The Spitfires launch their debut album "Songs From The Debt Generation"

Perth indie punk upstarts launch their debut album "Songs From The Debt Generation" on the 20/7/12 at Perth's Amplifier followed by a lighting trip North to play at Latitude 28, tomorrow Saturday 21/7/12. "Songs From The Debt Generation" is the RTRFM Local Fetaure and is out now through Firestarter Distribution. You can check out the video clip for the latest single Suffer Kate here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVq7m-NzFSk

So since we've been away from blogging we've been pretty busy with ourselves, Probably the most fun thing we've been able to do is making home made music videos. Since we don't have a whole lot of money it's always about getting biggest bang for our buck, so for the "Radio Control" clip we set ourselves a budget of a few hundred dollars which meant we required maximum creativity to make something half decent.

With the money we had we decided to purchase a couple of broken down boom boxes and a bit of wood to fashion into suitable head gear. We then enlisted the help of our good friend CJ Hughes to come with us and shoot random footage of us pissing around in Sydney for a few days. Favourite part of the day was definitely lobbing a TV off a balcony... sweet!

Hello Sydney!!!!!

Well it's been a long time since we wrote a blog... though in our defence things have been pretty mental!

In the space of one year we've released an album, made three music videos, toured nationally god knows how many times... hey we even found time to blow up our old house in Perth.

Still so many bands figuratively explode out of the Perth scene it's nice to literally explode... though I must admit the photos of Paul's feet after the explosion were a little scatty!

So yeah sorry about the neglect, I promise we'll update this thing more often and let you know all about what we've been up to this last year, but thanks for keeping the faith your continued support both baffles and keeps us going on the hard long slog :D

Sean

Well that was a crazy month,

So crazy that we've had no time to put out any fantastic blogs, which is a shame as it's been quite a month. We've had two back to back tours, one on the East Coast of Australia followed by a tour of Japan over Christmas so it's been pretty intense. Hard really to distill all those weeks of running around, missing flights, drinking booze and having total chaos... so perhaps we should just run through some of the highlights!

Luke Ledger's Floor

Following the ast Coast leg of the tour the band had to crash over in Sydney for a few days and what better place to spend our time than sleeping on the floor of our good mate Luke. As well as giving us a place to crash, he was also able to take us to a wicked cafe near by which served mushrooms in garlic sauce with their fried breakfasts. Also got to have a go at Halo while being educated in the strange musical genre of Dubstep which is taking hold of the country.

Japanese Anime Action Figures

G.I.Joe ain't got nothing on the shit we saw in the japanese kitsch superstore Mandarake. As well as stocking the usual Kiss action figures and Akira Mangas there was a whole heap of ridiculous stuff that to make your mind melt. Top of the list had to be the Princess Bitch action figure featuring a busty lingerie clad princess riding a giant mushroom, the lady in her Bikini taking a shower action figure and the strike witches figurines which are a bunch of youg girls wearing nothing but military shirts, panties and a pair of turbo prop engines strapped to their legs... mental!

More to follow...

It was a song, now it's a video... enjoy!

The band have always had issues with the name "The Spitfires"...

Not that we don't like our name, it sounds kind of cool and it's easy for people to remember. The problem with the name is that it's very popular and several other bands around the world have used, or are currently using The Spitfires for their band name. it wasn't really a massive problem when we started, we all played so far apart it was highly unlikely that anyone would wander into a respective bands venue. However, since we started playing outside of Australia it's become a slightly bigger issue.

Firstly, anyone googling "the spitfires band" outside of Australia find the Canadian band called The Spitfires' Myspace page at the top of the search. Not such a big problem as one quick listen will leave people in no doubt that it's not a garage rock band from Western Australia. Something else that happened recently was the English Spitfires (I believe from Watford) actually played a venue in England that we'd been in a few months before. I expect any patrons who saw us the first time round who returned to catch us again would have been slightly surprised to see we'd ditched the set and completely substituted the line up. Interestingly enough though they actually had a pretty similar sound which leads me to believe that all bands called "The Spitfires" are doomed to be garage rockers for all eternity!

Then there's the Belgian Spitfires... lets not go there!

Still the good thing is that there's never been a really famous "The Spitfires" band, so I reckon if we can just get our profile high enough then we should be able to lay claim to the band name as our own. In the meantime let confusion reign and fingers crossed we can one day organise a bill with all the bands sharing the same stage and merchandise.

Sean

Hello again,

So now that the band have got a few weeks of down time it's back to song writing. The process we follow is generally to play random things until we stumble blindy on a couple of notes and a rhthym that sounds half decent... the pin the tale on the donkey approach. Once we've got a bit of an idea or two we play around with it until it's feeling a bit more cohesive then I go home and write some extra parts and get the structure sorted. Once I've come back with the structure everybody else fits their bits around it an voila, we have a song!

