Luscious Jackson

“We want to make classic records – ones that last. No matter what way you look at it, it always comes back to Pet Sounds, The White Album and Transformer, doesn’t it?”

Luke Steele, guitarist, vocalist and front-man with The Sleepy Jackson isn’t slow to nail his colours to the mast as far as his band’s primary influences are concerned.

Hailing from Perth in Western Australia and currently enjoying the almost blanket patronage of the UK music press, The Sleepy’s are the latest in a long line of current contenders to doff their hats to classic American pop.

“I’ve always been fascinated by American music, especially West Coast outfits like the Beach Boys, The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield,” Steele offers. “Those guys were so on the money back then. The fact that it sounds so great today is a testament to their genius. There are a few people around today, like Beck, Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips who we admire a lot as well but it’s mainly the old stuff that inspires us.

The Sleepy Jackson’s self-titled mini-album, compiled from a pair of earlier Australian EPs, displays these and sundry other influences in spades, on songs like the languid, acoustic country rock of ‘Caffeine In The Morning Sun’, the trippy balladeering of ‘Sunkids’ and the quirky Brechtian ‘Let Your Love Be Love’.

Like most Australian bands they honed their live sound touring the wild outback towns of their native land, as Steele explains. “Me and the drummer Malcolm have been in bands for ten years and we’ve done endless tours particularly down in the south of Australia where it can get pretty rough. The gigs are usually full of guys who couldn’t get a job in the city – we call them rednecks. You’d be playing original songs and they’d start throwing bottles at you, shouting up for AC/DC covers.”

The band’s evocative moniker was borne out of a real life incident on one of those tours according to Steele.

“We went to this party on a farm after a gig and everything was getting pretty rowdy. One of the guys walked out and fell asleep in this bull pen. The bull was called Jackson and had a fierce reputation but luckily for him it was asleep at the time. The owner was surprised the bull hadn’t devoured the guy. He said, ‘it’s lucky Jackson was sleepy’. We thought, ‘hmm, the sleepy Jackson – that sounds good’!”