THE SCENE: 'In a bid to remain sane, we formed a band'
Hoodaki: "We all work together, like music and enjoy craft beer."
In today’s THE SCENE profile Hoodaki frontman Jago Byatt provides an insight into the Southland group and their journey.
What’s your music style?
We are a guitar driven rock/pop/indie band.
Tell us about your music Journey?
In a bid to remain sane, we formed a band. We all work together, like music and enjoy craft beer. Not long after getting together (2008ish), we had a chance to record with a student at SIT.
We lucked out because the student was Graeme Woller from Into The East. He did a great job. The songs were old songs I wrote in England.
We used to learn 4 covers and then go to the Globe in Riverton for open mic nights.
After doing this for a while, our set grew big enough to start doing a few paid gigs.
The biggest gig being a conference up in Auckland at Sky City. The whole time I kept on writing songs and managed to coax the lads into recording a few more. We now have 12 original recordings on Spotify etc and regularly play originals at our gigs.
What are your musical influences?
I love The Who, The Specials, Blur, The Beatles, The Damned, The Kinks and many more.
People say that they can hear a bit of the English influence in our music, but some have suggested there's a bit of a Flying Nun sound happening too!
Give us an insight into your creative process?
There is no real formula. Sometimes it starts with a riff, sometimes words, sometimes the whole thing pops into my head.
Jimmy's Jam Jar popped into my brain almost fully formed as I drove up to Queenstown.
Others can sometimes take a little longer to complete.....but it will drive me mad until I solve the puzzle.
The process is fun and far better than going brain-dead looking at my phone!
I gave up playing my daft song ideas on guitar to my bandmates and decided that creating home demos was a better way of selling my ideas.
Bandlab has made this process so much easier. Once the lads give the thumbs up, we'll give it a bash.
After a few rehearsals, we'll have it sorted. Once in the studio, ideas and refinements are encouraged.
Simon and Paul's voices are always added. We even managed to coax Matt Ward into singing a wee bit on our latest tunes.
Any enjoyable gigs that stand out?
We've played a few times at the Tuatara, and some of our songs are starting to get into a few poor souls' heads :) We played up in Auckland at a battle of the bands and won best original song with I Love My Bed.
What Hoodaki song have you offered up for Tribune readers?
I've attached a song called Killing Time.
No idea if it's our best, but it was fun to write. I wrote it during lock down.
It's basically what I got up to during those few weeks. The process kept me sane and the lads liked it.
The best bit was coaxing Emma Jarman to put some horns on it. I can't read or write music, but I managed to bah bah my idea to her and she turned it into a written score.
She got a couple of ex-students to learn the part. They came around to Hayden's and nailed it in a couple of takes.
We've never played it live with the horn section but would love to. It still works live even without the horns :)
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