With Lismore being put firmly on the musical map courtesy of Triple J's Unearthed competition opening in the New South Wales regional town, one of the 2 bands discovered there have risen from obscurity to take the fast track to fame & a possible fortune based on their ample talents.

I recently had the chance to catch up with Kris Hopes from the band & we spoke about that early bit of fame & life for Grinspoon since their competition win. We started out with the obvious, a question about how Unearthed has affected the band as a whole.

"We've been asked this quite a bit & there's a few different sides to the answer to this. You have to understand that there've been a lot of bands who've won Unearthed now & I guess as one of the first, we stood out & we were fortunate to get a lot of attention from it. The prize for Unearthed was of course to have your winning track professionally recorded & a couple of month's airplay on Triple J. Now of course we have a recording contract & we've been able to step out from behind the shadow of being an Unearthed winner a lot."

So did the competition hurt Grinspoon a little?

"Well, in a way, you're.... I don't know - maybe pigeonholed as a band, at least for a while, but what it has done is enable us to leapfrog the queue a bit... you know what I mean, sort of saved us a lot of the legwork."

Grinspoon are about to embark on a national tour - the Road Rage tour. Are you looking forward to that?

"Definitely. Right near the end of it, we're doing a set at the Livid festival, so that should be huge."

I noticed Phil McKellar, Triple J's extraordinary producer, produced Sickfest, your Unearthed winning entry & also the rest of the album.

"Yeah, Phil's such a nice guy to work with. He's got a huge reputation all over the country & he seems to know exactly what you need when you're recording. Basically, he was just so easy to work with & we're very happy with the way the album sounds, so I guess it's worked out great for us."

One song in particular I have to ask about is DCX3, which has the lyric '...deat cat three times...', just what does that mean?

"(Laughing), it's not quite as mystical as it might seem at first. While we were doing the recording or maybe it was the mixing of the album, we were travelling the same route to the studios & back each day & this particular day we were driving back & forth to the studio & there was this dead cat - roadkill & it just fitted into this riff we were working on at the time."

The Grinspoon website has just been set up & an email address for the band too, how did all that come about?

"Surprisingly, a couple of fans got in contact with us & asked us if they could set up an official Grinspoon website & it's ballooned from there. I've only just got the email set up & we've had a look & it's really great. There's just so much music stuff on the Internet you don't know where to start."

Where do you see Grinspoon going from here?

"That's a pretty hard question, of course & I can't really say much more than we'd like to get back into the studio soon, but touring is exciting enough for the moment."

Check out Grinspoon's amazing debut album Guide To Better Living out now through Universal.