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Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
End Of Fashion Announce 20th Anniversary Tour And Vinyl For Debut Album
Beloved Perth indie rockers End of Fashion have announced their first national tour in almost a decade, to celebrate 20 years since the release of their explosive self-titled debut album. Their breakout 2005 LP, bolstered by lead single 'O Yeah' which won two ARIAs and snagged a top 10 spot on triple j's Hottest 100 that year, will also be copping a special anniversary vinyl release to mark the occasion. The freshly-minted double LP reissue comes packing vibrant coloured vinyl, archive artwork, a never-before-released lyric sheet, and a collage of fan-submitted photos. The first disc features the OG album, remastered and packed with hits like 'The Game', 'She's Love', 'Oh Strain' (featuring Little Birdy's Katy Steele) and 'Rough Diamonds', while the second offers a treasure trove of rare demos, B-sides and unheard gems. 'When we made this album, we never dreamed it would still mean so much to people 20 years later,' frontman Justin Burford reflects. 'That's a real gift for us and we wanted to give something back. We put this re-issue together with a lot of love — and a lot of memories…our own and most importantly, the fans. Which is why we got them involved.' He continues: 'This is as much theirs as it is ours. To have this out in the world again, on vinyl, with all this amazing material from the archives that we never thought would see the light of day, feels really special.' As mentioned, the band will also be hitting the road for a five-date capital city tour across the country this August, performing the album live and in full, plus an encore of fan favourites and more. The run will kick off in Brisbane, before heading to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and wrapping up in their native Perth. 'There's a lot of history in this album, and a lot of love too,' Burford continues. 'We still feel that love and it's a huge privilege to be able to hit the road and share that with the fans. I really feel like this tour is going to be something special. Not only do we get to celebrate the past, we also get to show what's coming next. I think people will love it!' You can pre-order the 20th birthday reissue of the End Of Fashion LP here, or suss all the dates and details of their big 2025 commemorative live lap down below. Friday 15th August – The Brightside – Brisbane, QLD Saturday 16th August – Crowbar – Sydney, NSW Friday 22nd August – The Night Cat – Melbourne, VIC Saturday 23rd August – Jive – Adelaide, SA Saturday 30th August – The Rosemount – Perth, WA Sign up to pre-sale now HERE Fan presale starts Wednesday 28th May at 10am AEST General public on-sale Thursday 29th May at 10am AEST triple j's Like A Version in 2004 End Of Fashion Break Hiatus With First New Music In Almost A Decade End Of Fashion Frontman Slams Triple J For Career Downfall The post End Of Fashion Announce 20th Anniversary Tour And Vinyl For Debut Album appeared first on Music Feeds.
Sydney Morning Herald
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘We have our sights set on world domination': How Spacey Jane became Australia's biggest band
In August 2022, Caleb Harper was sitting in his underwear in a sweltering room in Los Angeles, willing the air-conditioner to work. The Spacey Jane frontman had just begun scribbling down the first lines of a song that would become August, the first track to emerge from their third album. But it wasn't coming easily in the 40-degree heat and the song ended up sitting on the shelf for about 18 months, Harper occasionally pulling it down to tweak a line here or there. Other songs came and were put to tape, the album was nearly tied up, but August remained out-of-reach. 'I had a counter melody that wasn't working,' Harper says over Zoom from Los Angeles, air-conditioning working this time. 'I ended up writing it on the last morning, and Peppa [Lane, bassist] and I went in and sang it that day.' That final counter melody carries out the track with the floating refrain 'if that makes sense?', which the band then lifted for the album's title. 'It really bookends that period,' Harper says, noting its meaning shifted considerably over the writing period, from a meditation on leaving Australia to predicting the beginning of a breakup. 'It's a hard listen, honestly.' August, like the rest of If That Makes Sense, was written and recorded over two years in LA – the first time the Perth band had recorded outside Australia. It was a big deal for the quartet (Harper and Lane are joined by drummer Kieran Lama and guitarist Ashton Hardman-Le Cornu), who have been synonymous with the Australian indie rock scene since their jangly, vulnerable 2020 debut album Sunlight. Sunlight was borne from the runaway single Booster Seat, which reached #2 in that year's Hottest 100, behind Glass Animals' Heat Waves. The band would become frequent Hottest 100 lurkers: in the 2022 countdown, following their second album Here Comes Everybody, they featured six times, three of those coming in the top 10. In 2022, the band was the third-biggest seller of vinyl for the year, behind Taylor Swift and Harry Styles. They've ridden this wave of popularity on numerous sold-out tours of the country, and are comfortable standalone headliners for the biggest local festivals. There aren't many bigger bands in Australian music right now, if any. Following the gruelling touring schedule for Here Comes Everybody (which had really stretched back years to the start of Sunlight), the band's management stepped in and told them to take a break. 