February 25, 2018

Drax Project – The 13th Floor Interview

For four Wellington music students, the transition from classroom to festival stage has been swift. Three years ago The Drax Project were playing cover tunes on street corners. Now they’re playing festivals like Homegrown and Sound Splash, touring with Six60 in Aussie and opening for Lorde and Ed Sheeran. Tim Gruar rang guitar and vocalist Ben O’Leary to have a bit of a chat.

The other day I was driving the kids to school when Drax’s big hit Woke Up Late came on the radio. The kids stop fighting and all sing along to the infectious beat. I thought it was Ed Sheeran and said so, which did not go down well at all. I relate this to guitarist Ben O’Leary as I introduced myself. He says he hears that a lot.

Tim Gruar: So you are not offended?

Ben O’Leary: “Nah, quite chuffed. It’s a compliment to know that your music is as good as Ed’s. I think that we’ll go down well when we open for him next month.”

TG: I think so, too. And, man, what a ride, to go from playing on the streets to opening for Ed and Lorde? Tell me about how you got involved with Drax Project. Didn’t it all begin as a busking outfit to subsidise student fees at Jazz school?

B: “Well yeah. Sort of. I joined the band as we transitioned from busking and playing covers to working in bars and starting to play our own material, around 2014.”

TG: So prior to that you’d been busking around the city?

B: “Well, not me. But the boys (that’s Matt Beachen and Shaan Singh) were playing around Courtenay Place, doing covers outside bars and gigs and the Rugby Sevens down at the Wespac Stadium. Shaan was playing Sax and Matt was on Drums. That’s where the label ‘Drax’ comes from – ‘Drums and Sax’. They were playing in the first summer between semesters at Uni. They were hanging out playing on corners and, like I said, at the Rugby Sevens, doing Katy Perry, White Stripes, everything. Anything popular.”

TG: Not The Gambler, surely?

B: “I don’t think so (he acknowledges the reference to Wellington’s most famous busker ‘Kenny’)

“Then they got Sam Thomson in, who plays bass (an upright bass). That busking stuff got them well known around the place and bar managers started getting interested. Maybe they were worried that they were getting too much attention out on the street and we’re losing business (laughs). They had stag night boys and hen’s night ladies singing around them. People of all ‘persuasions’ joining in. So, the boys, that’s the trio, started doing more intimate gigs and stuff in bars and clubs around Wellington for another year. Then I joined them on guitar.”

TG: Are you all Jazz students?

B: “All but me. I studied music at Whitireia (Polytechnic in Porirua). When I came into the band I was finishing my last year. I had this friend who was completing a final year assignment and needed to make a recording.”

TG: So he made the EP for you?

B: “Yes, just us, after hours with him in Whitireia studios.”

TG: And then you took it to (Wellington producer) Benny Tones to help mix and master the final recordings.

B: “Yeah. I can’t remember how that came about.”

TG: The recordings got out there. And they must have done well because the caught the attention festival booking agents

B: “Yeah, we did OK. We got to play a number of festivals over that summer (2014-2015). And we got a lot of fans from those gigs, too. Makes a change from being on the streets, getting paid, instead of getting given burgers and slices of pizza in the (guitar) case.”

TG: You also managed to end up working with Devin Abrams (of Shapeshifter, Pacific Heights).

B: “He helped us with our second E.P – as a producer. I think you can hear a little bit of drum’n’bass in that one, although because he’s now doing Pacific Heights, he’s moved away from that sound.”

TG: So those early recordings were a bit experimental. All being musically trained, you must have been exploding with ideas and potential directions. I noticed that one of your early singles, Real is a bit different to your latest release, Woke Up Late. Real has more experimental elements to it.

B: “Totally, we were real fresh at that point. At that time we didn’t really know what kind of music we wanted to write. Pop was kind of a ‘dirty word’ – in the band’s eyes, at least. We were chucking ideas around, we were all still studying at that point so we were chucking ideas around from different places, trying to find our feet.”

TG: “What sort of influences were grabbing your attention at that time?”

B: “More jazz influences. But we were more a fresh project, grabbing anything we could really. We’ve all got very different musical tastes so we were still learning how to be a band, getting the groove.”

TG: Do you write together or separately?

B: “Mostly together, although someone will tend to bring along a part, or an idea and we’ll work on that as a band. Sometimes Shaan will bring the basic bones of a song to work through. Other times we’ll jam a particular riff and then change it, move it around until we get a song out of it.”

