Grant Smillie
Now you’re a pretty busy man. As one half of TV ROCK, you play all around the place, Number 1 in the Victorian DJ Poll for inthemix in 2006…..How do you juggle all of that with being a swinging bachelor?
GS: (Laughs) The old bachelor quip. Haha. It’s a good schedule to have to be honest with you. All the jobs that I do and everything I am involved with is generally a lot of fun. You get to interact with great people. You know, some people sit behind their desks their whole life without getting a pat on the back for a job that they do, yet if I make a good record on a Saturday night or a Friday night or whatever night it is, when you have a thousand people with their hands in the air singing along to your own records there is no better feeling that you can have and with such instant gratification. From that respect I have a great time and I also get to drink on my job, which is probably a bonus as well
TL: (Laughs) We would all love that. I think if I drunk on this job there would be some pretty poor interviews.
GS: Well you know it could be questionable. You never know, you might actually have a great time and uncover a whole new talent you never know. Maybe next time I think give it a shot (laughs)
TL: I think I might. Now you guys have scored yourselves 2 ARIA awards for TV ROCK of course and you have spent the longest time in the Aussie top 10 in the whole of Australian history. That’s a pretty mean feat!
GS: Yeah, it’s a pretty interesting story how that all came about. The record noone wanted to sign, no label wanted to pick it up, which I why I started my own record label. We put it out and it went on to sell a hell of a lot of copies for a debut single and we set a precedent that we have never been able to match. You know every time you think you have a hit on your hands, you don’t and when you don’t think you have one it ends up being a really strong record. So I think we just try to put out music that we think has a lot of quality about it and from there you just sort of put it in the hands of the people that dance on the dance floor and they generally vote with their feet and their pockets, which is all we can hope for
TL: Definitely. And speaking of TV Rock. Your early stuff we could fairly say was 90’s influenced and your latest stuff is could be considered quite progressive. When did you decide to change your sound?
GS: After the first record we were a bit green and we sort of had these big record labels that all of a sudden said ‘you need to do an album, quick put out some more stuff’ and as a consequence we were sort of forced to try to make pop. Quite frankly we are shit at making pop music. We didn’t really get it so we just went back to what we knew, which was club music and we were like let’s just make some more club beats. Let’s not really worry about pop chart success and be happy with where we live and work, which is in a club environment. It was a conscious decision to go back towards the underground, but we still try to make them with the ability so we can play them wherever you might be. If you take ‘The Dukes Of Windsor’ (The Others) collaboration or even the latest record that we did ‘In The Air’. That is about to go into the pop charts in the UK, in the top 10 over there but it’s not written as a pop record. (The latest tracks) were written as club tunes and if they happen to cross over then so be it, but they were not really written for that purpose
Grant Smillie plays at FIERCE ANGEL @ THE IVY, SYDNEY Sunday 25th April
Author: Tim Little (21/4/10)
