The Russian Winters

Sat 3rd Oct, 2009 in Features

In vino veritas, the old saying goes; in wine there is truth. Whether that holds true or not isn’t for fasterlouder to say. What we will say is that, sometimes, in beer there is an interview. At least that’s what happened when your obedient correspondent shared a pint with guitarist Sam Sterrett and drummer Ben Crooke of veteran Perth outfit The Russian Winters. Over a scarred wooden table in the Rosemount Hotel beer garden, the pair laid out the origins of the band…
Sam:
Dima (vocalist Kris Dimitroff) formed the band originally as a three piece about four years ago, and we weren’t members of the band at that time. He formed it with a good friend of his, Matty G. They were in a previous band, Team Jedi, together for many years. We kinda joined, well I joined, a year and a half after they formed. They wanted a lead guitarist to come on board, and Dim and I had known each other for a while before. And then Ben joined about a year later.
Ben:
Yeah, about 2006.
SAM:
And then Rob Stephens has come on board in the last year as our bass player. And although the line-up’s been changing up a bit over the last few years, but we’re really happy with it now. Everyone gels really well now. This is the Russian Winters.
When asked about what defines their style of music, Sam is less forthcoming at first, handballing the question to his bandmate.
SAM:
Benny, I’ll pass that over to you.
BEN:
Well, our sound, I guess , has definitely got a bit if a pop element to it. As far as categorising it, I don’t know… pop, rock/pop… I don’t know, what kind of sound do you reckon we got, Sam?
SAM:
I think definitely we all love melody, we all love our pop music, and we chuck in a bit of 80s at the moment. We were pretty much a guitar driven pop/rock band, when we first got to together, but now Benny incorporates samples and beats and backing tracks, and we also get onto the synths now, just because we wanted to experiment a bit, and we were getting a bit sick of just being a straight-up, guitar-driven rock band. So we’re incorporating synths now, and that tends to lead us a little towards the 80s, but we also like tight, structured songs. We’re not into big, jam-out, sessions in songs, where there’s extended outros to songs. We like writing nice, night, structured songs.
BEN:
Yeah.
SAM:
Yeah, tightly structured, sort of like an Interpol song
BEN:
Nicely put together, I guess.
SAM:
Yeah, we like nice, well thought out pop songs. We’ve all got very varying influences. I should mention that Dima’s a massive Cure fan and has been for many years. He’s also a big Beatles fan. I mean, most people you speak to are. But I think The Cure has influenced his style of song writing more than any other group. But we’re all fans of very different bands. I mean, I’m a big fan of Radiohead and that stuff.
BEN:
I’d say of late the sound is moving more towards a bit of Bowie and Split Enz, kind of combining that with the Interpol roots and the Cure roots and coming together with a very interesting sounds.
SAM:
More recently it’s bands like Phoenix I’ve been getting into, these kind of nice intricate pop songs that they write. We’re all pretty big fans of those guys. Rob, our bass player, is a massive Who fan, he loves The Who, and a lot of those bands from the 70s, that era. So we all come from pretty different angles.
When asked about local acts, Ben, mostly taciturn up to this point, becomes more animated.
BEN:
We just did a show the other week with Ghost Hotel, and they’re doing some good things at the moment. That was a nice little combination, The Russian Winters and Ghost Hotel. Even though they have a very different sort of sound to us, it was a great show. Who else? Oh, Boys Boys Boys! You heard of them? We’re just about to go down south with them. We play with bands that we’re similar to, and that we can mix with pretty well. Red Jezebel, we play with them a fair bit.
SAM:
We’re all big fans of Red Jez, particularly their latest album, which is awesome. I was always a particularly big fan of the Silents, their early EPs, I really like those. Dima probably more so than us is pretty good mates with the Sugar Army guys, and so we love those guys. Great band. They write a style of music that I quite like. Oh, and I have to say – well, he’s not local any more, but I’ve always loved all The Sleepy Jackson stuff. Lovers was just an unbelievable goof album, and now Luke Steele is moving into David Bowie territory! He’s got a bit of mad genius, probably the most talented guy to come out of Perth in the last five to ten years.
Following up on the release of their debut EP, Give Up The Ghost, last year, it seemed cogent to ask if they had any immediate plans to record.
SAM:
We are planning on recording an album next year. We’ve demoed heaps of songs, so we’ve got no shortage of stuff for the album. So that is definitely the plan. The EP we did with a guy called Laurie McCallum at Sumo Studios, who was just awesome to work with, and if we could work with him again on an album next year that’d be fantastic.
BEN:
He’s got some good stuff coming out of Sumo. He’s really taken off, Laurie. It seems to be the next big place.
SAM:
Yeah, he did Boys Boys Boys! EP. He’s a very personable guy. To be an engineer/producer, to be good at that job, you have to be. You have to be tolerant towards all these people going “Can I just throw in this harmony?” at two in the morning. Either that or be Phil Spector.
BEN:
I reckon the job does that to you, the people you have to work with just drive you insane. Every time we record I just think to myself “How do these guys do this? How do they put up with it?”
SAM:
There’s something romantic about all that stuff. Laurie’s studio out in Osborne Park is just a warm atmosphere to record in, you know? He’s built the studio as a room within a room in this big warehouse space. So it’s not a big, sterile, boring place to record, it’s makeshift walls and stuff like that, which gives it a really good vibe in there.
BEN:
Another thing I want to mention is that we just came back from a tour in Malaysia. We went in March, we were invited to play the Sunburst Festival, it was kind of like the Big Day Out, but in Malaysia. We’d never been there before, but it was just great, as a local Perth band hitting the international stage
SAM:
The crowd reaction was pretty good. We were on pretty early that day at the festival, it was fucking hot – about thirty-five degrees – and one hundred percent humidity. We were on one of the big stages, which was a new thing for us, and the sound quality was amazing, playing on a stage that size.
BEN:
Very professional, those Malaysians, I’ll tell you. They really know how to do a very good show. Not dissing the professionals here, but I’ll tell you, it was really well done.
SAM: The hospitality! You’d come off stage and they’d have rows of ice cold beers waiting for us and bottles of vodka, which is exactly what you want.
BEN:
So that was our little highlight, and we’re hoping to expand on that. It was just amazing to discover these other markets out there, such as Asia in general, I guess. We couldn’t believe it. I mean we’re focussing all our time in Australia, as hard as it is here, and there’s a whole world out there.
SAM:
The bands over there are fantastic, and we just kinda overlook ‘em. There’s language issue with that – they may be speaking in Malay or whatever, but I was so impressed with the sound of the bands from Malaysia and Indonesia and Thailand, they had a real Western sound, and it would be great if those bands could come and tour over here.
BEN: Yeah, do some reciprocal touring through Asia.
SAM: But there’s a whole world out there. That’s what opened me up the most.

The Russian Winters and Boys Boys Boys! are doing a short tour of the SouthWest Beginning in Melville on 1st and stopping in at Players on 9th and Settlers on the 10th. Proudly presented by fasterlouder.