'It started as quite a difficult thing,' Harper says. 'It was almost counterintuitive … We are a band that considers our job to play shows. It was almost like the music served that. Now we've gone through a process of unlearning that and figuring out how to focus on making this record and pulling this world together first. And also giving the market a bit of space, from a business perspective. 'But once we hopped off that train, we were all freaked out. Especially, because we were living all around the world, we didn't see each other as much.' Like many Australian artists before him, Harper landed in LA and endured the merry-go-round of songwriting sessions – a process he called 'f---ing terrifying'. 'I'd always been protective of the songwriting process, and it always has been in my bedroom,' he says. 'I didn't know how to advocate for ideas that I liked, and I didn't know how to say no to things I didn't like. I would often not put forward ideas at all because I was just like, 'If they don't like it, that's embarrassing'. But now I find it's liberating to have that conflict of ideas. I'm grateful that I went through that transition.' It's easy to understand Harper's apprehension. His lyrics have always been intensely personal, and the songs on If That Makes Sense feature some wrenching moments. On the churning single All the Noise, Harper reflects on his upbringing: 'And that was the way that they gave to me … A promise that I would hurt everybody that I ever meet'. Then there's the shouted, tortured mantra in So Much Taller: 'You'll never be enough and you'll never be loved, and the fact you tried is embarrassing enough'. Recent single Through My Teeth obliquely references Harper shedding his religious upbringing and throwing himself headlong into partying at university. A lot of the album pulls in this direction and sifts through the various answers to the question: what happens when you have to drag your trauma into adulthood? 'Being out here,' Harper says after a pause, after we bring up Through My Teeth, 'it's almost like pulling myself out of my present life in Australia made the past compress, like the last 26 years of my life were all just in one accessible bank in a way that they hadn't been before'. 'All of a sudden things didn't seem as far away – not that they were any clearer,' he says. 'I still have trouble recalling much of my childhood, as I think a lot of people do, especially if they have negative things associated with that … Your brain tends to bury things or contort them. But I think a lot of it became far clearer or more in my face than it had been before.' Being away from Australia pulled some things into focus, but it also brought with it a lot of homesickness and guilt. 'I think family is the main one,' Harper answers, when I ask where the guilt comes from. 'There's already a host of issues and contentious things there. Being away is an interesting escape from that. 'But sometimes I take too much liberty when it comes to escaping things back home. Like I'm really bad at messaging my friends back, I'm really bad at calling my dad … and that's just something that weighs on me a lot. Relationships suffer, and you feel like it's your fault.' 'We'd be kicking ourselves if we didn't try [to break overseas].' Caleb Harper, frontman of Spacey Jane Sonically, If That Makes Sense doesn't deviate wildly from the Spacey Jane playbook, but the band have beefed things up considerably with undercurrents of synths and layers upon layers of guitars and vocals. It's the result of taking a longer time in the studio, and the presence of big-time producer Mike Crossey (Arctic Monkeys, the 1975, Wolf Alice). 'We didn't shy away from producing it, like really producing it,' Harper says. 'It was like, 'Let's put everything in here that we like and make it feel as big and wide as possible'.' The band also ran the entire record through tape at the end, a process that rounds out the sound and makes it feel richer, warmer (like the difference between an MP3 file and a vinyl record). Loading The four members of the band have been scattered in the wind over the past few years – Hardman-Le Cornu and Lane in Melbourne, Lama in New York, Harper between LA and home. If That Makes Sense represents a big step outside their Australia-sized comfort zone, and Harper says the band is feeling the pull overseas. 'Australia still feels like home for us in every way, and we still feel like that's where our strongest support base is,' he says. 'But at the same time, we have our sights set on world domination, and we want to do what we've done here in Australia. That's why we've put ourselves out here so much and why so much focus is on the rest of the world. 'We'd be kicking ourselves if we didn't try [to break overseas]. We're very hungry to see how far we can take this thing, so we're just going to keep going.'
