The Brisbane based trio Not From There have been one of the more notable successes over the last 12 months or so, with some exceptionally good music seeing release from the band in the later half of the year, as well as the band's quite amazing album Sands On Seven.

Recently, I was fortunate enough to catch up with Simon, drummer for Not From There, just prior to the band's tour of Australia, on the phone from Brisbane. While many may recognize frontman Heinz & expet him to do almost all of the work on the music, as I soon found out, this is not the case. We spoke for some time about a variety of subjects, but kept returning to the band's love of live gigs & also that of what may be in store for the band's next album.

First up, I quizzed Simon about how the band's live gigs had gone down with the crowds.

"Pretty well. We just completed the Big Day Out tour a couple of weeks or so back & that was great. The crowds there seemed to really get into it. It was good, from the point of that a lot of the people were there who recognized the singles Sich Offnen & of course the current one Juanita's Cocktail Party, but when we moved onto other less poppy numbers from the album, they all stayed listening, which is refreshing."

With such a great album, I wondered how the band transferred that sound to the stage.

"Well, it's sort of like although we're a 3 piece, we're not really trying to present ourselves as a 3 piuece as such. We've sort of got the sampler, which we actually use in our live shows. If you listen to the album, you can probably see how we can expand a lot of the material on it to change it around or experiment with it while we're playing."

So how do the gig goers' like the way you do that?

"The reactions always seems to be very positive. What we try to do is to make everybody happy. We're playing the 'hits' for the people who like the singles & for the people who come along to maybe every Not From There gig, they know that the performance of Sich Offnen will be a little different to the one we do tomorrow night & that one will be different to the one next week or next year."

We got onto the subject of the Internet, with the band having their own site I wondered how it was created.

"Actually, we have a guy that looks after it for us. We all want to get a bit more hands on with the Internet, but it just hasn't happened as yet. It isn';t that we're not interested, but from my own end, I don't have a computer at home. I'm thinking about it soon, more from the sampler end than that of the Internet, but I know that I'll get drawn into it, becuase whenever I go over to a friend's house who has internet access, it's like 'oh can I just look up this' & then it might be 3 hours later."

We got back onto the live scene & I asked what the band's favourite song from the album was to perform & indeed which song they liked best on the album.

"Hmmm... That's a pretty tough question & I don't really know that I can answer it myself because I'm so close to the music itself. As for the live shows, the singles are really the easier songs to play becuase they're much simpler songs than some of the other material. I love doing What Is Better because we can really improvise & play around with that one. The Orb Of Discomfort is another great one to do because we can really stretch it out or we can just do a shorter version like it is on the album if time's a little tight. It's also got a really chunky production that we can fiddle with a bit in a live situation too, so no one version will be the same live, sort of an extension of what I was saying about those faithful gig goers earlier."

Lastly, I had to ask what the next single is to be or if the next album will be the band's next release.

"We'll be going back into the studio before the tour & we haven't really decided what it will be, but probably the first track on the album, Hurricane Charlie. It's not exactly what you'd call a filler track, but it's a great song that doesn't quite have the pop appeal of say Sich Offnen. We're also going to look at what we'll be doing with the next album - certainly there'll be more experimentation."

Catch Not From There on tour around Australia soon or check out their album Sand On Seven, out now through MDS.