The Brag

Set Sail
Chasing Summer
By Birdie

Was it the music that came first, giving Set Sail the opportunity to play around the world? Or was it the band’s travel bug that inspired them to make music, and take off on tour? Not even violinist Josiah Willows is quite sure about that one, but what he does know is that so far he, guitarist Brandon Hoogenboom and drummer Joshua May have had the time of their lives. Playing across America and Europe? Check. Rockin’ this year’s ARIAs red carpet? Check. Getting arrested in Madrid? Check… And that’s just 2011.

“We just quit uni in November last year, and the plan was to try and get a gig or two in London,” says Willows. “Once we got to Europe it just spread out of control, and we ended up spending seven months travelling around the world. We had a lot of fun times – we slept in a van for a good month in America, and we drove over 17,000 kilometres in less than a month around the country… One of my biggest highlights was playing in Iceland in this community of 160,000 people. It still felt like a small town, even though it was a capital. The sun never set over there; you’d be up at midnight thinking it was the afternoon. There’s no sleeping there.”

Another obvious highlight for Willows was in Nashville, Tennessee, when he offered to give Nicole Kidman a copy of his band’s EP, only to have the actress insist that she purchase two copies instead. “Nashville we loved – it was the opposite to LA, where it was very Hollywood and artificial,” Willows explains. “Nashville has the same amount of stars, but it’s more of a community. One of the gigs we did had such a relaxed, cool vibe about it, with people just hanging out – and you could hardly tell that they were famous because of the attitude. We were just hanging out and having drinks with people like Kings Of Leon, then Nicole Kidman rocked up and she bought two of our CDs. We were going to just give them to her, but she was like, ‘Are you selling them?’ – so she bought them.”

Willows admits that very little of what the band has achieved so far would have been possible had they not been able to harness social media so successfully. “Social media is the only way that you can get the word out [these days],” he says. “People are following you only because you’re posting videos on YouTube and Facebook and keeping them in the loop about what you’re doing – without that, it wouldn’t be possible. At the same time, I really believe in the nature of the whole street promotion, [and the] guerrilla aspect of having a band. I’d love to see more bands take on that approach, do some secret shows and really build a fanbase from the ground-up. …It’s sort of like busking, but all around the world. It just felt natural for us to focus on other countries, rather than other cities. It was just a matter of going, ‘Well, instead of Sydney, let’s play in China!’ or ‘Instead of Perth, let’s play in Dubai!’ We literally left Australia with $800.”

In just one year, the group of uni drop-outs has gone on to release an EP (which, Willows says, has sold almost 10 000 copies) and make preparations for a full-length album, ready to be recorded next month. At present, they’re promoting a brand new single, ‘The Boat Song’. “We’re really looking forward to the shows, because it’s going to be very different to what people are used to seeing from us. Usually we’re in a pop-up format, which is very stripped down – sometimes our drummer even plays on a bucket on the ground. So this is very different. It will present the full spectrum of what we’re really like musically.”

What: The Riley Moore EP is out now
With: Holland
Where: The Oxford Art Factory
When: Thursday December 15