The Age
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘We have our sights set on world domination': How Spacey Jane became Australia's biggest band
In August 2022, Caleb Harper was sitting in his underwear in a sweltering room in Los Angeles, willing the air-conditioner to work. The Spacey Jane frontman had just begun scribbling down the first lines of a song that would become August, the first track to emerge from their third album. But it wasn't coming easily in the 40-degree heat and the song ended up sitting on the shelf for about 18 months, Harper occasionally pulling it down to tweak a line here or there. Other songs came and were put to tape, the album was nearly tied up, but August remained out-of-reach. 'I had a counter melody that wasn't working,' Harper says over Zoom from Los Angeles, air-conditioning working this time. 'I ended up writing it on the last morning, and Peppa [Lane, bassist] and I went in and sang it that day.' That final counter melody carries out the track with the floating refrain 'if that makes sense?', which the band then lifted for the album's title. 'It really bookends that period,' Harper says, noting its meaning shifted considerably over the writing period, from a meditation on leaving Australia to predicting the beginning of a breakup. 'It's a hard listen, honestly.' August, like the rest of If That Makes Sense, was written and recorded over two years in LA – the first time the Perth band had recorded outside Australia. It was a big deal for the quartet (Harper and Lane are joined by drummer Kieran Lama and guitarist Ashton Hardman-Le Cornu), who have been synonymous with the Australian indie rock scene since their jangly, vulnerable 2020 debut album Sunlight. Sunlight was borne from the runaway single Booster Seat, which reached #2 in that year's Hottest 100, behind Glass Animals' Heat Waves. The band would become frequent Hottest 100 lurkers: in the 2022 countdown, following their second album Here Comes Everybody, they featured six times, three of those coming in the top 10. In 2022, the band was the third-biggest seller of vinyl for the year, behind Taylor Swift and Harry Styles. They've ridden this wave of popularity on numerous sold-out tours of the country, and are comfortable standalone headliners for the biggest local festivals. There aren't many bigger bands in Australian music right now, if any. Following the gruelling touring schedule for Here Comes Everybody (which had really stretched back years to the start of Sunlight), the band's management stepped in and told them to take a break. 'It started as quite a difficult thing,' Harper says. 'It was almost counterintuitive … We are a band that considers our job to play shows. It was almost like the music served that. Now we've gone through a process of unlearning that and figuring out how to focus on making this record and pulling this world together first. And also giving the market a bit of space, from a business perspective. 'But once we hopped off that train, we were all freaked out. Especially, because we were living all around the world, we didn't see each other as much.' Like many Australian artists before him, Harper landed in LA and endured the merry-go-round of songwriting sessions – a process he called 'f---ing terrifying'. 'I'd always been protective of the songwriting process, and it always has been in my bedroom,' he says. 'I didn't know how to advocate for ideas that I liked, and I didn't know how to say no to things I didn't like. I would often not put forward ideas at all because I was just like, 'If they don't like it, that's embarrassing'. But now I find it's liberating to have that conflict of ideas. I'm grateful that I went through that transition.' It's easy to understand Harper's apprehension. His lyrics have always been intensely personal, and the songs on If That Makes Sense feature some wrenching moments. On the churning single All the Noise, Harper reflects on his upbringing: 'And that was the way that they gave to me … A promise that I would hurt everybody that I ever meet'. Then there's the shouted, tortured mantra in So Much Taller: 'You'll never be enough and you'll never be loved, and the fact you tried is embarrassing enough'. Recent single Through My Teeth obliquely references Harper shedding his religious upbringing and throwing himself headlong into partying at university. A lot of the album pulls in this direction and sifts through the various answers to the question: what happens when you have to drag your trauma into adulthood? 'Being out here,' Harper says after a pause, after we bring up Through My Teeth, 'it's almost like pulling myself out of my present life in Australia made the past compress, like the last 26 years of my life were all just in one accessible bank in a way that they hadn't been before'. 'All of a sudden things didn't seem as far away – not that they were any clearer,' he says. 'I still have trouble recalling much of my childhood, as I think a lot of people do, especially if they have negative things associated with that … Your brain tends to bury things or contort them. But I think a lot of it became far clearer or more in my face than it had been before.' Being away from Australia pulled some things into focus, but it also brought with it a lot of homesickness and guilt. 'I think family is the main one,' Harper answers, when I ask where the guilt comes from. 'There's already a host of issues and contentious things there. Being away is an interesting escape from that. 'But sometimes I take too much liberty when it comes to escaping things back home. Like I'm really bad at messaging my friends back, I'm really bad at calling my dad … and that's just something that weighs on me a lot. Relationships suffer, and you feel like it's your fault.' 'We'd be kicking ourselves if we didn't try [to break overseas].' Caleb Harper, frontman of Spacey Jane Sonically, If That Makes Sense doesn't deviate wildly from the Spacey Jane playbook, but the band have beefed things up considerably with undercurrents of synths and layers upon layers of guitars and vocals. It's the result of taking a longer time in the studio, and the presence of big-time producer Mike Crossey (Arctic Monkeys, the 1975, Wolf Alice). 'We didn't shy away from producing it, like really producing it,' Harper says. 'It was like, 'Let's put everything in here that we like and make it feel as big and wide as possible'.' The band also ran the entire record through tape at the end, a process that rounds out the sound and makes it feel richer, warmer (like the difference between an MP3 file and a vinyl record). Loading The four members of the band have been scattered in the wind over the past few years – Hardman-Le Cornu and Lane in Melbourne, Lama in New York, Harper between LA and home. If That Makes Sense represents a big step outside their Australia-sized comfort zone, and Harper says the band is feeling the pull overseas. 'Australia still feels like home for us in every way, and we still feel like that's where our strongest support base is,' he says. 'But at the same time, we have our sights set on world domination, and we want to do what we've done here in Australia. That's why we've put ourselves out here so much and why so much focus is on the rest of the world. 'We'd be kicking ourselves if we didn't try [to break overseas]. We're very hungry to see how far we can take this thing, so we're just going to keep going.'
