"We've played out the back of a pizza parlour!"
Chatting with Patience Hodgson – the tutu-wearing, impossibly energetic frontwoman of Brisbane rock band THE GRATES – is similar to watching her perform on stage. She's cute, quirky and interesting, but can quite often be all over the shop. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as I discover during the course of our second interview. After speaking with her for 20 minutes, I feel a bit scatterbrained. She has this uncanny ability to make you feel like you're catching up with your best friend about nothing in particular, yet afterwards, when I go back and listen to the interview, I realise that somehow, in amongst all the random tangents and chatter, I'm able to tick off all the major subjects I wanted to speak to her about. Topics of conversation swing between culinary skills (the secret ingredient in her signature dish, spaghetti bolognaise, is grated apple... what?), how second album Teeth Lost, Hearts Won has been received by fans, playing at massive US festival South By Southwest, the band's success at the annual triple j Hottest 100 music poll and microblogging on Twitter.
Last time I spoke with Hodgson Teeth Lost, Hearts Won was days away from release and she was fretting. I remind her that she confided in me that if the album release didn't go well, she threatened to cry. Well, were any tears shed in the end? “No,” she responds with a laugh. “It's been very good. We didn't seem to lose any fans and it actually got a much more positive response than I had imagined. I really liked what we'd made and I was really hoping that I wasn't just delusional and that a couple of other people out there would, you know, agree, [to prove that] I wasn't just living in a fantasy world! I'm very relieved.”
If anyone, Hodgson included, needs evidence that Teeth Lost, Hearts Won has been embraced with open arms by fans all over the country, the proof is in the pudding. And by “pudding” I mean “triple j's 2008 Hottest 100 result.” Hodgson and fellow purveyors of red-cordial-overdose-inspired stage antics, guitarist John Patterson and drummer Alana Skyring, clocked in an impressive three mentions in last year's countdown (Carve Your Name came in at #83, Aw Yeah at #80 and massively catchy lead single Burn Bridges led the charge at #34). Other bands that scored three songs or more include Vampire Weekend, the Presets, MGMT and Kings of Leon. An impressive little club to be a part of, huh?
“I was very excited about that! It felt like we were the little band playing with the big boys,” agrees Hodgson modestly. “When I looked at the bands that had gotten four and three songs – they were really big bands!” I ponder out loud whether such an outstanding result for such a 'little' band is testament to the devotion of said band's loyal fanbase. “I felt like our fans had pushed us into competition with the big guys all of a sudden,” she chimes in. “I do definitely think the Hottest 100 result was directly because of the dedication of our fans and it was excellent.”
Dedicated Grates fans can now take their fandom that one obsessive step further by following the band's every move on suddenly-all-the-rage microblogging website, Twitter. As soon as I mention the T word, Hodgson lets out a slightly bashful laugh, similar to one I imagine she would let out if I was instead quizzing her about her (hypothetical) collection of mint condition Star Wars action figures. It just has a very novel and nerdy feel to it, doesn't it? “I don't do it as much as John,” Hodgson is quick to state, passing the nerd baton to her bandmate without hesitation. “There needs to be a reason why you're following someone. Like if you're not in a band and you follow your favourite bands, it's really exciting. John follows Travis Barker from blink 182 and he gets a massive kick out of it because he gets these tweets from Travis that are like 'I'm at Disneyland with my little son and he's the man and he's pushing his little sister around.' He writes it in hilarious Travis Barker style and John gets super pumped about it, as lame as that is.”
One thing the band used its Twitter account for recently was to post updates from South by Southwest (SXSW), an enormous annual music festival held in Austin, Texas where bands from all over the world jostle for industry and media attention. “It's massive,” confirms Hodgson. “You cannot walk around Austin City during SXSW and not hear music. They close down all of the streets and everywhere turns into a venue – like we've played out the back of a pizza parlour! And when you're playing a gig, the loading in and out is nuts. We'd try to park as close as we could to the venue but because the whole city centre was shut down, you have to put all of your gear out on the road and you might have to carry it three blocks through like 100,000 people. It was just mental, but it was amazing.”
The Grates are now home from their overseas jaunt and are busily preparing for their upcoming national tour. Recent achievements such as playing at SXSW and scoring such a stellar Hottest 100 result are surely proof that the Grates' star is on the rise. Hodgson attempts to put it into perspective with the following analogy: “We played fairly early at Big Day Out [this year] but we got to play on the main stage. Maybe that reflects how we are as a band: we played early, but we played on the main stage.” At this point in their career, that's definitely not a bad situation for the Grates to be in.
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