The Kings Fool

Sleight of Hand Interview

Circa 2006

“It means you’re shifty bastards” I playfully tease the boys, as I ask the unavoidable question of how the band’s name conceptualised. “The initial idea came from an art teacher in high school who had a band called Bubble Juggler, who had a song called Sleight of Hand on their EP. At first I didn’t know what it meant, just like quite a few of our fans that ask us the question,” singer/guitarist Benj Axewell divulges.

“What it means to me is that it is all to do with cards tricks and hiding, and that kind of thing. It’s like, just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean that it’s not really there. It’s this underlying passion that you have for writing music and performing it for people, and creating, if you will, and that isn’t always a visual thing. Music is an audible thing, but just because you cant see it doesn’t mean it’s not there”.

After seeing Sleight of Hand in the flesh many a fan has invested in their debut EP Breathe (into its third pressing), which, apart from the fact that they can pen a mighty fine hard-rock song, can be put down to the fact that the boys gig like dogs. This strong work ethic and dogged self-belief is the reason that the guns these boys have stuck to have developed into some very heavy artillery.

In this scribe’s humble opinion, Sleight is one of if not the, best live performing band in the city. Even if you don’t like their music your attention is drawn to the energy pulsating from the front of the room. Singer/guitarist Benj Axewell especially, exudes a stage finesse as magnetic, energetic and genuine as INXS’s Michael Hutchence, or the Mars Volta’s Cedric Bixler-Bavala. If he could play his guitar and sing whist operating a pogo-stick I’m sure he’d jump at it. The rest of his motley crew tear up the stage as well, bassist Corey Porter is infamously renowned for a bit of impromptu instrument demolition as he flings himself around the stage, like paint splattered randomly about a canvas.

The Sleight boys are huge fans of our strong local scene of musicians and are doing their part to build upon the genuine sense of community that seems to be reappearing in our city, with more and more bands adopting the myspace.com friend networking philosophy. The guys have started their own little commune where they and half a dozen other bands rehearse and record each week. Tucked away in a light industrial estate in Mayfield, the boys ‘renovated’ a couple of adjoining storage sheds, constructing themselves their very own soundproof music temple, where they and their friends go to blow of steam. A home away from home of sorts.

“You can put us on the record; we all work in shitty job,” Benj disclaims. “We know we’re capable of so much more intellectually and some of us have taken the measures to pursue that in the future, but we just have such a good time in the rehearsal studio, and we have really started to get into this zone now, where we have got our song-writing chops down, where a song would take us the better part of a year to write, now we go in and whack one down and just go, ‘there we go, there is one from start to finish’ and we can work on that or we can just leave it but at least we’ve got something down and since we left the studio we have probably written the better part of 40 new songs”

That’s a lot of new material, some of which got its inaugural airing recently at The Queens Wharf Brewery, where the boys got to perform an unheard of double shift of new material. It is a testament to their shit hot stage personas. This group of individuals are obviously in the moment for being in the moment, and it is this passion for their craft that has allowed them to move to the next level; touring on the national circuit.

Sleight met their tour companions Brisbane’s This Collision, on the Myspace network. Myspace it proving the best way for aspiring hopefuls to team up on the road making it easier to line up gigs about the place. The Hands Collide tour is a three week sabbatical of the east coast snaking its way down from our Northern most capital to the Southern tip, stopping in at the Cambridge Hotel Friday the 11^th of August, whilst the new breed are not forgotten with an ALL AGES extravaganza at the Black-box on the 13^th.

Tags: Benj Axwell, Sleight of hand, SOH