Caitlin Park and Oliver Tank to join Active Child at his Laneway sideshows

We're big fans of Sydney's Caitlin Park (above) and Oliver Tank here at Bobbysix.com. Indeed, Park's stunningly beautiful debut album, Milk Annual, was one of the frontrunners in our Album of the Year poll (beaten to the prize by some bunch of chancers called Radiohead) and Tank also got a mention or two in our End of Year Review. So it is with excitement that we today discovered they will both be supporting LA resident Pat Grossi - aka Active Child - for a couple of sideshows to his St Jerome's Laneway Festival appearances in Australia this summer.

Intimately charting joy and heartbreak, battles with monogamy and love lost and rediscovered, Active Child's stories are tenderly delivered. From his father’s tenure at Priority Records (home to NWA and Dr Dre to name a couple), to his own choral experiences as a youngster, Pat draws from a wide range of inspirations including West Coast beats, soaring R&B and 1980’s New Order. He is unquestionably worth your attention.

As well as playing at St Jerome's Laneway Festival across Australia, you can catch Active Child headline a hugely impressive line-up featuring Caitlin Park and Oliver Tank in Sydney and Melbourne:

Sunday 29 January – Oxford Art Factory – Sydney
Tickets from Moshtix, online www.moshtix.com.au, by phone 1300 Get Tix (438 849), on your mobile via www.moshtix.mobi and Moshtix outlets.

Wednesday 8 February – East Brunswick Club – Melbourne. 
Tickets from the East Brunswick Club, online www.eastbrunswickclub.com, by phone 9388 9794 and 57 Swan St Richmond, 10am-8pm Mon-Sat.

Picture by Bobby Townsend

Getting To Know... The Fearless Vampire Killers

Guitarist Al Marx from Melbourne's The Fearless Vampire Killers tells Bobbysix.com a bit about the band:

The Fearless Vampire Killers are a really complementary group of people. Justin is the loveliest person you'll ever meet, Jacob is the most solid person I know, Sean is a boy in a man-suit, and I'm passionately flawed. We actually have quite divergent musical tastes. Though I feel we appreciate the same qualities in music, our different personalities interpret them in different ways so the music we personally enjoy can be quite varied. When we write, we all get to the same point down different avenues which I feel is one of our greatest strengths.

We like to write lyrics when we're feeling emotionally stressed. Not for some wanky pseudo-intellectual expression of pain, but simply because your reasoning is out of balance, and you see your viewpoint from a different angle. It makes it more interesting for the both of us. We can't really account for our musical inspiration. It's just a big pile of everything we've liked over the last 23 years and when we're looking for a melody something usually pops out. It's best not to wonder where it's been.

Our debut album is done! We actually recorded 95 percent of it two years ago. We had so many pathetic little setbacks along the way, but now it's sitting there on the shelves. It's a great relief to have the final product after much fluffing-about and be in a position to do something with it.

Melbourne is our home and I think it always will be. It's pretty hard to put my finger on it, but I think Melbourne is a very light-hearted city. Everyone seems to get on pretty well and there seems to be less social pressure than most other cities I've been to. You can just be what you are without the pressure to state what you are.

It might surprise people to learn that we don't surf. Many people ask us that, particularly north of Canberra. We love the beach and getting thrashed about by the waves, but frankly Victoria has less of the warm sunny paradise waves and more cold ferocious waves peeling off from the endless swirling chaos of the Southern Ocean. That doesn't make the learning process very appealing.

Our album launch at The East Brunswick Club this Saturday will be fantastic. I swear. Your performance is always susceptible to little distractions and your gigs can suffer because of that. But I feel this gig is going to be a massive sigh of relief for all of us. It's the end of a chapter and we'll be pulling it all out. It's like an enormous group therapy session you can watch through the suspicious mirror on the wall.

Interview by Bobby Townsend. You can find out more about The Fearless Vampire Killers at their Facebook page. They launch their album at the East Brusnwick Club on Saturday 26th November.