Parlez-vous Francais? If so, please take off your top. Or at least that’s what Aussie rockers Art vs Science would like to see if their hit single, Parlez-Vous Francais, is anything to go by. These guys have taken Australia by storm, have won a J Award for the video to their single and are now set to make your summer festivals rock that little bit harder. Drummer Dan W took some time to chat with OUTinPerth about their plans for global domination.
So you’re riding on the success of your lead single Parlez-Vous Francais – how’s that all been?
It’s been great. It’s far exceeded anything we really expected. The film clip started doing quite well as well and the whole song’s taken us up a notch. It’s been great, absolutely great.
Your next single, Friend in the Field, is quite a melodic shift. What can you tell us about that single?
That’s sort of the last single off the EP before we release the album. We’d done a couple of sort of banging, shouting dance tracks; we wanted to remind people that we were capable of melodies, especially before the album drops, because it’s going to be sort of a mix of both things. So we didn’t want to leave people with the impression that we could only do shouty dance music.
What can you tell us about the forthcoming album?
We’re probably recording it over the next two months, hoping to finish up in March. We’re recording it with the guy that we did our EP with, because we like his judgment and it’s worked with him well in the past, so it seems like it’d be crazy not to do it again. At the moment, it’s set for a June/July release, somewhere around that time, so hopefully you’ll be hearing some new music from it quite soon. We’ll actually be playing quite a lot of the tracks at Good Vibrations in February, so hopefully they go well.
Out of all of those festivals, do you have an all-time summer festival story that you can share with our readers?
There’s a video on YouTube – I think that’s from Falls, actually – and this guy is having the time of his life by himself, completely by himself and everyone’s like sitting down around him kind of chilling out in the middle of the afternoon or whatever. And he attracts these other couple of people who come over and start dancing with him, and pretty soon there’s this critical mass of dancing people and it turns into this massive, massive, massive dancing party. It’s hilarious. It just goes to show that as soon as a whole bunch of people start doing one thing, everyone will follow them. You need that first guy to take that step, otherwise it’s a big failure.
On the flipside to that question, do you have an all-time festival horror story that’s happened to you or someone you know?
I saw a guy fall off one of those rigging things in a tent once. You know they’ve got those poles that hold up the tents, in the music sort of tents. I saw a guy scaling one of those and sort of try to gracefully jump off and he kind of tripped and landed on someone; that was pretty bad. He was okay, I think, but he landed on some girl and that was kind of strange. But luckily that wasn’t one of those instances when he climbs one thing and then someone else climbs and it’s critical mass and then everyone climbs and then everyone and then everyone just falls. That didn’t happen.
Art Vs Science will be appearing at Good Vibrations at The Claremont Showgrounds on Sunday February 14. For further info about the festival’s lineup and to purchase tickets visit www.gvf.com.au
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