About to embark on marketing campaign before playing yearly charity festival Stuff The Stocking, the boys of pop-rock outfit FINABAH have their work cut out for them. Bassist BRENDAN LANGFIELD discusses the trials and tribulations of image promotion with ELWOOD LEE.

The last two months have been a massive whirlwind ride for the boys, having toured major festivals, and recently winning the title of ‘best unsigned commercial rock act in Australia’ via Commercial Radio Australia. The band realises the award is a small but important step towards the road to success “In the grand scheme of things it reiterated to us that what we’re doing was the right sort of thing, after chugging along for a few years, you sort of really need that recognition from people in the industry, especially if that’s where you want to end up eventually”.

Finabah are still as yet unsigned, however a result of winning the award allows them a decent amount of exposure on all the major commercial radio stations. This is a coup for the band who were previously caught between being too mainstream for Triple J and too alternative for the commercial stations. As a result Finabah now have to deal with the music industry standard of image.

Brendan is getting prepped up for tomorrow’s photo shoot in Sydney, and anxiety is setting in for him as the band are about to undergo what could be termed as an extreme makeover. “I’m definitely crapping my pants about tomorrow, you’re forking down a pretty decent chunk of hard earned cash and not knowing how it’s all going to turn out from a visual perspective. So we’ll see what they think we should turn into and we’ll tell them what we think we should look like, and we go from there. We’re reaching for a more mainstream and commercial market, so this process of developing an image that is more accessible to the regular person is very scary and very daunting, but very cool too”.

He compares the experience to working with a producer, which was something the band hadn’t done until the release of their Sugarcoat single. “When we first worked with our producer Stuart Stuart we were concerned he was going to completely change our music, and didn’t have any idea as to what he was going to do. In the end you have to just leave it in their hands, and I thought we came out of that experience pretty well”.

Apart from award shows and photo shoots, Finabah have recently been shortlisted for the government initiative, Rock The Schools. “Essentially it’s a big government and corporate funded initiative, where they put you on the road for five weeks, and you play at five schools for five weeks straight, they put you on a tour bus, and pay for everything, and you take part in work shops with the students. It’s like a big mobile rock school basically, and we get to be treated like absolute rock stars before returning to our day jobs.

With so many hours on the road, the inevitable question of how they keep busy comes up. “We tried the whole put the laptop in the back, and play the DVD, but everybody got kind of pissed off, because the people driving don’t want to hear the DVD, and the people watching the DVD don’t want to hear the stereo. We’re all still pretty happy with each other’s company, so we just talk about music all day. Usually one of us is vomiting during the car ride, so that’s usually really entertaining to watch.

FINABAH play STUFF THE STOCKING at Reddacliffe Place, Queen Street Mall (near the casino) on Saturday Nov 28, alongside Ellington, Wherewolves, Steven Childs, Fushia, Save Us For Summer, Dino Twins, Steve Grady, Totems and heaps more. Entry is by donation of non-perishable food and toiletries. Single SUGARCOAT is out now through iTunes.

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