Expatriate – 24-11-2009

Interview with: Expatriate
By: Nina Mende

At the Placebo show I was having a nice chat and interview with the opening act Expatriate. I was mostly talking with Ben and Damian.

Since I didn’t know them I asked them to tell a little about the band. The singer began telling that they are a band from Australia founded four years ago. They have a big fan base and career over there. But a year and a half ago they got a call from a manager in London who wanted to work with them. So it’s now one year ago they went to Berlin where they are all still living. During the summer festivals they did a lot of touring through Europe and then started to tour with Placebo. Even though they have been a band for a little over four years now, since they went to Berlin it feels like a new start. Especially the past six months and in particular the tour with Placebo because they have been meeting so many new people and playing in front of so many new people, and also playing in front of such big audiences. They just released their record here and are working on a new one that will hopefully be released in September 2010. That’s at least the plan for next year.

The festivals they played this year was Rock am Ring and Rock im Park in Germany, Forest Nation in Belgium, … ten or twelve festivals. They played a few shows with Placebo in Bucharest, in Romania and in Istanbul/Turkey. That was amazing because they saw the summer coming. The first day where they had the summer coming was at the first show in Romania. It was such an amazing gig. Even Placebo said it was one of their top 3 or five gigs they have ever done so far. There was about 8 000 people in this sort of car park, but it was such a great vibe and the sun was just setting, such a beautiful natural backdrop to the show. It was just amazing. That was also when Placebo invited Expatriate on the tour. They saw their show there and said “Look, we really liked your gig, do you want to tour with us?” Expatriate was amazed and said yes of course.

Living in Berlin is wonderful. It took them a while to call it home. But now they do. Berlin is a very open minded city with an impressive history which has probably attracted many people like Expatriate. People that want to be around open minded and artistic people, especially musicians. David Bowie, Iggy Pop, The Cure, Bono and U2 and many other great people came to Berlin and did some great music there. But that also puts some pressure on you. Especially people back home in Australia say stuff like “Oh, so you’re moving to Berlin? Well then you must be writing an amazing new record.” But then again it is a sort of comfortable pressure. They have a good group of friends in Berlin now; some of the band members even have German girlfriends now. It’s now becoming a home now. As Expatriate played in Berlin after four weeks of touring and they entered the town, a sigh came out and they felt like coming home, a great feeling.

I was wondering now, since he said they have a quite big fan base in Australia if they are not afraid of losing them or if the fans there miss Expatriate. So I got told that some of the Australian fans are wondering where the band is now, and also they might be losing some of their fans there, but a good thing is that Expatriate get to go back and play with the new material. The band is very comfortable with their stuff now and they are convinced that they come back with a great new record. The singer pointed out here that he doesn’t think it matters for how long they are gone; it is a matter of how they come back with the new material then. They are pretty confident that the fans will stay true to them and be there when the band returns, and also that the fans will love the new songs. But Expatriate hasn’t forgotten about their fans back home.

Expatriate is going to be back in Australia for a tour next year, and they are going to put the record out there first and present it on the tour. Then they will be back in Europe and tour with it here. Trying to constantly build up a fan base in Europe.

At that point of the interview everybody got distracted by the tour jackets they all got from Placebo…..

Back to the interview we talked about where they are home based now: Berlin or Australia. The first answer was Berlin, but when they are in Australia for about 3 months to promote and tour properly with the new material, Australia will be home. But then they will definitely come back to Berlin, because the manager is based in Europe. She is amazing and does a lot for the band but she can’t really do much for the guys in Australia. So they have to come back. And even though Expatriate is from Australia there is only a limited amount of people and places to play for and at. There are only 25 mio people, and you can only play for them so many times. Whereas Europe is much bigger and there are more people to play for. So it just makes sense to make Berlin a home, since it is cheaper than London and New York and such.

Expatriate has played in the US a couple of times. They played a festival in Texas there, but the USA seems kind of irrelevant for them. But Expatriate also explained that they recorded their record in Seattle and they found it beautiful there. The band feels much more European though. So they decided to focus more on Europe. Many great bands that they were influenced by were from Europe.

After drifting off talking about different places in the world and where we all have lived we somehow came back to the topic we began talking about and they told me about their experiences in Scandinavia: Expatriate played in Stockholm in Copenhagen and considered the crowd cool: Hardly any emotions shown and so on. Then they went to Helsinki and received such a warm welcome. Expatriate was amazed. They played an acoustic session in a record store there as well and the people were all so lovely to the band. Everybody seemed really warm there whereas Stockholm and Copenhagen were really cold.

The guitar player explained here that it also matters about where your hotel is based. Depending on that you have a certain impression of a city and it might be totally different from what the city actually is like. If you are only there for a night so you don’t have time to find out the real side of it. Like in Copenhagen they had a hotel nearby a crappy McDonalds and it wasn’t really nice. In Riga they stayed in the old town though and they just thought it was so beautiful. But he knows that Copenhagen also has pretty sides, but that is just not the side you always get to see when touring. Sometimes you’re lucky sometimes not. It is really hard to judge a city by only one night.
We suggested to write a tourist guide on that and laughed a lot about our different impressions of different cities.

Now I was wondering how the Placebo crowd is accepting Expatriate. That was something the band was also a little bit worried about in the beginning because Placebo fans sometimes seem to be very loyal and don’t really accept much other stuff. They are a really well established band and sometimes it feels like the fans think they own the band. But Expatriate got a surprising feedback from the fans. Like in Paris for example everybody was clapping along to the intro already and in the end just screaming and cheering terribly loud. After the show they were signing a lot of CDs and the reception has just been overwhelmingly good, which is great because Expatriate will do their own club shows soon. So hopefully some of the new fans they found during the Placebo tour will come there as well. But that is always an interesting thing when you tour with a band, you never know how the audience will receive and accept you. In Australia when you support bigger bands, they don’t really care about you.

Now I was asking about the roots.
Ben started telling about his life here now: He grew up in Indonesia, moving between Indonesia and Australia a lot. He found it a really great way of growing up, because he went to an international school there and met people from different countries with different cultures. He had friends from all over the world. You grow up as a citizen of the world instead of your home country then. In a way it is a great privilege, on the other hand it is a little strange because you don’t really have a home then. You don’t feel too grounded anywhere. But that is what he is writing the songs about and it gives him a lot of input for his creativity. It is hard to explain to people who haven’t lived it. But that somehow is the connection between Chris and Ben because Chris’ parents moved from Greece to Australia after World War II. He was living in Australia and didn’t move around as much but in his house there was a strong Greek household with all the traditions going on. So he was basically constantly moving in between these two cultures. As a teenager it is somehow important to feel settled somewhere, and if you don’t you have even more struggles besides “the common teenager struggles” one has. Many of Expatriate’s songs are about that. That’s why the album is called “In The Midst Of This” because you are in the middle of moving waters and it’s eating at you but you just have to keep on going and try to get out of it but you can’t. It’s hard to realize. But it seems like the best art comes from suffering. And Ben also thinks that that’s what their fans love about it, because they feel a bit tortured as well. It’s digging deep and always a challenge.

That was the interview with Expatriate. Quite interesting and I’m looking forward to what’s to come.
Thank you.

Links:
Expatriate Official