Morning Harvey is a Brisbane band built around the creative endeavours of Spencer White. With a new EP, 'love&loveand.', ready to be unleashed, the band will tour the east coast in July.
The process for ‘love&loveand.’ began in 2013, with Spencer and his brother Jackson White, as well as friends Steve Kempnich and Lewis Stephenson. “I am very proud of it,” Spencer says regarding the EP.
“It took quite a while to be honest – not for the songwriting side of things, I didn’t want to release anything until we had structures in place.”
The recording process has been an enjoyable task for Morning Harvey. “When you have these two minds in the room and you are throwing ideas at one another and you bring the other guys in and they give you their ideas, it is a really nice atmosphere.”
You can hear a variety of influences with Spencer's writing. “Our stuff at the moment, people refer to it as Britpop, I can see how they get that but I wouldn’t say that we went out intentionally to make a Britpop sounding EP. I guess I am really influenced by live shows, and strong leads like Primal Scream and Nick Cave.”
The EP’s driving single, ‘Smith Street Swap Meet’, definitely contains those Britpop sounds. The track is accompanied by an amusing music clip, which was filmed in Brisbane. “I woke up in the middle of the night,” Spencer begins, “and I had this silly idea and I just wrote it done, scene for scene, and in the morning I went over it again and I thought I would run this by some friends who make our film clips and see what they think, and they were excited about it – so yeah, pretty much the next week we went and filmed it.”
A life for a musician can be filled with ups and plenty of downs. Spencer experienced his first downer at a young age. “I started guitar when I was in grade 3 – I was the only kid in my grade who wasn’t allowed in the school band. The music teacher thought I had been teaching her son badly – who I hadn’t actually met yet.
"So I didn’t get into the school band, which was pretty embarrassing for a kid that age. I went into a ball of tears and mum was like righto... and put me into guitar lessons.”
And the future for Morning Harvey? “I have been writing for the album to come,” Spencer says. “As I said, I don’t really like to write for one genre. I like it when people go off and do something else. Out of their comfort zone. Talking about the album to come, it will probably be a lot different to what people are hearing now.” The band is hoping they'll be able to expand the next tour to even more cities. “In the last year or so we have really been focusing on our live show and just really enjoying ourselves rather than just slogging it out and not really putting in the time and effort.”
'love&loveand.' is released 3 July.
Morning Harvey Tour Dates
Sat 4 Jul - Solbar (Sunshine Coast)Fri 10 Jul - Great Northern (Byron Bay)
Sat 11 Jul - The Elephant Hotel (Brisbane)
Wed 15 Jul - Sosueme (Sydney)
Fri 17 Jul - Shebeen (Melbourne)
Sat 18 Jul - Gallery Bar (Sydney)