Although it sounds fairly straightforward it can take ages, mostly because the very first idea that we have to fumble around for can take a very long time. It's like drawing a picture of something, but you don't know what it's of until its finished. So our new song "The Game" came from an idea me and Paul had on guitars, then we played Brad a track by the Dead Kennedys to give him an idea of what the drums should sound like. I might add that we're not trying to sound like the Dead Kennedys (though sometimes we do!) but it is ten times easier to explain a rhythm using a recording than trying to scat the beat!

Now all that's needed is to write some guitar fills and lyrics and it'll be done... though I still haven't got the faintest idea what the song will be about, maybe a tribute to Scrabble.

All the best from the band!

Sean

Hi everybody,

This week the band have been filming the music video for the new single "Smile" which is currently doing the rounds. Now out of the band we actually have one actor, our drummer Brad, so he took everything in his stride. Paul was also quite handy and put on a good show, however your humble narrator was probably the most clueless when it came to acting. Not that we had to do too much, the band were required to hang around in a pub, play half a song... then participate in a brawl!

We had a stunt coordinator to assist in making sure nobody got injured, so things went extremely smoothly apart from the fact I couldn't stop laughing every time I went to bash somebody over the head with a beer bottle. Still after numerous takes we were done, we just need to wait for the editing to be finished and we'll put it up on youtube.

Now that it's over the band will be back in songwriting mode, we've been very busy so this has been neglected a little, but we've had a few good ideas so we should have a couple of new tracks in time for the single launch and East Coast tour in December. The band have gigs lined up for Perth, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne (Sorry Adelaide!) then it's off to Tokyo for the first shows of the Japan tour... exciting or what?

Take care until then!

Sean

Alright there!

So tomorrow's the big day where the band get to be in the movies... Well a music video at least! The last two weeks have been spent scouring the city for extras, cameras, film locations (we found a pub!) and a whole heap of other crap it takes to make a clip. The concept of the video is pretty much a fight in a pub, so we've had to track down a fight coordinator for the project. Also we're shooting two versions of it, one for television and another one which is slightly more controversial which we'll stick up on youtube. We don't want to give away too much so keep your eyes peeled in the coming month to see if it pops up on the T.V.

In other band news we're all still hopelessly skint, we've had to scrape together the last of our cash to fly the band over to the East coast for the tour so we're living like paupers. We've got quite good at touring on the cheap though, thanks to having plenty of couches to crash on and a bit of local knowledge of the cheap eats in town. I think my favourite place has got to be Rics in Brisbane for it's $5 fried breakfast (also a venue we'll be playing at) and the kebab place in the valley who's name I forget.

So we'll try and post some photos and video from the shoot, in the meantime don't forget to download the new single and if you know anyone else who might like it we'd appreciate it if you send them the link to our site... go mailing list!

Take care,

Sean

So the new single Smile is out... well sort of!

We're currently giving it away for free from that annoying box at the top of our website before it gets it's official release in December. I still haven't figured out how to shrink it down to the size where it doesn't take up an entire page yet, but at least it's easy to spot. The next thing will be firing it out into radio land, which pretty much involves posting hundreds of CDs to the various radio stations and hoping they'll play it. It can be a bit of a weird experience as we start to pick up new fans all around the country and they start popping up on the facebook and populating our mailing list. Kind of feels like we're growing a small army... though buggered if we know what to do with them. I expect we'll probably just harass them into attending our shows and get them to wear our T-shirts to show loyalty to their new favourite band of the week.

Still enough talk of world domination, we're doing a music video next week! I understand that it is simultaneously the most exciting and boring thing in the world i.e. it's a music video, but we'll have to stand around a lot. I've insisted we film it in a pub so at least I can stand around with a pint to keep me entertained. Our new drummer Brad is actually a proper actor so he'll probably come out of this looking great while me and Paul will end up making dicks of ourselves... no change there then!

So do yourselves a favour and get the new single Smile, it took us fecking ages to come up with it so we appreciate it when people take the time to listen to it.

thanks again for reading!

Sean

There's a pizza restaurant down the road from us that has quite a selection of pizzas, several of which are named after prominent local bands plus there are a few signed plates hanging around the store which got me thinking....

What would be on The Spitfires signature pizza?

Two schools of thought, as the pizzas are themed after the names of the bands i.e. Birds of Tokyo is Teriyaki Chicken, Smashing Pumpkins has pumpkins etc The Spitfire Band pizza could be something fiery like Chilli and Calabrese sausage with extra chilli. The only problem would be that this pizza might be a bit too mental and blow everyone's head off.

Personally I'd like to be known for some sort of English Breakfast pizza. It could be topped with sausage and black pudding topped off with a fried egg in the middle! I think I'll spend the rest of the week dreaming up these creations and see if anything tasty comes to mind. I'll also have to think about how we're going to get famous enough to justify a signature pizza.