Kingswood to park on lawn

MELBOURNE alternative rock group Kingswood have been announced as a late addition to the line-up for Hobart’s Day on the Lawn on Saturday.

They replace fellow Melbourne rockers The Smith Street Band, who pulled out of the event earlier this month.

Kingswood join a seven-act line-up that also includes Birds of Tokyo and Spiderbait at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens in Hobart on Saturday.

Lead singer Fergus Linacre said it was “a bit last-minute”, but Kingswood were very pleased to come down to Tassie.

“We love Tasmania, so I think we’ll make a weekend of it,’’ he said. “I don’t know how many times you can go to Mona a year, but we always seem to end up there.”

The band are working on their third studio album, which is scheduled to be released this year, with the first single expected to drop in May.

Last year Kingswood released the single Messed it Up, but Linacre said that song would not appear on the new album.

“We wrote a whole album last year and recorded it and we have it finished and we decided after a little while that we didn’t want to put it out,” he said.

“It was so far from what it began as that it’s almost like a side-project thing now.”

Linacre said it was rare for an artist to not release something they had worked on for more than a year, but that the band had now written a new album from scratch.

He said the unreleased album was “very dancy and cool”.

“I think there was an element of that live performance missing from the new music, which is why we sort of went back to performance-based music,’’ Linacre said.

“That’s what we grew up loving. We wanted to be out front and playing big guitar solos and playing piano and all of this sort of big, grand, loud music.

“The guitars and the backing vocals and the grandness of this new music is definitely to a whole new level and sounds like nothing we’ve done before.”

Tickets are to the Day on the Lawn at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens on Saturday are $96.90, or $66.30 for children aged 8-15.

For bookings and information, visit dayonthelawn.oztix.com.au