Stonefield: Rock ‘N’ Roll High School

Forget gimmickry, Stonefield’s Amy Findlay tells ANDREW MCMILLEN the all-sister quartet from country Victoria want to be known for their music.

There’s an endless fascination associated with staring into the musical past, as evidenced most recently with the Critics’ and Readers’ poll-topping debut by Perth-based psychedelic rock act Tame Impala. Seemingly from that same well of inspiration spring Stonefield: four sisters from country Victoria, aged 12 to 20 years old.

Brandishing a youthful take on 70s-inspired rock, they won last year’s triple j Unearthed High competition, and have since secured a booking at the 2011 Glastonbury Festival in the UK. Richard Kingsmill, music director of triple j, could be heard singing their praises at the One Movement festival in October last year: “They’ve just had an absolutely brilliant musical upbringing,” Kingsmill enthused. “They’ve got very wide and considerable depth in their music knowledge. They’re four sisters who can really play, and who can really belt it out. They’re already great live. I think they might be a band that might evolve into something.”

Ahead of their Glastonbury Festival slot in June, the Findlay sisters are booked to play the St Kilda Festival, the Adelaide Fringe Festival, and Pushover 2011 in the same month; a gruelling schedule, considering that half of the band members are still school-aged.

You've got a pretty full gig calendar coming up. Will it be a struggle to fit in rehearsal and gigs around Sarah and Holly's school commitments?
Amy: Well, we managed to do it throughout last year when we had a lot of stuff coming up, but I think we’re going to have to do a bit of time management to fit in rehearsals after school. They’re going to have a few days off, obviously, and if it gets too much, they’re probably just going to be switching to home-schooling. So we’ll see how we go.

What does the band's typical weekly schedule look like?
At the moment, because everybody’s on school holidays, we’re just practicing as much as we can every day. This month hasn’t been too full-on with gigs, so we’ve had lots of time to write, and rehearse old songs. But when it goes back to school, it’ll be band practice every afternoon that we can, and on the weekends, playing gigs as they pop up. And interviews during the week.

Of which you’re handling most. You’re the mouthpiece.
Yeah! [Laughs]

Were you elected into that position, or did the others not want to do it?
I just ended up doing it because I’m the older sister, I guess. It naturally happened that way.

Where do you rehearse?
We’ve got a shed on our farm, so we go in there and make as much noise as we like, and no-one really hears. Unless it’s a windy day, and the sound travels. [Laughs]

I saw a post on your MySpace blog where one of your wrote that you’d been “warned to look out for “sharks” in the music industry". Who told you that?
A lot of people in the industry; managers and things. When we first won the triple j Unearthed High competition, I got as many phone numbers as I could and spoke to them, and got some advice. A lot of them said that there’s “sharks” in the industry that we should look out for. There’s also good people, of course. We haven’t really come across any of those sharks, just yet.

How did you come across your current manager [Paul Gildea]?
He’s a friend of a family friend. I was speaking to the family friend, asking for some advice, and he said, “Call this guy, he’s a manager, and he’ll probably be able to help you out”. So I went and saw him at his studio in South Melbourne, and had a chat, and caught up a few more times. We all felt really comfortable with him, and thought that he had a good overview of the band, and what we could do in the future. He’s a dad as well, so he’s got that whole fatherly sort of thing about him, which is good. We just clicked, and went from there … He managed a band called Motorace, and currently manages a pop guy named Michael Paynter, who’s completely different to us. He’s just doing us two at the moment, and he’s got a post-production studio as well.

Besides Paul, who else do you have in the team around the band?
Paul’s got another two girls working around him, Emma and Jess, who help out with management and online, social media things, like creating banners for MySpace. And then we have a publicist, Kate [McCabe], who we just started working with recently. We’ve got a radio plugger named Russell, who’s been very keen to help us out. And we’ve got a booking agent, Damo [Damian Costin] from Premier. So we’ve got a few people around us, helping us out.

Does the band have a stylist?
No, we don’t. For our video clip, we had someone come and give us some clothes and things, but we don’t really have anyone permanently working for us. We’re also getting some clothes from a girl who’s really young; she’s just started her own vintage label called Wildhats. She’s designing some outfits for us to wear at Glastonbury.

