Operator Please play The Zoo Wednesday 16 May 2007 and the Chophouse Friday 18 May 2007.
Young Gold Coast starlets Operator Please have just returned home from their inaugural UK jaunt, where the teenagers impressively won over all and sundry with their mix of effervescent youthfulness, wide-eyed innocence, and smile-inducing indie pop.
“We pretty much went over to do about five shows,” vocalist/guitarist Amandah Wilkinson explains, “and we did a couple of live radio slots as well. We did a showcase type show at the Camden Crawl, which is kind of like their version of SxSW. The rest were just some small club shows.
“The reception was really good; we were actually surprised at how many people turned up. We were stoked and we had heaps of fun – it’s just really fun to play in other countries, and meeting all the UK bands was really cool as well. I don’t know whether we fitted into the scene, but we just played and the crowds over there were really into it.
“And we shot a video clip over there, which was really cool. On the day that we went in to shoot, we started about 8am and ended up finishing late into the night, but we managed to get everything done in one day. The video clip was for ‘Song About Ping Pong’ – that’ll be our first single coming off the album.”
While in the UK, Operator Please also snuck in some studio time, laying down some demos that, along with the ones they put down in Sydney’s Big Jesus Burger studio earlier this year, will eventually constitute their debut LP.
“It was a really awesome studio – a totally 70s-style studio with the full-on wood panel and big stones,” Wilkinson says of the London studio where they recorded. “It was really awesome – they had all these really cool fairy lights, and the mood and the atmosphere was really, really good.
“On those two days I was meant to go and see family in Manchester, so I was pretty bummed out but fully excited as well. We went in there and we managed to get a lot done; we got to know the engineers and the producer and got to muck around with a lot of equipment too.”
After being awarded the much-coveted Modest Mouse support in January, Operator Please have just been confirmed as the national support for both Maximo Park and the Kaiser Chiefs’ upcoming Australian tours, both of which get underway in August. In the lead-up to those big events the band will undertake their own national headline tour, which will function as a belated launch tour for their March-released Cement Cement EP.
“I guess it’s a little bit late to be starting an EP tour now,” Wilkinson admits, “but we never really got the chance to launch our EP because when it came out we were actually supporting other bands. So it’ll be good to ‘launch’ the EP; it’s exciting and nerve-wracking, but we’ll just take it as it comes.
“Since we got this EP out it’s been really cool – we’ve made two videos that have gone on Rage and we’re getting some decent radio play too. We’re really stoked about everything that’s happening.”
Cement Cement out now independently.
