Interview: The Naked and Famous

New Zealand indie rock band The Naked and Famous are bringing their tour to the UK this month and we were lucky enough to catch up with band member Aaron Short about their debut album Passive Me Aggressive You, their never-ending tour and being secret fans of Gossip Girl. 













You’re quite a new band and you only released your debut album last year. So tell us, who are The Naked and Famous?

We kicked off at the beginning of 2008 and released our first two EPs which are just about to be made available in the UK. It was me, Thom and Alisa who first made up the band and started putting all those EPs together. Jesse and David, our drummer and bassist, joined us the following year and in 2009 we started developing the album. The album then came out 2010, sorry 2010 for us in Australia and New Zealand, and the beginning of this year for the rest of the world. We’ve just been touring like crazy ever since. And by the looks of it it’s never going to stop!

Some of the songs of your album, Passive Me Aggressive You, have a kind of electro-pop feel, a bit like MGMT, are you influenced by bands like them?

There’s not a lot of influence there. We do get the comparison quite a bit, especially with Young Blood or Punching in a Dream. With both of them there’s not a lot of commonly well-known music out there that people can relate it to. At first people will generally say “your stuff is a bit like MGMT” but I think as soon as you listen to the album and put it all in context those comparisons kind of fade away between us. We’ve got a huge amount of influences between us but I come from an electronic background and Alisa has a lot of female singer/songwriter style influences that come through.

You’re bringing your tour across here to the UK next month. Are you excited to come here?

We’ve already done it a few times this year. We left New Zealand in January and we’ve been touring ever since. We will be going until April and we’ve already done like three Europe tours. We did a full tour of the UK in February, and I’m actually just sitting on our bus right now. We’re in the middle of a full month tour of the States, so we’ve gotten pretty used to the whole touring thing. It’s going to be nice to come back to the UK and revisit all those places from earlier on this year and spend a bit more time taking in the scenery rather than it all being a mad rush.

Is it really different playing in the UK to say America?

Yes, because Americans are generally more talkative. They’re a little bit more vocal. We get on stage and always focus in on each other. We’re not the kind of band who stands and gets the crowd all hyped up. That’s not really our thing.  On the whole every place we’ve been to has such a passionate following of people and it’s been really overwhelming and pleasing to see every place we visit. It’s been great fun.

Your debut album came out in New Zealand last year and you’ve had a lot of award nominations for this. You also got nominated for a BBC award. How does it feel to get that kind of recognition?

It’s all pretty overwhelming stuff. All these award nominations, the BBC Sound of 2011, before we got that we didn’t even really know what that award was or what it meant, so it’s an entirely different world for us. It’s not a culture that we’ve followed or been exposed to a lot. From New Zealand coming up next month we’ve got like six nominations at the New Zealand Music Awards. It’s crazy, crazy things to get and they keep popping up but yeah, they’re pretty overwhelming.

A lot of your songs have been used in TV programmes. Two of your songs were in Gossip Girl and there was one in The Vampire Diaries as well. Do you think that plays a big part in letting people know who you are?

It’s quite funny whenever someone tells us our songs have been in Gossip Girl because we’re secretly Gossip Girl watchers, especially if they say two songs because that’s more than one season as well. We’ve all watched four seasons and a couple of us are still going on the latest one that’s just come out. It’s exciting because those things expose us to an entirely different audience. You know the people that are watching Gossip Girl might not necessarily be the people that hear us playing on the radio. It’s a way to expose yourself to an entirely different group of people. It’s also a way to make an income from your career. I mean, things are changing so much now and with record sales being such a challenging thing to make money from it’s now turning more to things like getting in movies, getting on TV commercials, getting on TV shows that supply you with the money to carry on being a musician as a full-time career.

So what’s the plan next? Have you got plans to make a second album anytime soon?

Yeah definitely. I mean we’ve got a little bit of down-time over Christmas so I think we’re looking at a month off from touring. Having a month off is going to be nice to just settle down somewhere and have a breather for a while, set up a little home studio and just enjoy being creative and make some new music. This tour is going to carry on until the end of April and then after that there’ll be time to move into phase two of making the next album and getting serious with that.

- Samantha Taylor