Barely time to catch a breath

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

It's been a big week for Breathe in what is turning out to be a very big year.

On Monday, the Wellington band supported Travis at the Auckland Town Hall. On Wednesday, the night before their new album hit stores, they played at a launch gig at Bar of the Stars.

The Asian karaoke venue in inner city Auckland was hired for the night - complete with a dwarf and a very tall transvestite on the door who greeted music retail, radio and media invitees with tickets to a post-show meat raffle - by record label Sony, who are very keen to see their new signings do well.

Signs of that big push are already apparent.

Despite a previously low profile, they're on the cover of local rock monthly Rip It Up and the second single and title track from the album Don't Stop The Revolution is currently a fixture in the New Zealand singles chart.

Effectively, Breathe are the first band to sprout in the "sonic bloom" of our cover story.

But unlike the other four groups, the five-piece aren't debutantes. They released their first album Pop Life in 1998 through Murray Cammick's label Felix. It didn't exactly set this part of the world alight, selling just 1200 or so copies.

But it did get them noticed as a band with quite a singer in frontman Andrew Tilby and a rustic pop-rock approach not dissimilar to nouveau roots American bands like the Counting Crows and the Wallflowers.

Apparently they were spotted, when supporting the Exponents at the Powerstation, by Sony A&R man Malcolm Black who was on the look-out for a band to take the now-defunct headliner's place - a pop-rock band for the people.

"Obviously we didn't really fufill that obligation," says Tilby.

We meet a few days before their big week at the Sony's offices where the band are milling about the plush environs in between promotional activities.

Tilby and guitarist Richard Small are nominated as interviewees.

But if they're excited by hitting the Kiwi rock big time, it's hard to detect in their quietly spoken, reticent demeanours.

By way of opening, there's much muso-speak about the recording sessions - much of it done at Karekare in the house-cum-studio where Crowded House, who Breathe can sound like sometimes, did their swansong Together Alone.

"We thought we were going to go out there and were a little bit worried we were going to make a hippie album full of slow, mellow songs.

"But you go out there and the place isn't like that. It's beautiful but it's a rugged landscape as well. It hardened us up quite a bit."

Well musically speaking, you could say Revolution has them caught between a rock and a soft place. And among the current crop of young Kiwi bands, their thoughtful, measured approach means they don't really fit in.

"And that's the way we like it,"says Tilby."We are not really conscious of it we just really do our own thing ... we never set out to say we will be like this or write a song like this, we just do it."

And do it big, as the lush sound of Revolution attests. That's major label recording budgets for you, says Small.

"It actually gives you more freedom. It certainly has with us. Like 'we want to put a string section on that song, can we have it?' 'Yeah sure'. Just things like that. We had a horn section recorded in Sydney."

Yes, they agree that the "sonic bloom" makes it a fun, competitive time to be a young - the five members have an average age of 25 - Kiwi band on the make.

And other than the success of the feelers and Stellar and a turnaround in commercial radio, Tilby has another theory about why so many bands are being thrust into the spotlight.

"Another reason that the industry looks a little bit better at the moment was a few years back New Zealanders were too scared to write pop songs because it wasn't cool. So they were all sitting there with feedback and drones on the bass and stuff like that, which is cool, but now people don't mind. They write pop songs, they are not ashamed to do it any more."

The pair admit that despite the creative time in the studio for the album, they have some work to do, especially as a live outfit.

Tilby: "We want to do really well live now because we haven't done as well as we should in the past."

Why's that?

"Confidence issues, I think. Also, the fact that the songs that we were playing, we were never really as happy with them as we should have been and that getting into a song that you don't really enjoy playing that much can be quite hard.

"And I also think getting up on stage and having fun as opposed to 'we've got a gig, we've got to play well, we've got to impress everyone' we should just get up on stage and play and have a laugh and enjoy and play music and get the audience into it."

Back at Bar of The Stars the band come on after an introductory video which has cameos from everybody from Prime Minister Helen Clark to Lord of The Rings director Peter Jackson and star Liv Tyler to Keith Quinn offering tongue-in-cheek insults about the band.

The group blast through the highlights of Revolution, pausing for effect on piano-led ballad When The Sun Comes which briefly reminds of Split Enz' I Hope I Never with its high-altitude vocals.

The night ends, of course, with the prize draw.

And as the tall man in the pink leather dress gives away that meat pack, the thought occurs that as ironic as the raffle is intended to be, it might actually be saying something about success, luck-of-the-draw and neatly packaged raw talent.