Here comes the (red) sun
Andrew P Street watches for the new dawn of The Red Sun Band
It's not all been smiles and sunshine for The Red Sun Band, you know. After coming out of the gate with Peapod back in 2004. Despite starting with one of the strongest Australian debuts of recent times things seemed to slowly grind to a halt for the Sydney trio. Aborted recording sessions and record company wrangling left the band demoralized and unenthused: in fact, I confess to writing a particularly scathing review of a show where the clearly wished they were anywhere but on stage.
"Yes, I did read that, unfortunately," singer/guitarist Sarah Kelly sighs. "We were at a point then where things weren't really working out between the members of the band and that we were feeling pretty lackluster. We'd had a couple of difficult days during those shows, and also John [Matthews, drummer] was really sick."
Things didn't get much better even as the band dusted themselves off and began work on album number two, The Shiralee. No sooner had superb first single ‘Like An Arrow' been announced than new pics of the band were circulated, featuring only Sarah and her keyboard-playing younger sister Lizzie: the trio were now a duo.
"I can't remember what the last show was," Sarah replies when I ask whether that lackluster show was the final hurrah for the line-up. "I remember when he left, but I don't remember what the last gig was. It's funny. That was possibly the last show. I just never thought to work it out."
That's in the past now, with the sisters Kelly ready to hit the road in support of The Shiralee, with a new drummer in place and a fresh determination to make up for lost time.
"I think we had a little bit of bad luck," Sarah shrugs. "I don't want to make it sound like some sort of sob story, but we had a lot of trouble with our label. We did a lot of touring and we were given the impression that if we did a lot of promotion we'd be able to make a record sooner rather than later, and it just didn't materialize. And it was really frustrating for us because we had what we thought was an album written and we were just unable to make it. So we had to extricate ourselves from this record deal and then we set about making the record ourselves. And we did it the second we got out of that contract: we'd made the record within two months."
As the songwriter and driving force since the band's inception, that must have been a personally trying period. There must have been times when Sarah was tempted to chuck it in and...
"...Have a real life? Oh, we totally had those moments. I mean, we went back to university ‘cause we were just sick of it: we'd turned 25 and we were like ‘oh, this is never gonna work out, we've gotta grow up'" she laughs. "I guess we just came around eventually, and that was thanks to a lot of the people who were around us. Like, I won that grant that was awarded by the Big Day Out [the Jessica Michalik Contemporary Music Endowment] and it made such a difference to me at a time when our record label just weren't telling us what was going on and we couldn't tour anymore: we toured for two years and you can't just keep flogging one record. We'd done all this work and things were just slipping away. It was very frustrating. But we came through it. We're an 100% indie band now, and that's the way I like it."
The Red Sun Band launch The Shiralee at the Oxford Arts Factory on Fri 27 June, and are on the bill for The Great Escape at Newington Armoury over Sat 4 and Sun 5 Oct
You can listen to one of their tracks 'The Eagle' by using the player below.