The band went on to release two more singles Falling Out Of Sight and So Lost in 2016 but it was Woke Up Late that really put them on the map.

TG: “So how did …Late come about?”

B: “That was Shaan. He came up with the ‘catchy’ guitar line. That one was a more organic approach to writing.”

TG: What about the lyrics. They work because they are so easy to relate to?

B: “That song? That’s from our own experiences, mixed with potential ideas. Shaan gave us the start but then we work-shopped it from there and all added our own twist to it. An exaggerated experience for the purpose of the song.”

TG: “I understand that that the song almost never happened?”

B: “That’s right Shaan was around at my place. We were jamming ideas. It got late, about 2 or 3AM in the morning and he was heading off for a bus or something. Then he turns up at my home half an hour later ‘cos he didn’t have his wallet on him. I was ready to go to sleep and he was was ready to keep working and so we kept messing around with the guitar line he’d dreamed up coming over. And Then we made this terrible beat over it to get things going.”

TG: And then you took it to the band…?

B: “We actually kept forgetting about it. (It wasn’t on) the original list of songs that we had when we went to meet with Devon for the album (that is now in the pipeline). We had about 30 songs – He was going to listen to then and decide what to use. Later we were hanging out with the guys from Six60 and Shaan was playing the line and they asked what it was. He said that it was just something we were working on. They thought it was an epic song. So after that we decided to look at it again – and then it came together really quickly and was one of the first ones done. And then we went in to the studio – boom, first one down!”

TG: Tell me about that video for the song. It just seems to fit so well.

B: “The video was made up by the wind turbines, in Brooklyn, in Wellington, taking in the Wellington vista.”

TG: You can’t beat Wellington on a good day.

B: “Oh, man. We were so lucky. We had a 3 day window of great weather to make it. The idea was pitched to us by Lee Ginggold of Dusk, who directed the video. The ‘lucky’ girl in the video? She was a friend of Shaan’s who just happened to run into Lee a few days before. So, it was fate that she was cast. We thought it was a great way to visually show how a relationship could grow.”

TG: Because the song is the opposite of a one night stand. It’s about what could happen next. A positive message, not a sleazy reference?

B: “I hadn’t thought about that. Yeah, so that video is like a sweet moment straight afterwards, not worrying about the long term. Everybody remembers the first few days they spend with a new person, when they first meet them and want to stay together. Don’t they?”

TG: Speaking of memories, can you remember opening for Lorde?

B: “Definitely. We we told she hand picked us because we did a cover of her song (Lorde & Disclosure’s Magnets) I don’t know if that’s true (but they were clearly stoked, despite the put down).”

TG: Unfortunately, you didn’t get to meet her…

B: “No. But she left a big bottle of bubbly with a handwritten note saying she liked the song.”

TG: And I bet that’s framed up in the band room.

B: “Nah. I think Shaan swiped it (laughs). Hey (he calls to Shaan, whos in the room, apparently), what did you do with it?” (There are mumbles of denial and laughter in the background.)

B: “We’ve got heaps of material that we are working on, some similar to Woke Up Late, some not, all towards a new album.”

TG: “A new album? So when is that planned?”

B: “Aha, that’d be telling. It’s coming along. Date yet undisclosed.”

TG: You are closing the Festival, the last act, in the Spiegeltent?

B: “Yeah, that’s really exciting to be closing the whole thing. I’ve never been in the tent. It’s a Victorian style tent, stained glass windows, etc. I’ve only seen it on Google, so looking forward to seeing how it works.”

TG: What will you bring to the show?

B: “Well, some of the new material. Every gig gives us a chance to workshop new songs and from that we change things around. Improve it, some. We use the gigs as a tester.”

TG: I read that somebody was singing one of your songs after hearing it live for the first time.

B: “It was crazy. We played this song once in Wellington and once at the Lorde gig and there’s this girl on YouTube singing our song. She was at he gig and singing it. We thought what the hell? I don’t even know where they got the lyrics from.”

TG: So that’s proof that Woke Up Late is not a one hit wonder. Your new material has legs. They must be catchy songs, too.

B: “I guess so. Must have recorded it on her phone. But I don’t care. It was epic!”

TG: Hopefully, the upcoming Festival gig will be epic. Too.

B: “You know it will be!”

Interview by Tim Gruar

Drax Project play two gigs at The Festival Club, in the Spiegeltent, Wellington Waterfront 17-18 March
https://www.festival.co.nz/