Zeptepi

Article by Severine

Indie fans, this week's Spotlight is dedicated to you. Coming straight out of Australia, Zeptepi brings a catchy and powerful sound to your ears, mixing with some new wave melodies and deep lyrics. Great riffs, guitar solos, drums, surprising melodies and vocals... it makes for an all round, dynamic cross-genre Indie album! We7 met Phil Dean, the lead singer to talk about their recent gigs and the forthcoming album...

Hi Phil, how are you doing?

Elated and exhausted… my wife gave birth to a beautiful baby girl last week, so I'm somewhat emotionally and physically drained right now. It's all good though.

So first things first, how did you meet?

I met all the members of the band electronically, via a website for Melbourne musicians. That sounds pretty nerdy doesn't it? Zeptepi has existed as a studio project since 2001 when I first came to Australia, but it wasn't until 2004 that I hooked up with Bernie (drums), and since then we've had several line-ups. Frank (bass) came onboard the following year, and the three of us have been the core of the band since then. After touring the last album "Universality" for the first half of 2007, we took a break, and re-grouped towards the end of the year. Since then Bryce (keyboards) and Hayley (violin) have joined the band. It's taken a while to get the right personnel – we'd been looking for a violin player for a couple of years before Hayley finally found us – but I'm really happy with the band right now.

Who did choose the name Zeptepi and what does it stand for?

I came across the name years ago and locked it away in my mind for future reference. I just liked the sound of it really, but it does have a meaning too… it's an ancient Egyptian word meaning "the beginning", referring to the dawn of time, in which sense it would more correctly be written as Zep Tepi.

Where do you get your inspiration from when writing?

More often than not I'll be inspired to write by a book I'm reading, certainly from a lyrical perspective. It's rare for me to read a book by an author such as Colin Wilson, John Michell or Paul Broadhurst and not be inspired to write something myself. Occasionally I'll hear a song that will lead me to try my hand at writing something similar, but usually a melody will just drop into my consciousness every so often from out of nowhere, which is pretty handy… sometimes whilst I’m sitting there strumming a guitar, more usually while I'm driving the car or walking the dogs.

You have played many gigs lately: any particularly great memories?

The gigs we have done in the last few months have been some of the most enjoyable I've ever played – the band has been completely reinvigorated with Bryce and Hayley joining, and the energy on stage has been brilliant. There's been a real sense of excitement about the shows now – all the recent gigs have been memorable. In particular it's been fun to watch Hayley become so at home with us onstage so quickly – a few months ago she'd never played onstage with a band, after just a couple of shows it was as if she'd been doing it all her life.

Do you have any pre gig rituals?

I won't even consider going onstage unless I have ironed my underpants.

If you could, which band/artist would you like to play with?

It would be a great experience to play with any of the bands that have meant something to me over the years, but it would be pretty special to play with The Waterboys or The Only Ones. Both of these bands have been an enormous influence on me, Mike Scott and Peter Perrett have indirectly taught me so much about writing a song. And they're both amazing live acts.

You have been in the music industry for several years now. What do you think about new ways of promoting your music online?

Yeah, when I started playing in bands there was no Internet and the trusty old cassette tape was the medium of choice! As an independent band it's great to be able to have so many options now, and websites such as Myspace and Youtube are great promotional tools, giving you the potential to reach an enormous market. In some ways though I tend to think little has really changed – money talks, and without a record label on your side with a bit of cash I think it's still very hard to get noticed. It seems to me the most effective way for people to discover you is still for your music to be heard on TV/radio, or playing plenty of gigs. WE7 has been good for us though - that people can discover and download our music for free while we still get paid gives us all a nice warm fuzzy feeling, and it's brought us a lot of new fans that would have probably never found us otherwise. I like the fact that there is a degree of quality control on the WE7 music catalogue that is sorely lacking elsewhere.

You are currently recording your third album: how is it going?

Really well actually, we've started work on a bunch of new songs and I'm really excited with what we've done so far. It's a much slower process this time round, we're just doing the odd day here and there in a local studio, and then adding some parts/editing etc at our own studio. I think I prefer this approach as it gives us plenty of time to think about things as we go - with "Universality" we recorded for two weeks straight, and then did the same with the mixing, and I found it quite hard to get perspective on what was happening. We're hoping to have something ready for release by the end of the year.

Any advice to new artists like you who want to stand out of the crowd?

Date someone famous. Failing that, get yourself arrested for something really outrageous, ideally something without a lengthy custodial sentence.