Operator Please play the Brunswick St Mall Saturday 10 March 2007 as part of Fortitude Rising.
Teenage buzzkids Operator Please haven’t even finished school yet, and only one of the five members is 18. Yet they have a contract with Virgin Music, have released a 7-inch in England that recently sold out and have Magoo [Regurgitator, Midnight Oil] on board for their debut album.
From the quiet offices of EMI in Sydney, vocalist Amandah Wilkinson tries to avoid eyeing the Keith Urban posters on the wall during this interview.
Recently the Gold Coast popsters hit the road with Dappled Cities, which was the group’s inaugural interstate tour. No shenanigans were had, however, due to the median age of 17.
“Sorry to disappoint you!” Wilkinson laughs, when asked about any tour gossip. “Everybody kind of knows how old we are! It’s like, ‘Ah… you guys have to go now’. Our youngest member is about to turn 16 in April, but I turn 19 this year and two [others] turn 18 this year.”
With all the attention Operator Please have been getting, considering their ages, Wilkinson says she’s currently trying to get to grips with fame, as are her bandmates.
“It’s kind of a hard thing to grasp, really,” she says. “It’s surreal but at the same time we’re just not taking anything for granted. I don’t know – it’s weird for us.”
Having recorded their current EP Cement Cement with Magoo, the quintet rerecorded their infectious pop ditty Song About Ping Pong for the UK release. You can expect that song to be on the debut album, expected later this year.
“The first [EP] we did was independent and we were selling at our shows,” she says. “That had Ping Pong on it. That one we recorded with our drummer’s father in his recording studio, and we did a big DIY job and printed up about 300, and sold them at shows and on MySpace.”
“We are planning on recording an album sometime this year so we can release it sometime this year,” she continues. “We’re actually in Sydney doing some demos and we’re going to be recording all the new ones that we’ve written.”
The story of how Operator Please went from high school ensemble to Virgin Music signing is quite different to other bands. For starters, they didn’t play the regular shows and gigs around the Coast, due to their ages.
“That’s the thing with venues – they wouldn’t let us play full stop!” Wilkinson says. “To get a gig at an established venue you’d have to ring up all the time and piss someone off to get something. Then when you were there, the people wouldn’t talk to you because you pissed them off so much on the phone – it was like, ‘Yeah come in, do it and piss off’.” So we didn’t really play all that many venues – the only place that would have us is the Chophouse – so we made really good friends with a couple of Gold Coast bands there, and helping each other out with shows was how we started playing shows.”
But now, being signed means there’s a team running around doing all the donkey-work for the kids while they concentrate on their record.
“It was a bitch walking up and down [streets] finding posters to stick posters to, because there was so much already there,” Wilkinson laughs, “so it’s cool that we have publicists and promoters and that, but we still do all our own design work and have to approve whether it looks good.”
Cement Cement out independently.