Was much thought given to the band’s image?
No - that’s just how we usually dress.

Are you concerned that the band's age could be viewed as a gimmick by some?
Definitely. I think, in a way, it’s a gimmick. I’m not saying we’re bad musicians, or anything – we work just as hard as any other band – but the whole sister thing, of course it helped us, because it makes us stand out from other bands that might be, you know, all males. It definitely gives us an edge, but it helps hopefully in a positive way, rather than, “Oh, they’re just girls, they can’t even play.” [Laughs]

Have you met any of that kind of reaction along the way?
No-one’s really said that to our face, but of course, YouTube comments, and all that sort of stuff. You know – whatever. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. They can think what they want. We’re just working hard so that we can 100 percent be good enough, that the whole girl thing will hopefully eventually not even be part of the story. We want to be known for our music, not for the “four girl” thing.

Do you spend much time looking at YouTube comments?
Not really. Only when I’m checking view [counts] do I have a read through. But it doesn’t bother us too much. You can’t really take it on your back; you just brush it off, or whatever.

How much truth is there to the rumours that you're being courted for record deals by several labels?
There’s one label in particular that’s pretty keen. We’re looking at our options at the moment, and trying not to jump into anything.

I have to ask about Holly's scream in 'Drowning'. How did that come to be?
[Laughs] We do a cover of ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, which is by Frank Zappa and John Lennon. In the original recording of that, Yoko Ono is screaming throughout. So Holly does that in the song that we cover, and then we go that idea for ‘Drowning’. We had the build-up bit, which needed something after it, so she tried it out and it kind of stuck!

Which vocalists have influenced your style of singing?
When I first started singing lessons, I was being taught a lot of ballad stuff; Wendy Matthews, and all of that. I moved away from that when I found Robert Plant and Aretha Franklin. I love soul singers.

Tell me about the cowbell in 'Drowning'. At what point was it added to the song?
That was added when we did the recording, because obviously no one had a free hand to do it. So we added it as a layer, and unfortunately we can’t do it live, which kind of sucks.

The band is no longer something that you're doing in your shed, just for fun. It’s a bit bigger than that now. What do you aim to get out of it?
The main aim is to be able to live off of the band, and to travel and see different parts of the world with our music would be great. And to inspire other young people to start playing music. Especially for us, growing up in a country area, there wasn’t much else to do. So if you play music, it gives you a lot to do. You meet a whole heap of people playing gigs around the area. It’s good fun.

“Especially for us, growing up in a country area, there wasn’t much else to do. So if you play music, it gives you a lot to do.”

Have the band's goals changed in the last 12 months, as you’ve gotten more attention?
The goals have definitely become bigger. Before we won the [triple j] competition, we planned on releasing an EP, but we didn’t realise that we were going to have the opportunity to make it this big a deal, and have it in shops and everything. We thought we’d just do it, and sell it at gigs, or whatever. But everything’s moved to a bigger scale. I suppose the whole record deal thing, whenever that happens, and going overseas; it’s becoming more of a reality now.

What do you know about the Glastonbury festival?
I know that it’s absolutely massive and amazing. [Laughs]

How are you planning your set for that show?
Well, we’re just going to do a lot of practicing doing shows over here. The residency at the Tote in February will probably help with that. But we’ll have a massive pep-talk before we go on, and just gear ourselves up to put on a really good show.

You're playing the residency with Immigrant Union at The Tote. What do you know about those guys?
It’s the drummer from The Dandy Warhols’ new band [Brent DeBoer]. They’ve got a country rock vibe. It should be good.

What do you have planned for the shows?
We’re definitely going to try and do something different each week, whether it’s a different intro thing, or changing up the set and adding in new songs that we’ve been working on. We want to change it each week, to keep it interesting.

Finally - there's a long line of Australian indie bands who started out as teenagers - bands like The Flairz, Dandelion, Operator Please and GOD. Where do you see Stonefield fitting into that lineage?
I don’t think we really compare ourselves to anyone. We just kind of do our own thing and see what happens. We’ll go with the flow.

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Stonefield’s month-long residency with Immigrant Union continues tonight (February 10) at The Tote in Melbourne. More details here.

Related reading: The story of Dandelion.