Biography - DOC

							The Audreys When the Flood Comes
Biography

“There’s a big change coming and it won’t be long, before we’re all in this together.”

For every up, there is a down. For black, there is white. For day, lurks night. Or so The Audreys
discovered following the warm embrace garnered by their debut longplayer, Between Last Night and Us.

The album catapulted The Audreys on to the national stage and saw them collect the 2006 ARIA
Award for Best Blues & Roots Album, but the accompanying success left them high and dry in a
songwriting drought. Vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Taasha Coates says it took her and fellow
songwriter/guitarist Tristan Goodall an age to get back to writing.

 “We were just a little Adelaide band that made an album, then suddenly we were touring constantly
and playing on bigger and bigger stages. Everything was new,” Taasha explains. “It was all so
overwhelming and took up so much of our time that is was 18 months before we wrote another song.”

But in a universe controlled by dynamic balance, the drought was broken by a flood. Rather than a
metaphorical flood of songs, it was a soaking of sentiment – a darkness, a foreboding – that seeps into
the corners of their sophomore album, When the Flood Comes.

“The flood as in the end of the world, you know, the apocalypse,” Taasha reveals.

Not exactly what you’d expect from the Adelaide five-piece, comprising Coates (voice, piano, melodica,
ukulele), Goodall (acoustic and electric guitars, banjo), Michael Green (violin, lap steel, backing vocals),
Lyndon Gray (upright and electric bass) and Toby Lang (drums).

Yet on When the Flood Comes, The Audreys shatter all expectations. They deliver an album of lyrical
and sonic beauty that expands their musical template beyond the alt-country-tinged instrumentation
and smoky pop of their gorgeous debut. Musically, it’s a revelation that almost defies categorisation. It
aches. It breaks. And it drips with passion.

“We always knew it would be a different album because the band is different, and bigger, but sound
wise we were never sure what to expect from it,” Taasha says.

The dark portent that undercuts opening track Chelsea Blues and reappears on many of the 12 tracks
showcases how much The Audreys have grown as a band.
“There are certainly lyrical ideas that run through the whole album,” Tristan agrees.

It’s there in Chelsea Blues. It resides in the album’s title track and in Here He Lies, a funeral march
written for a friend who died young. Or in Sally & the Preacher, a salvation song where hope is found in
the bottom of a bottle.

“Quite a few of the songs are about drinking,” Tristan confesses.

The first two songs penned ended up being two of the album’s standout cuts, the first radio single
Paradise City and the aforementioned Here He Lies.

“Paradise City has changed a lot from the version we’d started playing live but it’s changed for the
better,” Taasha says. “I wrote the lyrics for that with my sister, Danika … there are a couple of tracks
on the album that we wrote together. She’s my lyrical sounding board.”

With the drought broken, Taasha and Tristan decided to tickle their creative juices with an overseas
songwriting sojourn, taking in a visit to Nashville and a stay at New York’s famous The Hotel Chelsea
(aka the Chelsea Hotel), digs that have housed everyone from Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Janis
Joplin to William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Dylan Thomas. (It also lives in infamy as the place where
Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols allegedly stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death in 1978.)

“Songwriting can be really hard emotionally,” Taasha reveals, “and we just like to string ourselves out
on it. We sat in a seedy hotel room and drank too much and fought with each other. It’s part of the
process. We’d spend the days writing in the hotel and then we’d go out at night and hit a bar or
something.”
“We wrote a bunch there at the Chelsea,” Tristan says of Chelsea Blues, the raunchy Lay Me Down,
When the Flood Comes, Small Things and Anchor – a tender sea-shanty. “Then we were really on a roll
so we came home and wrote a bunch more.” Sally & the Preacher, Closing Time, the ethereal Head so
Heavy, the pedal steel infused More to a Sinner and Songbird, a Bad Seeds inspired epic, were all
completed at the band’s rehearsal studio in the Adelaide Hills.

Once the songs were written, The Audreys entered Yikesville Studios in Melbourne to work with
producer Shane O’Mara, who also crafted Between Last Night and Us.

“It took a lot longer than the first album and it was a lot harder. If the third album is this difficult it may
be my last,” Taasha jokes.
“The bed tracks started to go down quite easily,” Tristan recalls. “But as we got into tracking and
layering up parts things started to get more and more involved.”

That time amounted to three sessions at Yikesville, with The Audreys determined to get the album
right.

“We’d go away for a few weeks and come back, often with fresh ideas. Sometimes we just wanted to
go back and re-do stuff because we weren’t happy with it or wanted to try a different approach,”
Taasha says.

The Audreys’ determination to nail the longplayer goes beyond what was laid to tape. The artwork
incorporates evocative original paintings, crafted by award-winning graphic design team Debaser, who
have worked with Powderfinger, The Cat Empire and created The Audreys’ eye-catching Sheets to the
Wind tour poster.

Now comes the next phase for The Audreys as the band prepare to take When the Flood Comes out
on the road.

“We’re really looking forward to adding these new songs to our live set. We’re always going to be the
quietest act at the rock festivals and the loudest act at the folk festivals,” Taasha muses “but it
somehow seems to work. I guess we’ve just got our own music.”

Our own music.

Three simple words that capture the essence of The Audreys and When the Flood Comes.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:

PRESS
Anouk at AVM Publicity / ph: 0411 724 598
Anouk@avmpublicity.com

RADIO/TV
The Right Profile / ph: (02) 9519 6419
John Zucco: john@therightprofile.com.au
Tim West: tim@therightprofile.com.au

www.myspace.com/theaudreysband
www.theaudreys.com