Angus and Julia Stone, unturned

ANGUS and Julia Stone, the sibling darlings of the Australian indie folk scene, have reunited with a new outlook on music.

Angus and Julia Stone enjoyed tremendous success before branching out as solo performers.

ANGUS and Julia Stone have just been for a walk around Sydney Harbour, taking in the sights like tourists, even though it’s the city they have called home for most of their lives. A lot has changed since the two mus­icians left four years ago, set on a path of success on the back of their second album, 2010’s Down the Way, and its award-winning, international earworm Big Jet Plane. The siblings got famous, toured the world to rave reviews and looked set for a long and fruitful collaboration, a million miles away from their humble roots playing open-mic nights around Sydney’s northern beaches just a few years earlier.

When the lights went down in 2011, however, something wasn’t quite right. After the hubbub of Down the Way and globetrotting to promote it, the siblings set off in different directions, both to record their second solo albums, but also to spend time away from each other. Those albums, Angus’s Broken Brights and Julia’s By the Horns, highlighted the individual songcraft that informs their work as a duo, where they also have written separately, but they were statements of intent as well. As quickly as their names became recognised in tandem, Angus and Julia decided they weren’t going to be an act any more. There was a strong possibility that Down the Way would be their last hurrah.

“We just needed to step back for a while and take stock,” says Angus, at 28 two years younger than Julia. So they took a year out, set up homes on opposite sides of the US, went to India separately on retreats and worked on their solo projects. They didn’t see each other for months on end and once bumped into each other on a Paris street by chance. “We’d talk to each other on the phone,” says Angus, “but we had no intention of making another record together.”

50 YEARS OF MUSIC IN THE AUSTRALIAN

Leap forward to the present and the scenario is decidedly different. The two young musos, dressed in familiar hippie-ish attire, are sitting in the Sydney office of their record company, EMI, with tea and biscuits, grinning, sparring with each other, talking enthusiastically about spending the foreseeable future working with the same purpose.

On August 1, Angus and Julia Stone release their self-titled third album, a collection of songs that marks their first collaboration as songwriters, at least in terms of being in the same room. On the back of that album a bout of international touring has begun in Europe, with a new band in tow. They’re looking forward to being on the road well into next year.

“We’ve found a new confidence, I think,” says Julia, who is slightly more outgoing than her younger brother. “In the past sometimes we’d a struggle a little, standing our ground on things, but there’s more of a feeling of collaboration now.”

The man responsible for this remarkable turnaround is American super-producer Rick Rubin, a legend in rock circles and one of the most respected names in the music business. His resume, however, is not overflowing with the work of Australian folk-pop acts. Metallica, AC/DC, Aerosmith and Slayer are on his list of achievements, although there’s diversity. Rubin has put his studio gloss on work by Beastie Boys, Eminem, Josh Groban, Weezer and Johnny Cash, among many others. He’s a music fan as well as a professional. English singer-songwriter Jake Bugg named his latest album Shangri La after the famed Malibu studio where it was recorded, which is Rubin’s headquarters. It was there that Angus and Julia’s musical resurrection took place late last year, but not before the siblings had rebuffed and fretted over the producer’s eagerness to record them.

The 51-year-old studio whiz heard some of Angus and Julia’s music at a party and decided on the spot that he had to know more about them. He invited them separately to Los Angeles, just to talk about their plans.

“He explained that he had listened to us and really wanted to work with us,” says Julia, “and he made us consider what we had as a duo.”

What followed during the next few months was a kind of courting process, with Rubin keen to bring the two together again, while the siblings remained convinced it wasn’t a good idea.

“We were enjoying being apart and doing our own things so it took a while to convince us it was going to work,” says Julia, who describes Rubin as “the man of wonder”. Eventually they succumbed. The turning point came after the two were on the same bill at a festival and performed their first song together since their lengthy separation had begun.

“It felt so magical,” Julia says, “so we decided then we’d do the record.”

“Him telling us like that he liked us … well, it would have been crazy not to do it,” adds Angus.

Angus moved to Los Angeles from New York, a handful of demos in his bag, and joined Julia and some hired hands in a rehearsal studio for two weeks, putting their new material to the test. It was a new beginning.

Within a few weeks they had set up in Shangri La, with Bob Dylan’s old tour bus parked in the front yard and a wealth of rock ’n’ roll history seeping out of the woodwork. It was a change of pace for the freewheeling Stones.

