Life sounds pretty dandy for Sparkadia frontman Alex Burnett, who is enjoying being home after spending the last 18 months touring throughout Europe. The band's debut album, Postcards, was nominated for a J Award, and although they lost out to the Presets, Burnett remains undoubtedly gracious, and positively focused on the future.
yourGigs (yG): How will Sparkadia prepare before taking to the Big Day Out (BDO) stage?
Alex Burnett (AB): Leading up to it we'll put some new songs in the set off our second record. We have a few pre-show routines and music we listen to. Each tour we have a different album or style of music that's exciting us, so if we put on disco music we go onstage dancing like disco, but if we put on weird '50s music we go on feeling very romantic and teenage. It's all very secret.
yG: What are your tips for a good Big Day Out?
AB: Sunscreen. You also really need to make a commitment to the bands you wanna see. If you half-see a band then leave to try see another band you can't get in the tent and then you miss their set, then you go back to the other one but they've finished. And obviously come see us 'cause we'll change your life.
yG: You've played some pretty major festivals overseas, was there any one that stood out?
AB: Glastonbury was probably the big one. It's such a prestigious festival ... The T in the Park festival was wild; Scottish people are wild. I don't think I've seen so many people peeing in public. We did a festival in a zoo in the English countryside called Zoo Thousand and Eight. Everyone was amazing hippies and it was just madness. The guy who ran it was named Stress Management; he changed his name to "Stress Management"! For the last song he put the smoke machine on and left it on, and in the end we left in this Apocalypse Now-type scenario.
yG: Got any interesting rock star stories to share?
AB: We were backstage at Wireless Festival the same day that Jay-Z was playing, and he walked in from his limousine with six huge bodyguards, and I was like, "Wow, look at that!", thinking I was talking to Dave, our drummer, and next to him was Boris Becker. I thought, "It can't get any funnier than this."
yG: I heard you wrote the lyrics for Postcards on a typewriter. Why did you decide to do that?
AB: The typewriter's a very rhythmic thing which helps with getting the flow of words. With the computer you can cut and paste and do different versions, but with a typewriter you can't delete, so you have to commit. It's conducive to writing exactly what's on your mind, as opposed to a 50 per cent representation of that ... It was freaky at Homebake 'cause we've been away for so long and I didn't realise the impact the album had had on people. There were like 3000 people in this tent singing all the words. I just wrote them to make sense of things in my life and it was awesome to see other people relating, and it essentially becoming their song.
yG: You've spent the last 18 months on the road. Do you feel like you've been on holiday or you need a holiday?
AB: We don't need a holiday. At times you gotta get up at 4am and you only got to bed at one, and you're hungover and you've got no money and you're homesick, but, far out, it's still a wonderful way to live. You get to go to all these different cities and meet all these people from different cultures and ways of life: the old, the young, the married, stalkers and celebrities. I wouldn't change it for the world, but it is nice to come home and be normal again. I would say that now is more of a holiday than the touring lifestyle. But you can't complain if you get the day off in Barcelona and get to go and see the Miro Museum, can you?
Aimee-Lee Curran
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