Up & Comer: Honeybone

This week’s Up & Comers are newly Melbourne based three-piece, Honeybone. We chatted to Rachel Trainor, drummer/vocalist.

Tell us a bit about yourselves!
We are Honeybone, a three piece Garage Rock band hailing from Dunedin, a small city near the bottom of the South Island of New Zealand. We formed a week before our university’s battle of the bands in 2009 and have been playing together ever since. Drew is on vocals and guitars, Peter rocks the bass and back-ups and I (Rachel) play drums and sing as well. We made the move to Melbourne in March of 2012 and are beginning to build up a fanbase here. We’ve played with some awesome bands so far, Melbourne’s got a great scene.

Tell us a bit about your journey as a band so far.
We’ve had some pretty cool experiences in the last three years. We released our debut EP Soul On Fire in July of 2010, gained and lost a second guitarist (amicably of course) and we’ve been working on our debut album for the last year and a half (we want to get it perfect!). Before we moved here to Melbourne we played all around the South Island of New Zealand, which was awesome and we got to play with some of NZ’s great bands like The Datsuns, Dragon and Luger Boa. Also a highlight would have to be playing the Brass Monkey Motorbike Rally in Central Otago in the middle of winter on the back of a truck. There were hundreds of people and their motorbikes in front of a massive bonfire (it was about four degrees), and we played for about six hours, playing all sorts of classic rock covers. We ended up playing our entire originals set as well, which is unheard of as usually they are a tough crowd and will hate anything they don’t know. I couldn’t walk on my kick drum foot for about a week. That’s the sign of a good gig!

Describe your music for a new listener.
We play a bluesy type of garage-rock, influenced by bands like Deep Purple, The Datsuns, Led Zeppelin, White Stripes, Black Keys, Dead Weather etc. We love the blues and ’70s style progressive rock, so we try to meld the two together. Drew and I share the writing and lead vocal work so there’s a bit of variation as our styles are pretty different a lot of the time.

Where would you like to see yourselves (as a band) in two years time?
The goal for the next six months is to have the album finished and released (hopefully on vinyl) and do some gigs out of Melbourne. In two years we’re hoping to get another album done or be working on it, have some proper management and a couple of tours behind us. Mostly we’re keen to build up our fan base and play around as much as possible.

What’s the best gig you’ve been to recently?
Peter went to see Gary Clarke Junior at Cherry Bar a few weeks ago and he loved it. We all went to see Shihad at the Hifi (they were amazing) and Drew and I saw Russian Circles a couple of weeks back, they were absolutely incredible. That’s what we love about Melbourne, we don’t have to go out of town to see our favourite bands live, but it’s making our pockets pretty light!

How can we find out more?
We’ve just released a single called Don’t Need You which you can download for free at our bandcamp page , and our EP is also up there for free download as well. We’re playing a couple of gigs in November in Melbourne so head to our facebook to check out the dates.

Are you in a band? Do you play music? If you want to be featured as a Lip Up & Comer, email Zoya at [email protected] with some info on your band to get started!

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