Tallulah INTERVIEW

Tallulah: Chatting with Leroy, Callum, Miko and Gabe

Hailing from Sydney, Leroy and Callum share vocals while Miko plays the drums and Gabe plays guitar in this pop-punk four-piece. If you got to see them live at SESFEST, and even if you didn’t, frankly, now’s a good time to get to know the boys behind the band.

Tell me a bit about Tallulah. What is Tallulah? What is the essence? What's the vibe, the aura, the star sign? 

Leroy: I’m a double Aries. I tell that to people and they're like that's terrible, which checks out. But me, Gabe and Miko met in high school and we've been best friends since year seven. Then Callum auditioned for the band. Initially we didn't want him.

Miko: We wanted his best friend who actually declined us.

Leroy: And then we got Callum. 

Feels like a bit of a rebound situation. 

Callum: [The other guy] played funk, though, and played bass with his fingers, which is lame.

Gabe: When we were strictly a Blink-182 cover band.

You were a Blink-182 cover band?

Leroy: A little bit. 

Did you guys will bond over that? 

Gabe: Yeah, my older brother put us all onto it.

Do you all agree on a favourite song by Blink or does everyone have a different answer?

Leroy: ‘Feeling This’ would be my answer.

Miko: I like ‘Wasting Time’, that's my favourite one. 

I like ‘Feeling This’ because I think that's a song where Mark and Tom did different verses and then came together.

Miko: We do actually try and incorporate that as well 

Does everyone write lyrics?

Leroy: I guess me and Cal, kind of write the lyrics together, sometimes separately. 

Callum: I think a lot of the time we both write the music part. But there's not a contractual thing or anything. 

Miko: There's no like, rule of thumb, right? 

Callum: I feel like, at the moment, we've been getting better at all of us contributing something to the lyrical side of it. 

So, why Tallulah, who is Tallulah?

Leroy: It doesn't actually mean anything. Tallulah, I think it just sounds nice. 

Miko: I think we just wanted it to be a single word.

Leroy: You know, like The Beatles! Something recognisable and easy to spell, even though everybody spells it wrong. 

So, you guys are from Sydney. How do you find making music in the Sydney scene?

Leroy: I think a lot of it is, at least for us, is owed to a certain rehearsal studio called Talon Music, which is where we met a lot of the bands that we play with at the moment. 

Miko: Yeah, they're like our best friends

Leroy: Brent Williams, who runs the runs the rehearsal studio and the guitar shop at the front is the pillar head of the community for us. 

Gabe: He used to be the roadie and guitar tech for the Hoodoo Gurus. 

Miko: Since the beginning, he's always just been there, listening to us when we've recorded at the studio. It's such a good place to be involved with.

Does it feel like more like collaborating with friends as opposed to just hardcore professionalism?

Leroy: That’s most important thing when we involve someone else in the process, like when we've gone with producers. In the past, we went with a guy called Ben Goldstein. We did our most recent project with a guy called Fletcher Matthews and, in both cases, they were just people that we really got along really well with. 

It must pretty cool to be a part of something that’s been around since the beginning of time, contributing to the tradition of music.

Leroy: Yeah 100%, it does feel weird sometimes. The stuff that we're most proud of, our recent stuff, at least to me, it's weird that like that just came out of somewhere—that didn't exist prior to collaborating together and that's pretty special.

Could you all want to take a moment to say why you chose to become a musician?

Miko: I was just always around music because my parents played music. My dad was a drummer. I played piano until I was seven when I broke my finger. I could only hold a drumstick in a cast and that’s when I started playing drums. 

Leroy: I think my parents had a big part in it for me, not like Miko, they didn't play music themselves, but they always encouraged me to try whatever I wanted. Then I was always really into film and music was another creative process where I realised that you can connect with people through that. I used to play bass when me, Gabe and Miko were just a three piece but then I think switching to guitar helped me song write a bit more. 

Callum: I think there was a kid in year nine who showed me Blink and he showed me all this music that I really, really liked it. I also love lyrics, I love the way you can story tell with lyrics but I think I'm the first person in my family to do anything slightly musical.

Gabe: For me it was mainly my dad, he grew up in northeast London in a very diverse area. He always plays music, he loves everything. World music, post punk, yeah so from my dad mainly. And then my brother, mum also loves her soul music.

Is there anything you guys are excited about for the future? Are you working on any goals?

Leroy: We're really excited this year. We recorded like five tracks with Fletcher. We're really excited for those to come out, they're coming out sporadically throughout the year as singles. 

Miko: We’re really proud of them. 

Leroy: Yeah, we're really proud of them and it feels like a new direction. A lot of our older tracks was stuff from high school, almost 10 years ago now. 

Miko: I think, we want to play like a huge stadium, make $4 million a year.

But you're pretty close to that? 

Miko: God, no, there's a lot of work to do. 

Callum: I’m only at 1.2.

Miko: Yeah, yeah. We also just want to make more. I think we were so excited and amped after finishing those five songs. We gotta do more.

Leroy: I think our favourite thing to do is the songwriting.

Callum: And we’re playing a bunch of shows at the moment.

Miko: They’re so fun, we used to suck at playing shows and now we're getting better, which is cool. Makes such a difference.

So, you guys are starting to feel more comfortable on stage?

Callum: We were nervous for tonight. 

Leroy: We were but our biggest strength, I think, is that we’re all best mates who spend lot of time together outside of music. 

Miko: Even if there are tense situations between us, it's kind of secondary.

Leroy: Definitely and the band is really just an excuse to hang out with each other. 

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