The morning after Guineafowl wins a SMAC Award, the AU review’s Larry Heath catches up with Sam Yeldham to speak about the band’s sudden leap to headline shows and the whirlwind of touring nationally...

You guys sounded great last night, and you seem to have a bit of new material in the mix at the moment...

Nothing new-new, they’re all EP songs we played last night, nothing weeks old or days old, but relatively new, like a couple of months old, which I guess is pretty new. We’re going to debut one or two new songs at our EP launch which is very exciting, but all those songs still feel new because they’re not very old.

You’ve got the Hello Anxiety tour coming up very soon. What can we expect from that tour, as you’ve got some great bands coming along for the ride?

We’ve got some fantastically good support bands from every city. We’re just excited to go on the road. It is our first headlining tour and our third headlining show in Sydney when it kicks off, so we're just really happy that we have our own shows and create our own environment at shows. They will be ours, as well as the other great bands that are playing with us.

You mention that you’ve played a couple of headline shows in Sydney, and it seems like it’s just been going gangbusters for you guys since the middle of last year and you haven’t really stopped.

Yeah, we made the jump from playing very small rooms to playing medium to small rooms. It was a good leap. We’re still playing club nights wherever we can because they’re really fun, but that’s where we started like playing Mum at World Bar and Three Oaks side bar shows, and I’d still do them again in a heartbeat. There is such good atmosphere when it’s a cheap fun night where everyone is going to dance. But yeah, it's great to graduate from that relatively quickly to your own headlining shows; it’s a real privilege.

You toured with Belles Will Ring last month, and wrapped up the year pretty nicely.

Yeah, it was a really good tour, it taught us a lot about touring. Belles Will Ring are a very seasoned, very professional band, so they didn’t stop or anything. We’d go from one night and one show to the next night and another show with hours and hours of driving between them. They really showed us you’ve got to be tough to be a rock n roll band, very tough, and that’s something we learned.

So you’re gaining those toughness skills as you go along?

Yeah, definitely, which I think is crucial for any musician who wants to last. You’ve got to get good, and what’s more really love the tough bits, because it's going to happen a lot. The Belles Will Ring tour was difficult, but it was a lot of fun.

I understand you have been working on new material though.

Yeah, little bits and pieces are coming together, and new demos are forming, but they’re going to go on hold until we really treat this EP with the love and respect it deserves. I don’t want my head to go somewhere else while we are releasing this EP. I want it to be focussed on delivering these songs that we recorded to the best of my ability.

Well it should be a fun tour, what else is around the corner for you guys in 2011?

We’re going to try and tour as much as possible. We did 59 shows last year, so we want to try and top that and do more, so we’ll see if we can do that again.

So the SMAC award should just be the beginning of quite a lot I’m sure?

Hopefully. It was a good way to start the year, and I hope we continue on that direction. Who knows? The music business is a slippery and ever changing environment, but starting off the year with the SMAC award is filling us with confidence that were going to have a good year.

Everyone was talking last night about FBi and how important it was to them, do you want to talk about how important it has been to you guys?

There was a pretty common story last night of a band dropping in their demos on a Monday, and two weeks later getting an email saying 'you’re going to be played on FBi', and that’s definitely what happened for me. I dropped off three demos to FBi, and they played “Botanist” a lot, and started to play “In Our Circles” after that a lot. And not only did it fill me with the confidence to say 'hey, I’ve written some songs, and they’re not woeful, and I want to show them to people', and then build the live band, but it also meant that the live band when it was formed had a foundation, and had a presence as a result of FBi’s support. That meant we could play shows to people and not do as I’ve done in previous bands; doing random shows and sending invites out to your friends hoping they come. FBi meant that it wasn’t just my friends coming to the first shows - it was dedicated music loving people who wanted to see the band, who wanted to see what this Guineafowl thing was about. And that was because of FBi, and also because of the blog, but FBi have had the biggest reach.

You guys played Ding Dong last week, which is the start of your Melbourne times.

Yeah, the start of Melbourne times. Melbourne is slowly warming, there were some people there who were looking like they were just starting to jump around and dance a little bit. It’s tough to break another city, but it’s just that you’ve got to be dedicated and want to give the people in another city as good of an experience as you do at home.

Best of luck with spreading your music around the country, and we hope the tour goes really well.

Thankyou, and thanks to the AU review for being so supportive over the past year.