Sadly, our favourite Sydney band, The Paper Scissors, have just announced they are breaking up. We invited frontman and songwriter, Jai Pyne, to tell us about his favourite TPS memories: ‘There are so many memories over the last seven years. Lots of good times, lots of really stressful hard times. I was just the other day lamenting about when I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown in the back seat of a hire car when we launched our first album. But hey, this is about the good times’.

2007. The Kids
Our original drummer Bryce’s girlfriend Thalia managed a daycare place. It turned out the kids loved our first EP and would dance around like crazy to it after their nap time. So a gig was organised. We played in the back garden of the place, with drums and amps on the paving, to a group of kids, all under 5. It was a pretty memorable experience, all these kids rocking out to our music.

2009/2010. Falls Festival/Southbound.
This was a really fun time for TPS. It was the first time we’d been to Perth, and we got booked for both these massive festivals. I remember the show from falls really clearly, I remember it was by far the largest audience we’d ever played to, it was a crazy buzz, having a packed tent of people all becoming this one mass of party, of energy. I jumped onto of my amp and remember coming very close to stacking it in front of all those people. After Falls we went to Perth and played a show before going down to Southbound Festival. Southbound wasn’t the greatest show, we were on at 12 and there weren’t many people there. But more than anything it was just a nice trip, we had our own self- contained unit by the beach and we cooked and we went for a drive to Margaret River and swam. I think TPS were more into travelling and hanging out sometimes- the shows were just a good excuse.

2007. The Great Escape Festival
The Great Escape was a short-lived but awesome multi arts/music fest out at an old army base in Sydney. We played the first one, and the year after we played as well. We were lucky enough to be playing the one indoor stage ( I think it was called The Bunker) of about 5 or 6 stages and it started pissing down rain just before our set. I can’t really remember many details, but just remember it being really humid and jam packed with people. Sometimes the wet weather can be your friend.

Late 2006. Making ‘Less Talk More Paper Scissors’.
We took two months off work and relocated to Byron Bay to make our first album in our family studio (my dad and Xav’s uncle and his dad owned it) called Fracas. It was a pretty run-down bunch of rooms in an old small goods factory on the outskirts of town, but we had free rein and as much time as we wanted to fuck around with sounds and make an album. We experimented a fair but and that kind of led to the sound of the album being pretty diverse, or eclectic. There were lots of memorable moments- recording Tipped Hat, my brother must have been 13 or 14 and he and Bryce (original TPS drummer) and I played and tracked the drums with three kits in one room all at the same time. One other thing that I remember clearly is mixing the song Restless Through The Night- it is a weird kinda throwaway disco tune about not sleeping well, I was mixing and some family friends dropped in and one of their kids who must have been no more than 6 started going bananas and I cranked the monitors and we danced around the studio together.

2008. Less Talk More Problems.
I had hung out with Jake Stone from Bluejuice a few times, seen each other at The Mandarin Club and The Hoey. He was always telling me how much he liked the production on We Don’t Walk. We both had albums out and we decided to do a pretty hefty national tour together. This was a bad idea. It was the most drunken, exhausting, homoerotic tour that you could conjure up. We were usually a pretty timid band, we go wine tasting for fucks sake. But somehow the collective synergy of 9 band members, plus PHDJ in tow and crazy tour managers, made it a beast of booze and liver damage. The most memorable moment was when we played in Launceston. The gig was bad, there was hardly anyone there and this was a real comedown from the last few we’d played which were jammed. Our accommodation was above the club, very basic, no heating, pub accom- and after our show they turned the venue over and it became a drum & bass party. So there we were with no heating in Tasmania, freezing our arses off whilst this bwwaaaaaaaggh, thud thud, boom tish, boom tish rocked us into a sleepless stupor. The only saviour was the big bag of weed we’d been given by a family friend that lived in Tasmania, and we were flying home the next day, so we inebriated ourselves enough to get an hour or so sleep. It was awful, but memorable. As a side note, this was the tour that included a fateful evening that was the impetus for bluejuice’s ‘Broken Leg’ when Jake broke his limb whilst dancing in The Valley in Brisbane.

General.
I think one of the amazing things about being in a band is just the amount of people you meet and good excuses we got to travel and get drunk and listen to music. Some of the best fun has just been driving around in his cars listening to The Meters, or whatever we were digging at the time. Bands are a pretty weird thing and there have definitely been some really hard and harrowing moments that you can ask me about if you see me, but I won’t go into detail about here. But most of all it has been a blessing and an absolute privelege: just being able to make art, make music, pretend we were film makers, have people actually want us to sign their clothing they just bought off us (I always felt like I was wrecking their shirt), drive taragos, play in front of strangers, play next to Sydney Harbour and see Cate Blanchett grooving to you music out the corner of your eye, hang out with friends and argue with them about musical decisions, learn how to write, learn how to produce music, learn how to screen print, learn how to sing and not yelp. All these things and so much more that can’t all be rattled off, that all came about because of a thing called The Paper Scissors.

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Ah, ha! Our favourite Aussie indie band, The Paper Scissors, have a new single out, Lung Sum, from their second full-length album, In Loving Memory. Oh, and the video is kinda fun. Of course.

