Concrete Playground Meets Barnaby Weir

A few days out from the highly anticipated Tuborg Summer Sunday, we caught up with Barnaby Weir, brain child of the much loved NZ musical collective, Fly My Pretties, about what's in store for the weekend, the Summer, and the rest of 2012.

So you must be getting pretty excited for the Tuborg Summer Sunday that's coming up this weekend? What can the crowd look forward to with the Fly My Pretties outdoor experience?

Well, the Pretties did the tour recently which was an eight show tour, and that was all based in theatres, so that's obviously quite different to a festival feel. We've got sixteen new songs and we're performing most of those at Summer Sunday. At the moment these songs have only been played out a handful of times, so as a start, that will certainly be different to any previous Fly My Pretties experience that people may have had. We're still bringing in the full visual team so it's going to be quite high production levels. The whole performance is a musical showcase. Usually we would do a three hour show,  but the festival show is an hour and a half, so in a way it's a broken down highlights version.

What's the vibe like when you're playing at a festival, obviously with a whole lot of other bands, it must be pretty different to when you're just touring as Fly My Pretties?

Yeah, it is pretty different. When we are performing just as Fly My Pretties in a theatre, for starters it's seated. Sometimes people wanna stand up and party, and then they end up getting told to sit down by the ushers in some instances. We're often recording the theatre sessions but we don't really do this when we're playing in an outdoor festival environment. So festival environments are a lot more fun in some ways and loose, and you can do whatever you like. People are probably a little bit more boozed and relaxed. Hand stands, star jumps, whatever goes really.

So this is how small NZ is, I was having a chat to a friend of mine who works at Sustainable Coastlines, and he mentioned you guys have got together for Tuborg Summer Sundays to do a bit for their charity. How did that collaboration start up?

Yeah! Well Sam Judd, who is one of the guys who set up Sustainable Coastlines, is a mate of mine from school days down in Wellington and they've just been doing some amazing stuff for New Zealand and with New Zealand on the coastlines. Fly My Pretties 3 was Fly My Pretties: A Story, and that story was based around an environmental message of looking after our water ways. It was the story of these twins that discover that their local river is being polluted by a big company. So, from that, we wanted to team up with people that were serious about our waterways and that was around the time that Sustainable Coastlines were really getting pretty active.  So it was an easy match, and we are just forever supportive of what they do. With this Matakana festival they are really trying out a few different ways to keep the environmental impact down; busing people to the site, recycling glass properly, create less rubbish and use fewer resources, so that's kind of how it all relates.

So, you've done quite a bit of work with Flox for recent tours, which has always been a huge talking point and a real spectacle of the shows. When you are teaming up with artists, how do you chose who you collaborate with?

It seems to just organically happen. Before we started Fly My Pretties 4 we were looking for an artist who had the skills and had a bit of a reputation and wanted to interpret the music into pieces of art. Flox just came up in a short list of people that we were going to approach. She was really professional and lovely, and was really keen to get on board. Partnerships like that kind of just naturally happen. You kind of just trust that people are going to do their best work and come with the right vibe for working together.

So what's on the cards for 2012? Any major plans?

Major plans for this year.. Just finishing up Fly My Pretties 4. We've just mastered that so are working on completing the artwork for it. The Black Seeds are also going to be releasing an album this year, so we are working on that. Busy times at the moment. Two albums and a whole lot of touring for The Black Seeds. Probably not so much touring for Fly My Pretties at this stage but we are just keen to get that album out there and see what people think and then look toward the next project.

As you'd know, kind of topical this week was the announcement that it's the last Big Day Out for NZ. Are you heading along for the last one?

Not going along this year cause I'm down in Wellington but I'd be going to just see Sound Garden if I was up there. The Black Seeds played there a couple of years ago, we really enjoyed it.

So, speaking of NZ festivals, Rhythm and Vines will be hitting double digits this year. You played at the first ever one back in 2003, any fond memories from that first one?

I remember it being a new gig and it was a pretty exciting time because it was before a lot of other festivals had started. There was a really good vibe in the air for NZ music that was starting to brew. It was very much a smaller production back then. It was just nice to be invited, and subsequently be invited back a few times. I mean, it's obviously grown now, it's a whole new beast! There's a totally different flavor and vibe to when we played, I think that's really important for everyone, that we get those international acts coming to show us what's going on around the world and include us in that global touring community. All power to them.

As you may know, Concrete Playground started off in Australia. Any plans to tour across the Tasman this year?

Yeah, we certainly do. There's definitely a release tour in the works. There will probably be two or three trips over there this year actually. Last year we had some good gigs, Reggae Town up in Cairns, we played in Perth not so long ago. There's a really good vibe in Aussie for us. So definitely keen to head over there. The first international show for Fly My Pretties was in Melbourne, so we'd definitely like to do that again.