A Conversation with Ocean Alley
★ by Abby Strangward ★
photos via Ocean Alley socials
From a backyard garage in Sydney’s Northern Beaches to the main stages of festivals worldwide, Ocean Alley are your quintessential, Aussie success story. Since forming back in 2011, the guys (Baden Donegal, Angus Goodwin, Lach Galbraith, Mitch Galbraith, Nic Blom and Tom O'Brien) have had a steady rise through the Australian (and now International) scene, recently culminating in their 2019 Triple J Hottest 100 win (with mellow, summer-inspired track ‘Confidence’), catapulting them to national fame and kickstarting a string of worldwide tours and festival runs.
At the heart of one of Australia’s most recognisable bands right now is six mates who live in a couple of share-houses, still writing all their music in the same living-room style as when they started. On the phone to Mitch Galbraith (guitarist), I was consistently struck by his down-to-earth attitude, the unmistakable passion creeping into his voice every time the conversation turned to song-writing and playing live, and (most enjoyably), the slight bemusement as we discussed the band’s ‘sound’ and his lack of interest in labelling it. We talked share-houses in Byron Bay, allowing breathing space in creativity, one unforgettable night in Budapest, the friendships that feel more like marriages, and the collaborative writing style that’s given way to some of Australia’s most beloved tracks. At the core of it all, it still feels like just a bunch of mates, making the music they love and trying to play it in front of as many people as possible. How very Australian.
Hey! How have you been?
Yeah, alright. Isolation’s pretty boring - just kinda been doing the same thing for a while, but can’t really complain.
I read a few of you were living in a share-house…
Yeah, a couple of us are living in a share-house in Sydney, and there’s another few of us in Byron. We’re just hanging out. We’re near the beach so we’re just surfing, playing music, that sort of stuff.
Getting sick of each other yet?
Nah, we got over that a long time ago (laughs). It feels a bit like we’re all married to each other by now.
You were about to head out on tour before everything shut down - are you still bummed about that, or has it been nice to have a chance to slow down a bit?
“Lonely Diamond”, the new album, is set to be released on June 19th
It’s nice that we can focus on other things, but we’re stinging to get back on stage and back on tour. Playing our music live to other people… that’s the most important thing for us, and it’s something we can’t do right now. But everyone’s in the same boat, so you just gotta take a couple of deep breaths and relax.
You guys have these really classic Aussie roots — coastal town, backyard shed, high-school mates, that kind of thing. How did you originally come together?
So there were a couple of us that went to high school together, and the other half we just sorta ran into around the beach at home (Northern Beaches of Sydney). We started hanging out and playing in our Bass player’s parents shed - you know, just the normal garage-band story - and we’ve kept writing music together ever since. I’d say writing the music together is where we found our real passion. At first the songs were pretty shit, but we kept at it and got better, and that’s lead us to where we are today.
Has that song-writing process - where it’s purely collaborative, and you’re all kinda just hanging out in your living room together... has that stayed the same through everything?
It’s definitely the same process. I suppose we’re better at writing each of our own individual parts now, but when we bring it all together it’s still in the same manner as we did back when we formed in the garage. We just get in a room together and see what works. Lucky we’re good friends, too, ‘cause we can tell each other when stuff’s shit.
The best collaborations always seem to come from that pre-existing friendship, when you’re all really comfortable with each other - enough to just be brutally honest (laughs).
Yeah, exactly. And we’ve never done it any other way. This is the first and only band we’ve all been in, so we don’t know any other process apart from this. But it’s definitely working for us.
“We just get in a room together and see what works.”
With recording the new album over the last year and a half, you were so busy on tour - was the writing process all over the place, or were you able to find that time to sit down and focus on it?