News.com.au
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Kissed a Girl singer Jill Sobule, the first to crack the top 20 with an openly gay song, dies in house fire
Folk pop artist Jill Sobule, the first songwriter to crack the US top 20 with an openly gay song, has tragically died at 66 in a house fire. Sobule slayed the global charts and airwaves in 1995 with her upbeat earworm I Kissed a Girl, 13 years before Katy Perry released her hit with the same title. The artist's manager confirmed to American music media the singer had died in the fire at her home in Minnesota on Thursday. She was in the midst of an American tour, and was scheduled to perform three concerts across Colorado in the coming days. 'Jill Sobule was a force of nature and human rights advocate whose music is woven into our culture,' her manager John Porter wrote in a press release. 'I was having so much fun working with her. I lost a client and a friend today. I hope her music, memory, and legacy continue to live on and inspire others.' And what was to be Sobule's final post on social media is especially eerie following her death. Two days ago, she shared a post on Instagram admitting it had been 'hard being on tour,' complaining that she had 'somehow messed u [her] back and have sciatica.' The post accompanying her caption was a cartoon showing musical mermaids complaining about 'luring sailors to their deaths.' Fans flooded to the post after news broke of Sobule's death, one calling it 'prophetic in the worst way possible.' Sobule, who identified as bisexual, was part of a vanguard of female singer songwriters including Sheryl Crow, Lisa Loeb and Juliana Hatfield, who stormed the charts in the mid 1990s with their genre-bending pop songs with lyrics ripped from their diaries. I Kissed A Girl peaked in the top 20 of the US Billboard charts and placed in Triple J's Hottest 100 in 1995. She followed up that hit with Supermodel, one of the standout-outs tracks on the soundtrack for the now classic film Clueless. The songwriter told Philadelphia Gay News a few years ago that she had feared I Kissed a Girl wouldn't make it onto her self-titled third album because of homophobia within the major label boardrooms. '(When) I got my record deal and I was sitting in a conference room getting ready to have the first big meeting … they said, 'We've already had Tracy Chapman and Melissa Etheridge. Thank God we finally have a straight, female singer-songwriter.' It freaked me out,' she told the queer publication in 2021. 'When 'Kissed a Girl' came out, I didn't even think it was going to make it onto the record, but it came out and was treated like a novelty. 'For me, I wanted it out because it was the kind of song I wish I'd heard when I was young.' Sobule visited Australia once at the height of her fame, joking years later about appearing on Hey Hey It's Saturday. 'I was on Hey Hey!' she told Double J in 2017. 'I remember the puppet and the guy with the cowboy hat. 'It was the only time I ever lip-synched, I'd never lip-synched before. They asked me what kind of band I wanted. I'm like, 'what do you mean?'. They were like 'How do you want them to look?' None of them really played music because they didn't have to. 'Do you want an all girl band? Do you want a really rock looking band?'. 'They had a book of these people that I could pick. It was amazing and absurd at the same time.' Sobule was also ahead of her time in terms of leaving the major label machine to pursue her recording career as an independent artist. She was one of the first singer songwriters to engage fans to crowd-fund her recording projects before the launch of platforms such as Kickstarter, kicking off with her seventh album, California Years, in 2009. Sobule was midway through an American tour when she lost her life in the fire.
