Sons Of East - Interview

We had a chat with Nic Johnston, one third of Sydney group, Sons of the East. The trio will be playing some of the lovely tunes at a new boutique music festival called Lost Picnic alongside acts - Megan Washington, The Rubens, Emma Louise and Dustin Tebutt, on Sunday the 23rd at Centennial Park. Not only will you be able to see Sons Of the East, you can have an excellent Sons Of the FEAST! The festival brings a whole new meaning to the picnic experience, there'll be a fascinatingly innovative culinary experience, with the best of the best musicians coming together to create one MEGA day out.

Sons Of the East will be playing their first ever festival at the first ever Lost Picnic, so you must be super keen!

Yeah It's a reality cool idea to bring together, gourmet food with a whole bunch of great bands in a pretty awesome spot. We're kinda hoping that it grows and it may become one those big Sydney festivals, It's quite hard to crack into that festival scene, like bands really have only a handful of festivals that you can go and play at now, because there is so many artists on the scene and for smaller bands it makes it difficult.

Who are you really keen to see, who are playing on the bill?

The Rubens', we're really keen to go and check them out, but we love all of those artists I can wait to see all of them. I think we are gonna be on first so we can play then go and have some drinks and then watch all them which would be great.

So You guys had a pretty stellar 2013. how are you guys going back it up in 2014?

The main focus is heading into the studio doing a 2nd EP, last year was fun and a great way to break into the industry but there is so much more that we want to do in terms of recording and playing live shows, we'd all agree that playing live is the coolest part of being a band. If we can take our live shows to a new level, playing festivals would be great

So music? Who's good?

At the moment we're Loving Sticky Fingers their new song is awesome, and another band that I’ve really been digging is Little May, Sydney based guys who played with us before and have a great sound so I’m pretty keen to see how there new stuff goes.

We all listen to different music but we all kinda like Angus and Julia Stone and Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zero’s and definitely older artist like Crowded House, Paul Kelly and Fleetwood Mac. We tend to come to practice or writing songs and someone will come up with something that is completely different and what we're not used to playing which is good because it keeps things fresh and keeps our mind ticking over in terms of how we write songs and how we create music.

Since you've grown up in Sydney and you've been around the traps for a while, do you have any favourite venues?

Our favorite venue would be the Beresford in Surry Hills - such a fun venue they really look after you there and they have such a great sound also Moonshine down in Manly is a great spot we have a pretty good following down there.

What's a Sons Of the East crowd like?

That's kinda the funny thing you listen to our EP you think mellow vibes but it's pretty much the opposed it's usually down at manly its seems to be pretty rowdy. We put a lot of effort into our live shows, trying to get people off their seat and get them out and dancing

What's the loosest thing that's gone down at one of your gigs?

Some dude once threw a schooner glass at my head, which was pretty funny actually, He just came up and said sorry dude after the gig the whole thing was quite funny.

One of the best things about your last EP was the kick-ass clips that accompanied it. Who's behind them?

We worked with this really talented director - Sam, a friend of a friend who was really enthusiastic about writing a screenplay and getting everything together to make high quality film clips that we were quite surprised with like how professional it turned out to be. Our cinematographer Alex was pretty awesome about the whole thing aswell. It was basically just a bunch of friends of friends who helped us out with all those vids.

When can we expect some new stuff?

We're going head into the studio to lay down a new EP, looking to put it our between the back end of the year, to kind of hit the summer festivals. We definitely want to start playing festivals which is great publicity for a band, Yeah I guess that's the aim this year.

To see Sons Of The East, get tickets to Lost Picnic here

Interview by Nathan Gibbons

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