Nah, we were definitely all over the place. I remember there were these trips to New Zealand where we’d do a week in the studio [in Byron Bay, Australia], head out on tour and play the old songs, and come back and have to just slot straight back into playing new stuff we’d just written. It was disjointed, but it did give us the chance to leave what we were working on and come back to it with a fresh set of eyes. That definitely influenced how some of these songs were written. I mean, we re-wrote a lot of sections, too… completely flipping them on their heads, which I think we could only do because we had fresh eyes and we’d spent some time away.
Does the album feel cohesive to you, or do you feel like you can see that all-over-the-place writing process reflected?
We were very aware that [our approach] could make it sound un-cohesive, so it was important that we made sure it still told a story as a whole body of work… that it still made sense as a whole body of work. Hopefully the way the record’s structured, people get it and people get the story, and it’s believable, I suppose.
“We flipped [a lot of these songs] on their heads, which I think we could only do because we had fresh eyes and we’d spent some time away.”
With the newest single, Hot Chicken, (which is an excellent name, by the way), you can hear a lot more of this ‘70’s rock’ influence. Do you feel like you’ve hit a sweet spot and found your signature sound, or is it going to keep evolving from here?
We weren’t shooting for a particular sound, but the end product did come up rock-heavy. That late 70s, early 80s rock… there’s some big drums on some of the other tracks that are real 80s type drums, too. Honestly, we just had so much fun in the beautiful studio up in Central Coast [Grove Studios], especially in the live room, using our instruments and really getting into the sounds. It’s something where we’ve gone deeper than we had before, I suppose.
I love it. I mean, a little surprised at first listen… but overall absolutely loved it.
Yeah, that’s definitely one of the more ‘up’ tracks on the record. The rest of the album’s probably not full of hot chickens.
Never thought I’d hear that sentence in an interview.
(Laughs).
Ocean Alley’s sound has probably been described about a dozen different ways over the years - retro, rock, reggae, surf rock, funk, psychedelic… but if you could describe it in a new way, any way at all - what would you call it?
Ahh... I don’t know. It’s so hard - we don’t spend any time thinking about it, to be honest. I think that’s why it comes across as such a rainbow of genres at times. There’s definitely songs of ours you can put into specific boxes and say, that’s a rock song, and that’s a bit more roots-based, but honestly we don’t really think about it.
I have heard someone call us psychedelic surf rock before.
Nice, I like that.
Yeah, I actually like that one too. But again, you couldn’t really put that label on everything we write.
Yeah, it’s very organic. It feels like the reason it’s so hard to label is because you’re just going with the flow.
Yeah, we like to explore different styles and different sounds, so we’ll write something, and then with the next thing we’re working on, we consciously try to avoid writing in the same vein we did that last song in. So we end up with something that’s different all the time.
Were you feeling any pressure coming off the back of your last album, with how insanely successful it was?
Yeah, totally. And like we were talking about, we were so busy in between touring and writing this, it felt like… we put more thought into this record, but at the same time it was more disjointed and a bit more dispersed amongst the year, I suppose. Almost a bit forgotten.
But it was it’s own time. We had to snap in and out of these head-spaces of touring and then recording, and then back on tour and then back to recording, but we just got used to it. There was pressure, definitely, but we kept at it and kept writing, and eventually the gates opened and we wrote a song and wrote another one. Again, it just comes back to working off of each other and waiting until that right riff appears.
Really getting back to where you began and how you started writing songs, to move past the pressure?
Yeah, exactly. Never straying away from how it originally worked for us, because that’s what we fell in love with, and that’s what we still love doing. So for us, we just revert back to that and slot it in to whatever we’re doing at the time.
“It just comes back to working off of each other and waiting until that right riff appears.”
Have you been tempted at all to get a bit fancier with the writing process, and work with other song writers etc., or are you just really focused on keeping it like how it was in the beginning?
