ELECTRELANE

Nothing gets a music fan’s ears tingling like the word ‘reunion.’ After announcing an ‘indefinite hiatus’ in late 2007, cult group Electrelane have since come out of hiding for the recent European festival season, and will now grace our shores for the first time since 2005. Known for their wide-ranging sonic aptitude, spanning farfisa organs to football match samples, as well as their impressive but understated all-lady line up (with nary a fist pump in sight), the group pen us a line en route to their Sydney show …

What brought you all back together? It was a very natural thing for us, as we had all decided we wanted/needed to focus on other parts of our lives, that being in band meant were neglected. We had been in the band since our teens, through our 20s and so, financially, it gets a bit boring, the older one gets, to have little or no security…being in a band is great when you are young and don’t think about the future, but it wears thin when you get older and realise that you don’t actually make enough money to save for anything…

How have you managed the vast distances – Brighton, Chicago, LA – between you when creating your music? We actually haven’t written new stuff, so the distance thing hasn’t been hard in that way – but obviously, if and when we do plan on doing new things in the future, it is going to require a lot of forward planning…which is probably why we haven’t done it yet!

In what ways do you think your sound has evolved from Rock it to the Moon to today? I guess the main thing is, we kind of found our own ‘sound’, so even if some songs are stylistically very different from one another, you can still tell its us  (at least, I like to think so!)…

What makes a sample call to you? I don’t know, really…we used quite a few samples on the first album – and mostly, it’s because they made us laugh, (on Invisible Dog, for instance, it was my dog, Ingmar, who would bark when you said ‘Speak!’) but we haven’t really been doing that for a long time.

I hear you will be learning to surf when in Sydney … what else do you want to check out? We are going to be holding some koalas I think…also, I have been reading a lot of reviews of good restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne, as its Mia [Clarke]’s birthday when we are there, so we will have to find a good one for that celebration…We are excited to play with Love of Diagrams, we really like them a lot. Also, I like Super Wild Horses.

Mar 22, 8pm, Manning Bar, Manning Rd, University of Sydney, $46.95+BF, manningbar.com