Roy Hilt: The next person we got was our singer. We had heard there was this amazing singer in our school, sang solos in the choir and everything. I wasn’t really thrilled on the idea of having a choir singer in our band, we did more rock, but Greg insisted we go and check it out. I’m glad we did because it turned out Miranda had one of those voices that could do anything, and that included rock vocals. We invited her to join our band and she said yes. I don’t think she took us seriously at first but we showed her how much the band meant to us and she got just as into it as we did.
Interviewer: And Seth? How did he join your group?
Roy Hilt: None of us actually knew him until he joined the band. We knew we needed a drummer and we didn’t have any idea where to find one, so we put the word around school that we were looking for one and Seth found us. He played for us and he was good, and he had his own drum kit, so we let him join.
Interviewer: So how did you become as famous as you did? You hold the rock music chart records in three different countries. That’s a big achievement.
Roy Hilt: Well it wasn’t easy. We went from my garage to local bars and school dances. I started writing some songs, Miranda wrote some others, and we started getting people walking up to us after gigs talking about how much they liked us. Greg burned some demo CDs on his computer of us and we started selling them for some extra money at shows. He even sent some in to local radio shows though we didn’t really expect them to play us. Imagine our surprise when a local disc jockey got his hands on our CD and actually played it while we were listening. Pretty soon we had a lot more people asking us for our CDs and we had to expand.
Interviewer: So did you find the head of Strange Recordings, or did he find you?
Roy Hilt: We found him. We sent our demo CDs to every record company we could think of and he was the only one who even responded. He told us that he didn’t think he could feel right signing us on a deal at the moment but that if we sent him another CD in a year and had improved he would consider it. I don’t think our band ever practiced as much ever again as we did that year. We were all still in high school and I can still remember sitting in science class, writing sheet music during lecture. I stopped even bothering to bring a regular notepaper to my classes because I never took any notes anyway. All I wrote during class was music. I’d sit in the back of English and tap out rhythms with my pencil. I think all of my teachers just got used to the idea that I wasn’t going to think of anything but music and gave up. I’d take the music to Miranda and play it for her and she showed just how amazing she was at writing lyrics. The music seemed to run through our blood back in those days.
Interviewer: So you met the standard of Strange Recordings by the end of that year?
Roy Hilt: He said that he had never seen a band improve so quickly. He said that we had shown potential but he had never expected us to get as good as we did. He signed us right away, said he had to get us before someone else did. After that we seemed to just blast into fame, everything seems like it worked in fast forward. One day I was a struggling high school band member, the next day I was pasted all over walls in front of good sized stages. Strange Recordings is good at advertisement and they put in a lot of effort to promote our band.
To be continued...
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