It’s just after 8 p.m. on Saturday at The Gorge and it’s that time of day us festivalgoers know best. The golden hour is setting an orangey-pink glow over Cloud Control’s warm, psychedelic pop vibes.
Little did the audience know that Cloud Control had woken up in Kansas that same morning. Alister’s hair may have been a tad more disheveled than usual, but besides that, there were no indications of tiredness. Currently on tour with Metronomy, Cloud Control is in for one kick-ass summer. And if there blissful set had any indication for what’s to come, you better watch out for these Aussies.
I sat down with two of Cloud Control’s members, Alister Wright (guitar, vocals) and Jeremy Kelshaw (bass, vocals) to talk about those famed cover songs and the payoff for doing shit that scares you.
You guys have recorded in some pretty remote places (a cave in the Kentish countryside, inside a stone house in the Blue Mountains). Is it purposeful to remove yourself from the chaos? Is the Cloud Control sound best found outside of the city?
Jeremy: It’s kind of on purpose and it’s kind of what’s convenient at the moment. The whole idea of taking sounds and vocals from Dream Cave and re-amping them in the cave was to try to find some kind of natural, organic sound to bring to the record. So yeah, I guess you’re right.
You guys have covered two 90s mega hits: “Praise You” by Fatboy Slim and “Dammit” by Blink 182. Why these two?
Alister: I loved those songs when I was a kid. That’s all it is!
J: The music you grow up listening to as a kid stays with you forever.
A: There are songs that you associate with a certain point in your life, songs that you get an unreasonable connection to… For all of us, those two songs have a really special, nostalgic feelings attached to them.
J: The time when you’re a teenager is such a crazy time. Being a teenager is weird. It’s extreme.
A: People think it’s fun! It’s fucked up.
Are their any other 90s songs you’d like to cover?
J: We haven’t recorded it, but sometimes we cover “Pepper” by Butthole Surfers. We don’t do the whole song; we’ll just throw it in the middle as a bridge section. If we play that during a show, you know we’re having a good time.
A: If we’re having a great show, I’ll nod at Jeremy and then we’ll play it. And if we don’t, it doesn’t mean we’re having a bad show…it just means maybe the audience isn’t ready for it. (Laughs)
What was your reason for doing a free acoustic tour? It seems like a pretty raw and intimidating thing to willingly choose to do.
A: We are pretty good at playing songs like that because we rehearse a lot like that. A lot of the work we did on Dream Cave was done that way…
J: It wasn’t foreign.
A: We rehearsed for like four hours and it went really well. It also made me want to do more acoustic shows in the future because there was crowd surfing, stage invasions and it was actually really rockin’. I think you get that with a full band because you’re hitting people over the head with loudness. But if you can do that with an acoustic set and have people get really into it, it feels like you’re meeting together in the middle.
Music from Australia is getting more recognition and attention lately. Who are some bands that may not be on our radar that you enjoy?
A:Total Control, Royal Headache, The Avalanches, Pond and Bloods. There’s a really good dance scene going on as well with like Flume, Chet Faker and Future Classic. And I’m going to mention my brother’s band, Fishing!
J: Have fun Googling that!
In interviews, you guys seem to emphasize music as this type of escapism – telling people to leave their troubles behind at your shows even if just for a few minutes. So what do you hope people walk away with after they see you live?
A: I was just thinking…well, it’s so ridiculous because it’s just a show and we’re just a band playing a rock show at a festival… But I think people should always be thinking about what they’re doing and what their life means. If we didn’t have this band, I would have just gone to University and got a job. It’s weird for people to do anything that’s slightly different from that, so I would encourage people to follow their dreams. I hope our band can inspire that.