“Rick is very easy to work with,” says Julia. “He was great and had a lot of good ideas.

“Plus he has done all this great stuff. He was the only one who could have brought us back together.”

Rubin is equally complimentary about his latest collaborators.

“This album is extraordinary,” he says. “Angus and Julia are truly unique musicians. They are authentic and pure people who do things from the heart. I’ve never worked with anyone like them before.”

THE night before this interview something special takes place to mark the latest chapter in Angus and Julia’s story. In a tiny theatre in Sydney’s Redfern, in front of just a few hundred invited guests, the pair are testing their new material — songs such as the strident and infectious A Heartbreak, the 1970s-sounding Little Whiskey, and the charming first single, Heart Beats Slow. With their tight band and an easy chemistry between them as they switch lead vocal duties and harmonise, it’s a crowd-pleasing performance, with a lot of warmth in its delivery as well as musical panache.

What’s most evident is the love they have for each other on stage; the wry asides, the knowing glances to each other and the occasional apology for playing something not quite right. If there was some rivalry between them it seems to have evaporated in the wake of Rubin’s intervention.

“We’ve been apart for quite a while so it was a good feeling to be back on stage together,” says Julia.

It’s no great surprise that Angus and Julia became professional musicians. Their parents, John and Kim, performed in a folk duo and, while growing up in Newport on Sydney’s northern beaches, Angus, Julia and their older sister Catherine listened to folk music, some of it performed by their parents.

All of the children learned brass instruments at an early age, Julia playing trumpet, an instrument she would teach later on, while Angus graduated from trombone to guitar, picking up the latter while recovering from a snowboarding accident. Julia has described their childhood as “very simple and very fulfilling” and says that when they had their initial success with the album A Book Like This in 2007 they were a little ­resentful that such simplicity had gone from their lives.

In 2005 Angus, already a songwriter, began performing solo at local open mic nights. He was also teaching Julia how to play guitar and by the following year they were performing together, with material they had written separately, but with the freedom to embellish each other’s work.

Early EPs Chocolates and Cigarettes and Heart Full of Wine brought them airplay for the song Paper Aeroplanes. During this time they relocated to London and recorded A Book Like This there with Fran Healy from Scottish band Travis. Soon their popularity in Britain began to grow just as it had in Australia, and they extended their reach when the album was released in the US in 2009.

It was a track from Angus’s first solo record, Smoking Gun, that, in a circuitous way, lit a fire under the duo’s career. Big Jet Plane, a laid-back folkie strut, was turned into a more urgent and infectious pop song for the pair’s second album, Down the Way, and gave them their biggest hit to date. It was a big year, with the single and the album winning them ARIA awards and Big Jet Plane taking the top spot on Triple J’s Hottest 100 in January 2011.

Fame hasn’t changed them too much, says Julia, and it helps that they try to get away from the music business (they both like tennis, which comes as a slight surprise). Both of them have also made several trips to India to practise panchakarma, the cleansing of the mind, body and consciousness by means of applied oils, special diet and therapy techniques.

“You slow everything down and take lots of fluids that are good for your body,” says Julia. “It’s quite a spiritual as well as physical experience and it’s hard at first. It gives you time to think, and I really got into it. Our old drummer Mitch went to India and he recommended it. It’s just a different experience. You don’t do much, in fact nothing, so it’s difficult, but you get used to it. When you’re travelling a lot in a band it’s good to be able to do something different. I’ve done it a few times now and I’ll do it again, although I’m not sure when now, since we are going to be so busy.”

The next date on that busy schedule is next weekend, when Angus and Julia are among the main acts at this year’s three-day Splendour in the Grass festival near Byron Bay. They’ll be overseas after that, before returning to Australia for a full-scale tour in September.

Most important, however, they will be doing all of that together.

“We’ve struggled sometimes knowing what we wanted to do with our lives, together and on our own,” says Julia. “After Down the Way and all the touring it was a good time for us to go off and do different things. Getting back together has given us a stronger bond and an unspoken energy. I’m looking forward to the touring we have ahead, which is a lot.”

Angus and Julia Stone, the album, is released through EMI on August 1. They play at Splendour in the Grass on July 25 and begin their national tour in Adelaide on September 12.