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We asked Jai Pyne of indie-rock band The Paper Scissors what Aussie nightlife means to him. ‘A night out in Sydney for me is probably not the most thrilling experience compared to others. I could lie and tell you about how much I love Ching a Lings, or Shadey Pines. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad there are some nice bars in Sydney now. But the truth is that I lay pretty low. For me, the best nights happen when food is involved. I think that’s one of the things that keeps me sane and keeps me in touch with Sydney. I often doubt the city and my reasons for living in it, but when I go out and eat, it reminds me of the reasons why I stay and why I begrudgingly love Sydney.’

‘The thing that represents nightlife to me is eating amazing food with friends. My partner and I will often make the trip to Lakemba to eat Lebanese food. Driving down the main street, it’s so far removed from the inner city that it’s refreshing; the smells are different, the faces are different, and the hours people keep are later. You’d be hard pressed to find a shop open in some inner city suburbs after 9, but here you can still buy nuts in bulk or bunches of herbs for a dollar. But the garlic and the mint and the hommous are the things that suck us back. And you don’t always have to venture that far for an awesome dinner. There is Thai food that has blown my mind and chilli rushed my head into oblivion and sleeplessness only a suburb away. Living in Newtown, I am surrounded by Thai restaurants, although a lot of them are very standard – edible but underwhelming. But there are a few places you can go and get flavour that kills these wok rockers.

‘Even with my band The Paper Scissors – we are the least ‘rock n roll’ guys ever – we always try to find the best spots to eat in the different places we pass through. We often take the piss out of ourselves – and deservingly so. One time we ate Gelati between sound check and show, and on a trip to Adelaide for a festival, we went wine tasting. I think my friends all have worked in the hospitality industry to support themselves or maybe sadistically for the joy of it, but I think it helps when going out. These people know where to eat, how to eat, to share dishes, to tip enough, and to drink well.

‘I spend all my money on food. I always wonder where it all went, but then I remember all the nice meals I’ve had and the fun I’ve had with friends. I think the term ‘foodie’ evokes pictures of Matt Preston or some wanker who reads Good Living religiously, but most of the people I love and value in life love food and the best memories of Sydney involve food.’

[audio:Howl.mp3]

Fill our crate with the best of Aussie nightlife. Your fave bands, DJs.. Go!

[Track by The Paper Scissors]

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Borne out of a desire to invigorate Sydney’s sedate CBD with some beautiful and engaging works of art, The Paper Mill is a new artist run space smack bang in the financial district, on Angel Place. I remember being dumbstruck by the majesty of Grizzly Bear this Sydney Festival, and looking next door to the rather nondescript Christian Book Store. Now I’m not sure if Jesus is all up on Twitter and the hard copy has gone the way of the music industry, but fast forward to today and four young artists with backgrounds ranging from art to graphic design and printmaking have taken over the space.

Credit to Clover Moore, as Sydney City Council is getting behind the project and helping to make the George Street precinct not just about Justin Hemmes making more money and pre-paid only bus rides. Not only are the youngsters curating some fine fine shows, they are also putting on artist talks, drawing classes, paper making and other workshops. Their first show — opening on September 7th — features some of Sydney’s brightest emerging artists, ranging from sculpture to drawing to video, but all with some sort of focus or engagement with paper.

Of course like most art endeavours in Australia, it is poorly funded and they are scraping by to set up the gallery, so they are putting on two fundraisers. When they asked my band The Paper Scissors to play, it was in the blink of an eye that we agreed, as we do like stationery and we are always willing to support people doing good things.

So Fundraiser 1 — let’s call it the Rock Fundraiser — is on at the Oxford Art Factory, tonight (Wednesday, August 25), and features The Paper Scissors, Bird Automatic, Eye to Eye, Lucy Hall, and Dara Gill. More details here.

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Australian indie-rock band, The Paper Scissors, the hippest thing to come out of the dusty streets of Byron Bay since flavoured wheatgrass, have done it again with another awesome single, Howl [listen below], a short, sharp jab of pitch perfect, power pop. We checked in with their David Byrne-ish frontman Jai Pyne and asked him how was the recording process differed for this latest EP from their previous album: ‘It was completely different. We did the tracking live, with all four of us in the room together. It was great. I think it freed us up and let us be more of a band. We’ve come a long way since we recorded Less Talk More Paper Scissors. Now that Ivan [drummer] has been in the band for about a year and a half, it is a lot easier. We are all very comfortable playing with each other. We’ve been doing it live a lot’.

‘Last year we did a few big tours and some big festivals. This time we tried to take that energy and get it into the studio and try to distill it somewhat. It was really fun. On both these new tracks and a couple of other ones too, we had a 25-piece ramshackle choir — made up of a few of our parents, my little brother (he’s seventeen) and some of his mates, who are all young musicians in Byron Bay, and a bunch of young kids from the Steiner school in Mullumbimby where Xavier’s dad used to teach.

‘So we had all the fun parts that we have used in our previous sessions, but it was more organic. Having said that, we did track some overdubs to try to get everything perfect and did a lot of additional recording at home in Sydney. Maybe the clean air was too much’.
[audio:Howl.mp3]

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The frontman for Sydney trailblazers, Paper Scissors, has just dropped his first solo EP under the alias of Pork Pies, and it’s an absolute beaut. Like the Paper Scissors’ more low-key numbers, there’s a real feeling of raw nostalgia running through the record. Jai Pyne’s distinctive vocals linger on your eardrums for a while after they’ve ceased, anchored down by a poignancy and sense of longing.
[audio:Cappuccinos.mp3]

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Sydney indie heroes (in the nicest possible way), The Paper Scissors (TPS to those that know the secret handshake) have made a video for their new single, The Bandit. And it’s good. Damn good.

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