Broods take flight
The big record labels, stadium gigs, and TV appearances all point to a truth for Broods – they’ve grown up pretty fast, writes Grant Smithies.
The day I talk to Broods singer Georgia Nott, she’s in a hotel room in Salt Lake City, an area famous for a preponderance of Mormons, but there was a time when she lived just up the road from me.
We shared the same hilly horizon, the same glittering bay. Nott used to fling herself in the same chilly swimming holes up the Maitai river, mooch around Richmond Mall, stroll along Tahunanui Beach, go for picnics to Rabbit Island.
Between times, she was always making a racket. With her parents and four siblings, Nott played in an Abba tribute band as a kid, performed in church, busted River Dance moves in her PJs in the family lounge while singing along to The Corrs.
Before signing an international record deal with her brother Caleb in 2013, Georgia would buy her clothes in local op shops, but has since had a substantial makeover in which purity seems to be a key plank of the brand, with bleached blonde hair and snow white stage clothes.
How strange it must have been, to travel so far, so fast. One minute you’re just another gifted teenager in provincial New Zealand; the next, you’re ushered into that famous round Capitol building in Hollywood, the corridors acting as a gallery of the label’s most bankable past and present stars: The Beatles, The Eagles, The Beach Boys, Elton John, Snoop Dogg, Katy Perry.
What a huge leap, from playing with your older brother in a college band called The Peasants Of Eden, singing adolescent ballads about love and God and family in school halls around Nelson and Richmond, to washing up in a legendary American studio, singing into the same microphone Frank Sinatra once used, thumping out chords on Nat ‘‘King’’ Cole’s old piano.
Broods songs now soundtrack emergencies both medical and emotional on Grey’s Anatomy. There are profile pieces in Vogue. They toured with Sam Smith, sharing pre-gig hot tubs, and recently played a support slot for Ellie Goulding at LA’s Staples Centre in front of 20 000 people, among them Lorde and Taylor Swift.
‘‘Yeah, but I still get homesick for Nelson,’’ she says with a sigh. ‘‘I miss my family, of course, but also all the places I loved there, and the secret places, too, like the first place I got drunk . . . ’’
Nott still struggles to believe where she’s ended up. When she and Caleb first started playing in bands together in high school, this was the dream – to head overseas and have people come to see them somewhere outside New Zealand.
‘‘But we were just imagining a few gigs in Australia. But now we’re touring the world and it’s the weirdest feeling that this is actually our lives now. But it feels great. We feel blessed with the opportunities we’ve been given, but we also work our a***s off to make it happen.’’
Nott is straight as an arrow, and very sweet. She still has an adolescent sense of wide-eyed intensity about her, despite being into her early 20s now and recently married.
Broods tour New Zealand this week after a triumphant swing down Australia’s east coast. Their second album, Conscious, sits at the top of our charts. As with their 2014 Evergreen debut, it is mostly co-produced with Lorde producer Joel Little, and features a feast of bright and earnest synth-pop with no shortage of heightened emotion and angst.
Georgia has a hell of a voice: a cool clear ache, with no vibrato. And Caleb’s gleaming electronic arpeggios frame the power and the pain in it, just so.
The new songs sound bold, glossy, more pumped up and anthemic, as if custom-made for the bigger stages they’re playing these days.
‘‘That’s true. When we first started touring, a lot of our songs were pretty ethereal and soundtracky, like something you might play in your car on the way to the beach. But we always turned them into much bigger songs live, because that’s the PHOTOS: SUPPLIED beauty of live shows – everything feels emotionally exaggerated somehow.
‘‘This time around, we definitely wrote bigger songs with the live shows in mind, because we sometimes play six live shows a week these days. You want people, the audience, walking away from our live shows feeling amazed, just like we used to do. It’s such an awesome feeling, and you want to give that to other people as well.’’
On one swing through their old home town, Georgia and Caleb gave just such an experience to my daughter, Rosa. I took her along to see Broods play at Nelson College when she was 10. A couple of hundred visibly overwhelmed pre-teen girls were crammed into a stuffy school hall, plus a scattering of uncomfortable looking boys.
It was clearly their first big gig for most of this young audience, and Broods took their entertainment responsibilities seriously, performing on the tiny stage as if they were at Madison Square Garden.
I recall much ethereal spinny dancing from Georgia, and vigorous manly knee-bobbing behind banks of synthesizers from Caleb, the two of them flanked by fake flames made from triangles of fluttering fan-blown silk.
There was screaming, swooning, scattered outbreaks of wild dancing within a dense fug of hormones. It was a blast to see a band connect so powerfully with its audience, even for a cynical old bastard like myself, standing at the back.
‘‘Yeah, shows like that are important, eh? I remember going to see Brooke Fraser live when I was about that age, and it made me totally fall in love with how intense concerts can be. You see a whole different side to the person’s music when they’re up there, making it in front of you. It’s f***ing amazing!’’
This is the sort of feeling she wants her songs to spark, she says. ‘‘Whatever your personal struggles may be, if you listen to a song that completely describes how you’re feeling, it makes you feel understood, as if somebody out there has your back. That’s why I love listening to music, and that’s what I hope our own music will do for someone else.’’
Themes of the new album? Your guess is as good as mine. The video for lead single Free sees Georgia racing around an underground carpark in a ragged white nightie, singing ‘‘Hallelujah, I’m free!’’ over a squelchy synth line and sampled whip-cracks.
Caleb appears wearing jewellers’ specs and a Victorian frock coat and forces her into a helmet of virtual reality headgear. Georgia flails about in a pile of sand and a little Para pool, dodging imaginary snakes, octopuses, and alligators, while a random third person scribbles notes on a clipboard.
Then she wakes up in Piha, or something.
‘‘This record is about accepting that we’re adults. We’ve left the nest and moved on from teenaged, high school relationships, and are processing things in a really different way now. The last record had a lot of nostalgic homesick songs, like – I’m beginning to be a grown-up now and leaving my parents behind and it kinda sucks. But this is a more mature sort of album. I got married in January [to long-time boyfriend, Jacob Wieblitz]. Things changed massively, from a situation where you talk about difficult stuff with your friends and family to this intense communication with just one other person.