Interview: Angus and Julia Stone on Cape Forestier and weathering life’s storms
After a wealthy hotel owner in Egypt sent a private jet to pick up the siblings for a last-minute appearance, the Stones were made to wait until 2am to perform. The reason for the extended delay blew them away.
Perhaps more than any other popular Australian act of the past 20 years, the combined sound of Angus and Julia Stone seems to be expressly designed to accompany the stoic act of weathering life’s storms.
Paired with arrangements rooted in indie pop and folk music, his singing style is sleepy, unhurried and calm; his elder sister’s is more expressive and expansive – but when the siblings’ tones blend, something extraordinary materialises.
It happens at an inner-city Sydney performance space in late March: their record label, Sony, has booked a theatre inside Restaurant Hubert for a private showcase to welcome their newest signing to the artistic roster.
The default atmosphere at such music industry events bends toward awkward, as performers are charged with conjuring a vibe from a standing start, often at firmly non-rock ’n’ roll times – 5pm on a Monday, in this case.
Yet professionalism and musical charisma can triumph over most adversities, and good songs retain their quality no matter the locale or what the clock says.
As the pair sit on stools, acoustic guitars poised underarm, they begin finger-picking the chords to Losing You, the opening track from their new album. From the first syllable sung into their microphones, they’re locked in unison:
Baby, I keep on losing you
You got somewhere that you run to
Baby, I lost you in the shadow
You go somewhere I cannot follow …
Goosebumps flash across the skin of about 50 fans watching on – winners plucked at random from a social media competition – and the afternoon takes a sudden gearshift from the quotidian to the sublime. Their talent rises well above the staid setting to fill the room, and for 3½ minutes, nothing else matters.
Unusually, they retain their unison vocals – pitched a third apart – throughout the song, which showcases the underrated fact that their sibling harmonies comprise one of the greatest sounds in contemporary Australian music.
The gentle feel of the song was inspired by memories of singing along to their parents’ favourite music from the 1960s and 1970s while road-tripping up the east coast as children, having grown up in Newport, on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.
Making music that sounds fresh and effortless, while simultaneously concealing the effort and creativity required to write it, is among the trickiest and most elusive traits to be found in the performing arts. It’s rare enough to unearth one such talent in a family; for such a skill to be possessed by two siblings is freakish indeed.
Watching them unfurl Losing You like a mainsail while backed by a gun guitarist, bassist and drummer, the effect is spellbinding.
It calls to mind an offhand, yet entirely accurate Nick Cave quote. “Music, of all the creative forms, best repairs the heart,” said the singer-songwriter in Faith, Hope and Carnage, Cave’s 2022 book co-written with Irish journalist Sean O’Hagan.
What the Stones create in this small-scale theatre is so tender, gorgeous and affecting that you can all but feel the cardiac tissue being mended in real-time.
At once lovelorn, optimistic and unresolved, this opening lyric – and the singers’ combined delivery – works as a kind of mission statement for what Angus and Julia Stone have been creating since 2006, when they began recording together.
At song’s end, Julia, 40, tells the crowd: “Thank you, guys – you are all so lovely for being a part of this, and pre-buying the record, and entering to be here tonight. We’re so pleased that we get to play these songs for the first time with fans. It’s really nice for us in this environment; we’re about to go on a big world tour, and it’s fun to hear them in this room. So what are we going to play?”
“This next song is called Cape Forestier,” replies Angus, 38. “It’s the title track for the new record. It’s about a decommissioned old trawler, and I guess the premise of it sums up the concept of the record: when life gets a bit chaotic, there’s this ship, the Cape Forestier, that keeps us steady.”
Across 40 minutes and seven tracks – including a fan request for a 2007 tune, Wasted, which Julia wrote using the first four chords her brother taught her – the duo and their band hold the small but enthralled crowd aloft on a tide of their distinctively ethereal songs.
The fans’ phones were cloaked at the door for this exclusive concert, and it’s something of a throwback to simpler times to be in a screen-free environment where there’s nought to do but sit, listen and luxuriate in the music.
Before electing to end with their biggest hit, Big Jet Plane – which topped the Triple J Hottest 100 music poll in 2011 – Angus pauses to thank the audience one last time, and to point to new horizons yet uncharted.
“It’s really special to be able to be releasing a new record and be sharing music with the world again,” he says. “We hope you get something out of it in your lives, and your experiences with it.”
Backstage before the show, Review meets the Stones, who are holed up inside the restaurant in a private boardroom which, oddly, can be locked only from the outside.
Not so long ago, the siblings had so completely overdosed on each others’ company that the thought of being shut inside a room together might well have sent them screaming from it.
After an extensive world tour in support of chart-topping second album Down The Way – which contained the aforementioned Big Jet Plane, and won five ARIA Awards in 2010 including album of the year – their third set of songs as a duo was all but completed when they suddenly, but amicably, decided to ditch those recordings, part ways and pursue their own projects.
Their disconnection in mid-2011 was so profound that they spent much of the next two years living on different continents, not speaking to one another, and avoiding listening to each other’s subsequent solo releases.
In a twist of fate, Julia was sitting in a restaurant with her band in Paris when she looked up to see her younger brother walking in with his bandmates.
Neither of them had any idea they were in the same city, but the coincidence – and all that time spent out of orbit – helped thaw the icy familial relationship.
They reconnected for a self-titled release in 2014, overseen by famed US producer Rick Rubin, which saw the pair writing songs from scratch together for the first time, rather than the previous approach of bringing in songs separately.
Fourth album Snow followed in 2017, which featured the hit song Chateau; fifth album Life Is Strange was issued in 2021 as a surprise release that doubled as a soundtrack for the newest entry in an award-winning adventure video game series of the same name. (Late last year, Review named Life Is Strange as one of 52 flawless albums.)
