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 Singer for Adelaide Indie rockers THE SHINY BRIGHTS, WOLFGANG MARWE, chats with YUMI SED about band comps, wineries and best mates.
The Shiny Brights may have only been together since 2008, but with two EPs under their belt and countless competition wins, they have fast become one of Adelaide’s hardest working indie rock bands. They won the Unearthed 2009 Big Day Out spot for Adelaide, a spot on the Parklife festival in 2008 and The Great Escape Festival in the UK. They have supported the likes of The Wombats, The Vines and You Am I and yet singer Wolfgang Marwe, like all good indie musos, is slogging it out doing twelve-hour days in hospitality. “I’ve just returned home from working at a local winery here in Adelaide,” Marwe explains when I ask him what his day has held. “I’ve been there from six this morning. This week I’m doing twelve-hour days. I’ll do every day until we drive to Melbourne on Thursday, we’ll be there until Sunday night and then I have to drive home in time for my Monday morning, six o’clock start. It’s a lot of fun. People are asking me whether I still have a job, which just makes me cringe.”
I ask Marwe why he thinks the band have been so successful in the competition circuit, as it seems there are two categories for band comps – you’re either a band that wins competitions or a band that simply never will. “I really think a lot of it comes down to our live shows,” he explains. “That’s nothing against our recorded music, but we really try to captivate our audience and give them a great live show which has helped out a lot with competitions. It’s not like we do anything different during the competitions at all, we just have a lot of fun.”
I suggest that perhaps being best friends would also help their live dynamics and remove any self-consciousness they may have otherwise had. “Yes definitely,” he agrees. “We went to school together and we’ve been best mates for years. When we don’t have band things on we hang out together anyway. We are definitely best friends otherwise we wouldn’t be able to sit in a car together for hours and hours on end. At the same time we can have moments where we’re at each others throats for five minutes but it usually just turns into a joke and calms down in no time.”
Despite two EPs behind them a band hasn’t really arrived until they release their debut album and I ask Marwe when we can expect that. Having only been together for a short time I also ask whether they are finding the flow of creativity to be easy. “New material comes in waves really,” he says. “Some weeks we’ll have heaps of ideas and at other times we’ll have very few ideas coming through. At the moment we’re demoing some new material for, hopefully, a full album in the future. Nothing’s set in stone but we really hope to have a solid album’s worth of songs towards the end of the year.”
THE SHINY BRIGHTS will perform at The Cubby Hole (upstairs at Rosie’s) on Thursday Mar 11. The TOO MANY CHIEFS EP is out now. www.myspace.com/theshinybrights
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