The Vaccines' Justin Young on Big Days Off, His Favourite Sydney Dinners and the Album That Started It All

I'm catching up with The Vaccines frontman Justin Young on his Thursday morning and my Thursday evening. He's about to bring the band to Australia and New Zealand in November, supporting Two Door Cinema Club on their Tourist History 15th-anniversary run — and playing that debut record in full.

Eliza: You've been to Australia a lot — what, four or five times now?

Justin: Many times. It might even be more than that — the first time we came was Splendour in 2011, and then we did Big Day Out in 2012.

E: I actually remember seeing you at Falls Festival in Lorne, New Year's Eve 2018 (RIP).

J: That was a great trip. Thinking about it now, that was probably my favourite trip to Australia.

E: Did you get much time to explore the country when you were here for those festivals?

J: Yeah, we actually got lots of downtime. I remember before we got to Big Day Out, a crew member told us it was known as "Big Day Off," because you got so much time between shows. That was actually one of the best things about coming to Australia the first few times — when you're doing those touring festivals, you get an unusually large amount of time to do some exploring.

I remember Fraser Island [K'gari], driving 4x4s along the beach. And we went to — what's the place where everyone gets the classic koala photo? Lone Pine [Koala Sanctuary in Brisbane]. One of the best things about being on tour is forgetting you're on tour, forgetting you're at work, and feeling a bit like you're on holiday with your best friends.

E: This tour is with Two Door Cinema Club. Do you know the boys well?

J: Yeah, it's not the first shows that we've done with them in Australia. We did Field Day sideshows together over New Year's 2012–13, with The Jungle Giants. That trip was my first with an iPhone — I got it the day before we landed in Australia, so they're the very first things in my photo library. It's us, Two Door [Cinema Club] and The Jungle Giants all on a boat going around Sydney Harbour. So, yes, we've played Australia with them before, and found ourselves in weird and wonderful places.

Photo via Justin Young.

E: This is Concrete Playground, so I have to ask — any memorable places you ate or drank here?

J: Interestingly, I do have a list. I spent about three months in Sydney last year, and I know food is a central part of Australian life — it's very important to me as well — so I had a lot of fun finding places.

Ursula's I really liked. Totti's was cool. Neptune's Grotto, Olympus, Porkfat. Sixpenny, Mr Wong, and 10 William Street was great. Ester, Margaret. That's quite a lot, isn't it? I've had some great food up and down over the years — I love the Asian influence in Australian food. And you lot like to drink as much as the Brits, so it's never too difficult to find an ice-cold beer.

E: When I think of that 2010s indie-rock era, I see that What Did You Expect from The Vaccines? cover in my mind's eye. What was that scene like? Was it as fun from the inside as it looked?

J: We definitely had a lot of fun. When everything happens for the first time, it feels like all your dreams are coming true — you can't quite believe it. You find yourself in rooms and environments, with people, that you could never have imagined two or three years before.

But the funny thing about The Vaccines and our place in all that is: our first record came out in 2011, and we recorded it at the end of 2010 — so I think we were later than a lot of that early-to-mid-aughts indie. In many respects, we didn't really feel like we were part of a scene. We often felt quite isolated and alone in that, and a lot of what was happening around us wasn't bands. We felt like a bit of an island. But we did have lots of fun.

E: Was there a moment writing that record when you had a gut feeling you were onto something?

J: I'd have to break it into two parts, because we wrote about half of it with no expectation whatsoever. We were really just having fun, and the one rule was: do we like this? There were no big plans or grand ambitions. We were messing around in a friend's rehearsal space one summer between years at university, and we made a little demo on my phone or laptop or something, then played it for a couple of friends to see if they agreed it was any good.

Then someone shared it with someone else, who shared it with someone else, who shared it with these quite big managers — who are still our managers today. Once they came on board, they lit the fire and gave us this self-belief. They made us believe anything, and everything, was possible. Then we had this crazy run of writing the rest of the record, knowing there were suddenly these possibilities. Every time we wrote a song we liked we'd think, "oh my God, maybe we could take over the world with this one."

'If You Wanna' and 'Wetsuit' were some of the first songs we wrote.

E: So it was like… someone else's confidence in you gave you confidence in yourself?

J: Exactly. That was a really big life lesson, because confidence and self-belief are such a huge part of any degree of success in any field, aren't they? Having it instilled in you by someone else is a form of privilege, really.

E: Fast forward to now: you recently debuted a new track.

J: It's called 'Ten Years Too Far,' and we've been playing it since around springtime. It's part of a new record, which we're going out to LA this week to try and finish.

Celebrating 15 years since the first record almost put more onus on the importance of playing some new music in the set — just to remind people that there's only one foot in the past, and the other one's hopefully still in the future, or the present, or whatever. It felt like the first song that was ready to play, but now the others have caught up with it. There's an album's worth of material that will hopefully see the light of day at some point in the next 12 months.

 

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E: Will you drop a few more singles on the tour?

J: Funnily enough, I was just thinking about that as I was answering your previous question. I don't know why we wouldn't. We're now in the habit of playing 'Ten Years Too Far,' probably because I think it's going to be the first single — but maybe we should rotate it.

E: Do you have a sense of what the album will feel like compared to the earlier records?

J: I hope it has our DNA at the core of it, at the spine of it, but hopefully it's another step forward in terms of songwriting and presentation and production. It's definitely more — I want to say raucous, but I don't want to say raucous. I'm trying to think of a better word. It doesn't rely too heavily on processing and production. It's got a very band-in-a-room feel, quite rough around the edges. I think it's quite an exciting-sounding record.

E: Final question: what's on your playlist right now?

J: In terms of recent stuff, I've been listening to Ryan Beatty's new record, Sweet Fortune, which I thought was cool, and a guy called Dove Ellis. I've been listening to a lot of older favourites: Sufjan Stevens, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver and Richard Hawley.

The Vaccines tour Australia and New Zealand with Two Door Cinema Club this November — tickets via Ticketek.

Images: Justin Young | Supplied