoor show as well, will it be boiling hot on Sunday? That will either be thrilling or send us off on another tangent.
Can fans expect greatest hits or will there be some new songs previewed on the day?
Yeah, we do a few of our old ones, some of our favourites and of course we’ll play the well known ones as well, so it will be a pretty good cross section. We are very close to starting to road test some of our new material but we’re not quite there yet. I’m happy to say that we’re in the song writing mode and feeling good about it, which is great.
New material? Wow! How is that shaping up?
It has taken us obviously a very long time and then when we finally did get together it was quite difficult to, we still have the same chemistry there and the same ideals about what we both want in the song writing but finding that new territory we were both going to tread together was actually harder than we thought. Just in the last month or two we have broken the new ground and it something we can both agree on and be please with, so we are both excited at the moment.
Is that because tastes and interests have changed because obviously you’re not the same Frente when Accidentally Kelly Street came out as you both have evolved and developed as song writers?
I think there are so many elements to it but that would have to be one of them. I guess it was more of a mystery than I thought because we still do agree on so much in the song writing realm. One of the biggest factors was fear and I forget when Simon and I sit down together and write, how hard we push ourselves before we both feel like we’ve hit our strides and it has always been that way. We don’t just bust out the songs and think that’s good enough. So there is this real breaking of the barrier every time we sit down together and getting in to that space again.
Is there also fear in terms whether fans will actually like these new songs? Does that come in to it or does it not bother you?
You want to say that it wouldn’t but we had that discussion actually about who are we writing for and for both of us it is for ourselves. Whether we feel like we need to give a nod to that old material or whether that is even something we want to go back to. We both agree that you can’t really look back and we have both cleared the air with that and the best way to make any kind of move forward is to just go for it. When you are writing songs you can have the best intentions in the world but you still don’t know what they are going to be.
Is the juggle of life, work and other commitments and getting that clear headspace to write songs challenging?
It has been really hard to get time to wrestle and get the time together but I thought what you are talking about would be really difficult. Now we have the time to get together to get in the headspace we both actually lock in really quickly. That is one of the blessings of having kids you already do that with everything else that you do, you don’t have the time to have that lovely warm up session you just have to do the work.
When you are writing do the songs naturally gravitate to Frente or another project?
I think in the writing of it with Simon they are quite clearly Frente songs. I can feel it when I’m playing my solo stuff the songs are so personal and so particular about my life. Simon and I talk a lot more about the universal human being than just Angie and Simon. I think that happens pretty clearly and Simon and I write about things directly as just ourselves.
Is there the pressure there that you will write Accidentally Kelly Street II?
I think when we had our first big break as in when we broke up not when we had our great hits we had already stepped the tone for our second album Shape that wherever we went after that was new, and who knows where we would go or at least we set that tone for ourselves which was ok by us. I don’t think we feel that pressure, there are still some people who wonder what Frente has been doing this entire time. As things work no one knows what you have been doing with your music career the entire time. Some people think we haven’t done anything since Accidentally Kelly Street and they might be expecting another Kelly Street. Other people have travelled with us the whole way and have evolved with what we have done, I’m happy to live with that.
When you look back on your journey with Frente do you look back quite finding because I read the interview with you in the Sydney Morning Herald where you said that you’re still looking for that sense of normal?
I find it fascinating how your life unfolds, some of it you can help, some of it you can’t and what factors within in you are a part of the why things have turned out the way they have. Personally for both of us we’re not prepared to live such public lives or tour so extensively for so long. I don’t think we have the constitution for it or the time in our lives where we did, that’s just too bad. I look at it all quite fondly but I just don’t we were made that way.
Interview by Rob Lyon
Frente along with Sarah Blasko and Heaps Good Friends play the first annual SUPERMASSIVE Music Festival is a must for any Fringe devotee and will bring Victoria Square to life on Sunday 25th February with the best and biggest full day offering of entertainment for kids and their adults.
SUPERMASSIVE MUSIC FESTIVAL
SUNDAY 25th FEBRUARY 2018
GROUNDED at VICTORIA SQUARE, TARNTANYANGGA – ADELAIDE
11am – 7pm
Tickets from the Adelaide Fringe website