I don’t think we’re diligent enough to do that, honestly (laughs). I don’t think we could organise that. Maybe we’re just lazy song-writers. But there’s definitely a time and a place and an environment for us to get work done. Though, those times are becoming fewer and further in between... we had so much time as a garage band, getting together every 2nd night and just jamming crap, but now that we’ve got all this other stuff to do and we’re all 8 or 10 years older or whatever, there’s just less time to get back to those root jam sessions.
But we’re doing it in other ways, we’re adapting, and that’s the thing we’re most proud of. How we adapt and grow our sound and our band and our music.
After one EP and pretty much 3 albums, is there a song you never get tired of adding to the setlist?
There is a song we’ve played for as long as we can remember, and that’s Yellow Mellow.
Ahh, yep.
It always gets added to the setlist, because we’re afraid people will get angry if we don’t play it (laughs).
Oh, one hundred percent.
Yeah, right! There’s been a couple of times where we’ve been like, oh, maybe they won’t notice if we drop Yellow Mellow…
Nope.
Exactly. We always like to play our most recent stuff the most, though. Because that’s fresh for us, it’s fresh for the crowd, and it’s exciting to see the live reaction to something that’s fresh, something people may not have heard before, or that they don’t know as well. So, you know, that’s been Tombstone more recently, and Infinity’s really fun to play, too.
What’s been the most unexpectedly amazing overseas show? Like, did you ever show up in a city and were a bit unsure what to expect, but were kinda blown away instead?
I’d say… it was this festival in Budapest, called Szigett Festival. I’d never heard of it, but we showed up in Budapest, Hungary, and it was our first night of our European Tour. We weren’t really expecting anything, but the festival sight was ginormous… I think a quarter of a million people were there? Crazy. And we had our tent, which was just constantly jam-packed, and we met heaps of Aussies, and it was this insane weird experience that we weren’t expecting.
We all had a huge night and felt horrible the next day - I think someone lost their phone, someone lost their shirt, and that kicked off our tour. That was our first night (laughs). Hungary did us well.
Really setting the tone for the rest of the tour.
Yep (laughs). That really perked our ears up, that night, for sure.
“It’s exciting to see the live reaction to something that’s fresh, something people may not have heard before, or that they don’t know as well.”
What’s your favourite stuff to get up to on tour, apart from the music side of things?
We like walking around, checking out the sights… normally we only have a few days at a time, and no car or anything, so maybe you jump on a scooter or something like that. We’ve been doing these team dinners, too, where we try and book a big table somewhere in every city we go to. There’s not too much else you can get up to, honestly.
Oh, we were in Switzerland once, and it’s a land-locked country, right, but we went to this surf wave-pool thing. Our tour manager Tyler knew about it, and we booked in right after we got off the tour bus and went the next day, and that was pretty cool. We’ve been telling people we’ve gone surfing in Switzerland and everyone’s like …...really?
Is there anyone you’re really loving in the Aussie music scene now? Anyone we should be keeping an eye on?
We’re big fans of Dulcie, from WA.
Yes! I love them.
Yeah, we see a lot of us in them and them in us. The few songs they’ve released are really well-written and the girls obviously have a natural talent for working together. I mean, to be honest we haven’t been listening to too much new music these days. Been isolated (laughs).
Yeah, digging into those older tunes. I mean, that’s definitely reflected in your new music.
It’s always been our bread and butter. It’s the stuff we grew up on, and we’re still putting that music on to this very day. I remember last week, we went through a whole Dire Straits thing one night, just cranking it and revisiting the old stuff.
A lot of our readers are pretty young, and I was wondering - to the kids reading this in the same position you were, starting a band in their garage with a few mates - what’s the best piece of advice you’d throw out?
I would just say - play often, together, all the time, and keep at it. The best thing you can do to progress your band is play together. It doesn’t matter if it’s in front of a live audience, or you’re recording it or not... just play together. And if you keep playing together and having a good time doing that, eventually good things will come your way. You just gotta hone your musicianship, and hone your live sound. That would be my advice.
Thanks so much to Mitch for taking the time to chat with us!