How Gang of Youths became one of Australia’s biggest rock bands
With long, wordy songs delivered by an irresistibly charismatic frontman, this Sydney-born group has a global appeal to rival the likes of Silverchair and INXS.
Midway through a night where a multicultural rock ‘n’ roll band became the toast of the Australian music industry by winning four ARIA Awards from its eight nominations, Gang of Youths frontman David Le’aupepe gripped the microphone and looked out into the crowd.
“We’re probably one of the many bands that believe in the redemptive power of rock ‘n’ roll music, and its potentially world-changing emancipatory potential, which basically means it can help people and free people,” he said, while accepting the award for best rock album.
“Rock ‘n’ roll saves a lot of lives, in my opinion, because we get a lot of messages from people who actually care, and who actually give a shit,” he said. “And to those people who tell us how much we’ve helped them: thank you. We want to keep doing it, because we believe in this. We believe in rock ‘n’ roll. We believe in this powerful art form.”
The tall, burly son of a Samoan father and a German Jewish mother, on that night in November 2017 Le’aupepe spoke of growing up in Sydney’s inner-west without much money, but somehow, his parents managed to find $200 to buy their son a guitar.
“That guitar changed my f..king life,” he said from the stage. “Go and pick up a guitar; go and pick up an instrument […] because the world needs good artists who have something to say; to say meaningful things from the heart and from the soul, to speak truth to power, and to speak to humanity in the way that it needs to be spoken to.”
This was an unusually profound speech for a musician to give on an occasion where glitz and glamour can easily overshadow the potential for deep and meaningful thoughts.
Yet on a night where Gang of Youths also won best group and best album, it also neatly showed that this gang isn’t much interested in the traditional tropes of meat-and-potatoes rock ‘n’ roll.
Sitting near the front row at the 2017 ARIAs was Paul Harris, the former A&R manager at Sony Music Australia, who signed the quintet to the record label and nurtured its rise. “I think that kind of sentiment is something a lot of people would like to say, but they’re absolutely terrified that they’ll come across as sounding arrogant,” Harris tells me. “Dave’s always had this ability to make bold comments like that.”
“He learned how to refine that quite early in the process: I think he realised, ‘No, I can make these statements – and as long as I truly believe it when I’m saying them, then other people will believe them, too’,” says Harris, who now works at Warner Music.
Since that night more than four years ago, the quintet has become one of few contemporary Australian acts able to comfortably fill arenas, alongside artists such as Tame Impala, Amy Shark, Flume, Hilltop Hoods, Parkway Drive and, on his upcoming tour, teenage hip-hop artist The Kid Laroi.
Formed in Sydney in 2012 after the band members met variously while at Hillsong Church and while attending Mosman High School, it hasn’t exactly saturated the market with its material. Its newly released third album, Angel in Realtime, follows 2015 debut The Positions and 2017’s Go Farther In Lightness.
Five years between albums is an eternity in the modern music world, although the pandemic was a factor. Founding guitarist Joji Malani left the group in 2019 and was replaced by multi-instrumentalist Tom Hobden. Now based in London, where the band members live together, that early Hillsong connection is a distant memory.
“I have no qualms saying that I disagree profoundly with a lot of how I grew up,” Le’aupepe told The Guardian in November. “Those people treated me badly and rejected me, and as soon as we got successful, they’re suddenly nice […] Love the poor, f..k capitalism. And f..k these massive megachurches that rip people off.”
In early 2019, the group headlined the national touring Laneway Festival. Before its set at the Brisbane Showgrounds, I watched from backstage as the singer paced back and forth outside the crowded tent like a caged panther. He was alone, and nobody was speaking to him while he psyched himself up to the task of giving his entire self to the audience. I had seen the band perform once before, a couple of months earlier at a sold-out show at the Brisbane Riverstage in 2018, and had appreciated the ambitious grandeur of its sound. It is a special feeling to be among thousands of its fans – many of them in their late teens and early 20s – singing along to every word of Le’aupepe’s wordy songs.
It is remarkable that an act like this has become one of Australia’s biggest rock ‘n’ roll exports since Silverchair and, before them, INXS.
With Le’aupepe out front, and his bandmates diligently but somewhat anonymously driving these songs behind him, Gang of Youths is a singularly persuasive force of nature.
Perhaps this characterisation is unfair to his fellow musicians in bassist Max Dunn, guitarist/keyboardist Jung Kim, drummer Donnie Borzestowski and Hobden. There’s plainly nothing anonymous about the band’s sound, which has become as distinctive as a fingerprint.
Yet in the live arena, nobody can take their eyes off Le’aupepe, who has comfortably become the most charismatic Australian rock frontman since Michael Hutchence. There is no greater exemplar of this assertion than the band’s performance of its song Let Me Down Easy at the 2018 Splendour in the Grass music festival.
Captured by Triple J’s camera crew and uploaded to YouTube, where it has clocked more than 540,000 views, this mesmerising five-minute snippet tells you everything you need to know about this band’s power and its singer’s irresistibility. Moves like Jagger? Nah: moves like Le’aupepe, who is in a class of his own. Whatever he’s selling, you’re buying.
Putting the luminous vocalist aside, though, any fan of rock ‘n’ roll can find something to love in its cleverly arranged songs, which often take surprising turns and are allowed to truly breathe across five minutes or more.
Le’aupepe writes with wisdom, wit, self-deprecation and uncertainty. He can veer between sounding like a preacher who has all the answers to a pauper who has none of them, sometimes within the space of a single song.
This is part of what makes the band’s achievements so far all the more impressive: it has convinced arenas full of fans to come along for a ride centred on these verbose, complex and self-contradictory compositions. “We never wanted to make small music,” the singer told Rolling Stone Australia in 2015.
As of this month, Gang of Youths has more than two million monthly listeners on Spotify, where its most popular song is Achilles Come Down, a seven-minute-long, string-heavy epic inspired by the hero of Homer’s Iliad.
With 58 million plays and counting, there aren’t many popular rock ‘n’ roll songwriters who could manage to make that work. Maybe just one.
In the weeks prior to the release of its third album – which is likely to be one of the biggest Australian releases of 2022 – Le’aupepe goes to ground completely, declining all one-on-one interviews in favour of a single Zoom press conference held alongside bassist Dunn a few days before its release.
“Burnt out,” is the reason given by the band’s publicist, and while understandable – given the intensely personal nature of his songwriting – it also leaves a gap in the narrative.
The singer has previously been upfront about his inspiration for this collection of songs: the death of his father, Teleso “Tattersall” Le’aupepe, who died in 2018.
Having spent his 20s being interviewed at length, maybe Le’aupepe has grown weary of submitting himself to journalistic inquiry while on the cusp of 30.
Maybe he’s being precious. Or maybe he’s taken a trick from Peter Garrett, who told this writer last month, “If you articulate too much of these things – if you talk about and analyse it too much – it loses whatever it had.”
With a characteristic grin, the 68-year-old Midnight Oil frontman said, “You should really never explain your songs and how you work.”
All that’s left to absorb, then, is the work itself. Luckily for the frontman and his bandmates, the songs that appear on this third album – their third entry in the powerful art form called rock ‘n’ roll – are excellent. It’s big music. It might even be lifesaving.
Angel in Realtime is released on Friday via Mosy Recordings/Sony. Gang of Youths tours nationally from July 30 (Perth) to August 20 (Brisbane).
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