Kisschasy guitarist Sean Thomas still has to work as a gardener as a day job to support his rock ‘n roll habit. It's ‘country rock ‘n roll' he claims, out in the paddocks with horses chopping away at trees.
“I've recently moved to the city,” he explains, “but I still do some work back home when I am at home, and I do a similar sort of thing when I'm in the city as well.”
Sean agrees that combining a regular job with playing in a band can be pretty tough, but that he'd rather be working with his hands than sitting around twiddling his thumbs. “Financially it helps too,” he explains, “as you don't make any money in rock ‘n roll mate.”
Well, Kisschasy very well may be able to do so if they get picked up by an international major label – the likes of Sire's Seymour Stein have been spotted checking out the band in New York, but he's yet to whisk the band away from the clutches of Australia.
“Nah, nothing like that,” Sean says with a chuckle. “They rocked up at some of the shows we played in the US and they're certainly on talking terms with us, but as far as record contracts go there's nothing too exciting to talk about. We're just making friends in the US, which is why we keep going back there.”
Kisschasy have made it a habit to get on a variety of different tours that have broadened their musical appreciation in addition to their fanbase – in 2005, they backed up from a support slot with Kiwi rockers Shihad to hit the road with pop-punkers Simple Plan. The band is recently returned from another diverse bill, where Kisschasy headed around the nation playing their biggest venues yet as opening act for the Living End, with wonderful Perth four-piece Gyroscope sandwiched between the pair.
Every tour we go on there's a lot you can take away from as a band,” Sean explains, “and there's just so much to learn from the Living End; they've done so many miles. We always have a good time with Gyroscope, and all that has made us all the more keen for the next tour that we're going to do. We had our first rehearsal for it the other day and none of us have been that excited for it since the first tour we ever did.”
For their debut album United Paper People, Kisschasy aimed to make a good record that would find them a spot on the radio, and with songs like “Do-Do's and Whoa-Oh's” and “Face Without a Name” that wasn't an issue. But for their next release, Sean explains that the band intend to step it up. “With the second album it will be completely different. Also with the first album we made it quite diverse – we can fit into that ‘emo-rock' category, and it starts off like that.”
If United Paper People proved one thing, it's that Kisschasy are not a one-dimensional ‘emo' act –songs like the acoustic “Morning” or recent single “The Shake”, which features a heap of strings, is unlike anything most emo acts could ever come up with. “That's the thing,” he says, warming to the subject matter. “It's a category that we seem to be somewhat in, but I've always felt the best bands of any genre are the bands that take on board other influences.”
He doesn't believe that the breadth of sound found on United Paper People put a sense of pressure on the band in terms of how they were perceived as a live act and also into the future recordings. “We just play for our fans and our fans seem to like what we do,” Sean explains. “We make music that we want to make. We're not counting on it to pay the rent so it's about art for us and it's not about selling the records. We made a poppy album because we wanted to make a pop album not because we wanted to sell a certain amount. It sold ten times as much as our EPs and we were expecting it to sell the same amount.”
So will the second album find the band following a similar template-
“We may,” he says, tightlipped and noncommittal. “Or we may make a straight-up balls-out rock record. We don't know yet because we're in demo stage, and it could go either way. For the first record we wanted to make it diverse so that most bands get to their third or fourth album and make diverse records and people say ‘where are they going-', but people did that for our first record which is good because now we can go either way. People wouldn't be surprised if we came out with a totally acoustic record or if we came out with a half-electronic record or a completely balls-out rock record, because there's all those sort of songs on the first album.
“We're pretty deep into it,” he says of the planning stages for the next release. “We're really getting into that, and at the moment we've got a couple more demos to do, but the rehearsals are all geared toward the tour that's coming up.”
Kisschasy seemed to take off very quickly – they didn't have much time to really coalesce as a group in the wake of their album's release, but instead found themselves seemingly non-stop on the road. “Just having us in the room and remembering what it was like before touring and showcasing overseas and albums selling and being in magazines that we never expected to be in,” is how Sean describes the recent rehearsals, but explaining that it's also been a chance for the band to test out new material. “We always want to try new things.”
