If you don’t know who Walk Off The Earth are, you must have stepped off the planet for a couple of years. Or maybe you've lived without wi-fi or social media access.
With 178 million YouTube views for their cover of Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’, the innovative cover band are 21st century rock stars.
Walk Off The Earth's multi-instrumentalist Ryan Marshall says the internet has not destroyed the music industry, it has just changed the rules. “To me [all the internet] has done is it’s broadened the competition and allowed people from countries or who didn’t have the financial ability to get their music to other people’s ears, now they have a free highway to do that.
“It’s not even the internet or social media, you take TV shows like 'The Voice' or 'American Idol', and people go 'oh well, it’s filtered pop crap'. But these are really talented people man and they’re getting on those shows because they have an amazing talent.”
Talent alone was once not enough to succeed in the music industry; a musician or band needed the backing of a major label.
The big record companies still play a role, says Marshall, but much further down the chain. “Now the major labels just wait for you to do your own thing and if people like it and you have a fan base, then they take you and try to help you make some more money. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just a different way of business.”
To cultivate their fan base, Walk Off The Earth devise hilarious video-clip concepts capturing the insane instrumental and vocal chops of the five members (they've covered everyone from Katy Perry to Radiohead).
These videos are not simply a case of point, shoot and upload; they were the product of hours of toil. “We’ve done videos that we had planned on getting in one day and then we come back the next day and still don’t get it, so it turns into a three-day shoot.
“We do videos that are like 30 or 40 takes and you can see it when you watch the video; you can see the looks on our faces that we’re so concentrated because we’re like 'I don’t want to do this again, it’s 2am, let’s just everybody get this right at the same time'.
“We’ll get to a part and say 'ok Sarah, you gotta switch from the ukulele to the bass at this point' and 'oh, I’ve got the bass, so how are we going to do that?' 'Oh just throw it to me and I’ll throw this to Johnny and he’ll do that.'”
When their Gotye cover went viral, the band’s world changed rapidly says Marshall. “When that Gotye video hit, we were in Germany two weeks later for a two-week run and we’d never even been to Germany before.”
The prospect of coming to Australia, though, gives the band goosebumps. Though Ryan is quick to shower their support crew with praise. “We got a great crew that tours with us, they get guitars thrown at them, they get trumpets thrown at them. They make the stage show what it is. If it was just the five of us, all the instruments would be broken by the end of the show.”
Walk Off The Earth Shows
Thu 27 Jul - Enmore Theatre (Sydney)Fri 28 Jul - The Tivoli Theatre (Brisbane)
Sat 29 Jul - The Forum (Melbourne)
