REDHEAD will release its debut album Ordinary Girl this month. Though just a few months old as a band, it has been twelve years or more in the making.
Most will know vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Susie Keynes as one third of Fruit, the all-girl trio from Adelaide renowned for their harmonic pop and soaring vocal performances. Together with Mel Watson and Sam Lohs, Keynes made eight records between 1996 and 2006 and forged a considerable international following through relentless touring around Australia, the US and Europe.
In November 2006, however, unforgiving schedules and diverging interests led the threesome to call a hiatus: “We were on tour in North America and had our last show in Seattle, and we were putting it to bed for a while because everybody decided the time was kinda right to get out of the little pattern we were in of touring and making records and…knock on some other doors of opportunity.”
Keynes returned home to Adelaide, content to hang up the guitar for a while and settle into suburban normality. “I wasn’t burnt out, but I didn’t know what I was gonna make, and I was just waiting to see which way my heart and my head were going to push me.” After a couple of months, she found a new motivation: “I’ve always been a bit of a rocker, and loved it when Fruit was in its full format with drums and bass, and I could really fang out on my electric guitar a lot more.”
After ten years of creating highly-crafted pop with two other singer-songwriters in Fruit, Keynes was ready to strip back to a more elemental sound. She turned up the amp a little, switched to analogue pedals and just enjoyed fiddling with new guitar tones: “It’s like pulling a blanket off something and getting back to things that are a little more simple. And I liked it”.
With a bag of new songs, Keynes called upon bassist CJ Rhodes for some “musical noodling”. Keynes and Rhodes were first introduced a couple of years ago in Nashville by Fruit’s drummer, Yanya Boston, while Fruit was touring North America and Rhodes was attending bass master-classes with Regi Wooten. The pair bonded over a backpackers’ ritual – watching the AFL grand final live at a bar in the wee hours – and soon became friends. Back in Adelaide, she enlisted Rhodes to add bass to her new songs.
After a couple of gigs as a duo, Boston agreed to add drums and REDHEAD was born. (The name refers to Keynes’ cropped red hair, by which she was often distinguished from her Fruit bandmates, and by which she’ll now be remembered by Fruit fans when she tours with REDHEAD. Very clever.) With a few more gigs and a live recording at the Grace Emily under their belts, and recording started on the new album, it was clear that REDHEAD’s output bore little resemblance to Fruit’s trademark sound: “It’s almost by accident, but I think it’s a signature feature, that there’s actually no harmonies on this record”. The harmonies that were so fundamental to Fruit’s success quickly proved incongruent with Keynes’ new material, thereby confirming to her that she had achieved the looser sound she was aiming for: “I just thought, as I was recording it, this sound doesn’t want harmonies…I was going to double up and do my own harmonies, but I just thought, no, I just wanted to keep it simpler and, sort of, more of an analogue-y feel and less expansive and…like a bunch of fives right there”.
Ordinary Girl will be launched at the Governor Hindmarsh on June 20 with Adam Page and John Woods Band in support before REDHEAD departs for a fifteen-date North American tour.
