Villainy interview with Neill Fraser
4-09-2014
Questions by Terry

Villainy is about to head out on the Ammunition tour is that right?

Yeah we're about to head out to 6 cities I think around the country just a little blast to get back out there we haven’t really toured since the end of last year. Now that the record's done we thought we could think about other things and head out on the road and play to some people again it’s been too long.

I noticed that not only are you playing the main centres but you are playing a few out of the way spots this time too that don’t make it so often on tour schedules.

Yeah we're playing Palmy and New Plymouth and also playing Masterton which we have never been to which will be good. We have played Palmerston and New Plymouth before and it’s always been great, so it will be cool to get back there as well.

You have been lucky and got to tour NZ and Australia now how has that been for you?

We went to Oz in September last year. We have a done a few bigger shows over their we did the Big Sound Festival in Brisbane which is a big music conference which was 3 days of endless music and bands and music people everywhere so that was really cool and then we drove from Brisbane down to Byron Bay and then Sydney then across to Melbourne kind of if anything gives you an appreciation of how small New Zealand is. You drive 12 hours to get from Melbourne to Sydney as opposed to a 4 hour jaunt to get from say Palmerston North to New Plymouth or something like that kind of puts everything into perspective. It’s a hell of a lot of fun though the 4 of us packed into a van with a couple of crew and it’s just like a road trip its awesome. We definitely live in each other’s shoes when we are on tour.

Have you guys got to the point where you can quit working yet or do you still have to hold fulltime jobs outside of the band?

We all hold down day jobs. Just to keep the money coming in when we are not doing the music stuff. To be able to get to that point we need to be able to look at getting overseas a bit more and building those fan bases over there. So that’s our next big step as well.

You were able to work with Tom Larkin for your first album what was it like having Tom onboard?

I guess at that point we still hadn’t worked out what kind of band we really were at that point so there was a lot of exploratory type of stuff going on doing lots of pre-production working through songs and just figuring out I guess what sort of sound we were looking for. He helped a lot with that. He has an insanely good ear. I think with the first record we walked in with about 30 or so songs and he was able to pick out what he thought was the best on first listen it’s just having that fifth member type person in the room who can listen to stuff and be a bit more detached from it and sometimes a bit cold or even excited because they hear something they really like and want to pursue. It’s really good in that respect. He really knows his way around the studio and has also worked with a lot different producers so has a wealth of experience. He’s learnt a lot of the tricks along the way and developed his own style from there.

You have new material on the way how do you guys go through the writing and recording process?

This time around 90% of the songs were written out of jams we just rehearsed weeks on end and just recorded everything that we did and then we would all go away after the rehearsal and listen and pick out the things that we liked and somewhere in there were things that we thought was a song and just kind of work backwards from there. It worked really well for us and I think we wrote like 30 or 40 tracks for the record and we just took those back to Tom and he just did his thing and went through them and put in his votes for what we should do and then we started tracking.

So how far away are we from getting some new material?

I think at this point it’s probably going to be early next year it’s still got to be mixed and mastered and that sort of stuff so there is still a fair bit of work to be done but we're feeling pretty good and have been able to sit back and listen to the fruits of our labour just this past week actually as I have just finished all the vocals. It’s nice knowing we now have a second record and we just have to finish it off.

With the tour will we hear a few of the new tracks?

Yeah for sure part of the reason for the tour is to go out and road test some of the new songs and get inside them we have really only played them in the studio for ourselves and in some situations we even only wrote them tracked them and moved straight on. So we're sort of learning them now and learning how to perform them so it’s a lot of fun.

One last question Words of advice for young musicians.

I’ve been making music now for about 10 plus years now in bands I’ve been playing music most of my life. I think what made the difference for us was hooking up with people who had a lot of experience people like Tom  who can steer your sound and just give you an opinion, It helps you find out what works and what doesn’t work. That was insanely invaluable for us. Even more so you just have to be committed. When I first started off in bands I really wanted it to do well but it wasn’t really front of mind but if you want people to hear you and some degree of success you really have to believe in it and believe in yourself and that doesn’t mean you have to go out there and make crap sell out music but you just have to back yourself and put everything into it.

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