Today at Restaurant Hubert, six weeks away from the release of Cape Forestier, they’re completely at ease with one another, and so on a shared wavelength they regularly finish one another’s sentences.
Julia wears a striking red dress and sips white wine; her bearded brother, who’s built like a rugby league second-rower, wears a navy blazer over a floral print shirt, and the chunky silver rings he wears on several fingers clink together when he lifts his glass of iced cola.
When Review asks how they prepare for intimate shows such as this one, in front of hardcore fans, their response becomes a mountain of shared memories of fan interactions.
Like the young girl who told Angus about losing a friend in a car accident, and that one of their songs was playing on the stereo as the car rolled.
Like the man in Cornwall, south England, who took it upon himself to start spruiking their debut EP, 2006’s Chocolates and Cigarettes, at local radio stations after one of its songs, Mango Tree, became the unplanned soundtrack to a rushed drive to hospital as his son’s throat closed over due to an anaphylactic reaction. The boy survived, the father become a passionate advocate, and Julia concludes the tale with a wide-eyed “F..kin’ hell!”
Angus nods, and adds, “With all the shades of life’s chaotic facets, you have the light as well: people meeting for the first time, and the music being in the background of those love stories. It’s all a balance, life, really – and the music will find its way into it. That’s what’s so crazy about it: you could never imagine being in that corner of the earth, at that time, with that (song). It’s pure magic.”
That prompts a memory of perhaps the wildest booking they ever received, while touring Snow: after performing at Istanbul for the first time, a last-minute festival appearance popped up in Egypt.
A wealthy hotel owner in the country’s north sent a private jet to pick them up from Turkey; on landing, they were driven through the 45C desert heat – on the bus trip out there, Angus recalls seeing lots of “AK-47s and watermelons” – then made to wait until the decidedly rock ‘n’ roll hour of 2am to perform.
The extended delay felt like a weird annoyance at the time, until they learned that the festival organisers had caught wind of a convoy of hundreds of Egyptian fans driving five hours north specifically to see the Australians perform.
They ended up screaming every word of every song, and the Stones could scarcely believe the circumstances in which they’d found themselves, playing in such a remote locale.
A knock on the door interrupts that thought. Yet more fans are waiting in the performance space next door, to hear songs new and old. Drinks are finished, outfits are smoothed, throats are cleared: once again, it’s showtime.
The next morning, when Review meets the pair at a cafe inside a Hyde Park hotel, they’re both dressed down to the point of being incognito.
Julia wears jeans, a plain black T-shirt, Blundstones and minimal make-up; Angus sports a long-sleeved shirt that’s open to reveal copious chest hair, but his main concern is a highly distracting shoulder injury. Partway through our interview, the record label publicist delivers a relieving cocktail of Voltaren, Deep Heat and Panadeine Forte, which soon take effect.
The elder Stone eats half a toasted sandwich then loses interest; her brother eyes it off for some time, before eventually reaching over and taking a big bite. If that act isn’t enough to signify their closeness, it’s also evident in the huge amount of shared eye contact, as they regularly “check in” with one another while responding to Review’s queries.
Asked for more detail about the story they briefly recounted to their fans at the showcase yesterday, and the somewhat odd decision to name their sixth album after a decommissioned trawler, Julia gives an expansive answer that begins with spending time on board Cape Forestier for a music video shoot, admiring its steadiness, and connecting it to their careers.
“It’s down in Tasmania, and the Southern Ocean is extremely wild and unpredictable – like life,” she says. “And this trawler, nothing’s going to stop it. The song was written about the name of the boat, but really, I guess it’s the embodiment also of the man who loved and lived on that boat, and the choice of that kind of lifestyle – and that also tied into the lyrics about our own journey through the storms of life.
“For us, the ocean has been such a huge part of our life, and growing up being so connected to the sea. It felt like a really nice song that embodied so much of what this record was about: we have been on a journey, and we are kind of like that trawler; we just keep going.
“Sometimes you probably should turn around, and have a moment and anchor. But when you go through it, there’s something on the other side, and you can never know what’s going to happen if you survive the storm.”
Of all the album titles they considered, that was the one “that most reflected the full circle of this journey that we’ve been on,” she says.
With a laugh, the pair describe the familiar feeling of learning about the meaning of the songs they’ve written only after they’ve been recorded and they start talking to journalists about them.
“This is a therapy session,” Angus tells Review, smiling. “It’s very rarely we talk like this, ever – unless you’re going through something. All the interviews we do, we’re picking up the breadcrumbs that we’ve unconsciously left along the way.”
Despite the maritime theme that loosely connects Cape Forestier, it has not been all smooth sailing for the siblings, who are presently suing their former manager, Tim Manton, and his UK-based management firm HNOE for allegedly overcharging them.
Last week, the pair appeared in Sydney Supreme Court, which hears disputes where the claim is in excess of $750,000; Manton denies the claim, and the hearing continues.
Few people enjoy the experience of their dirty laundry and financial particulars being aired in public; the Stones did not comment on the matter to Review. But in fitting with the steady-as-she-goes mindset they’ve cultivated across the years, it’s a peculiar coincidence their sixth album is arriving this week amid the court case.
Against the backdrop of the behind-the-scenes turmoil in recent years, it’s remarkable the pair has penned and recorded another strong, stirring set of songs.
The Stones have learned how to prioritise their needs, both individually and within the bubble of a touring band, which they will soon be once again.
Starting next week, 32 European and American concerts will keep them on the road until early July. After a month off, they’ve got a run of New Zealand and east coast Australian shows, too. Many of these dates are sold out. Their last major tour was in 2018.
“When we were younger, the snowball effect of success was always taking us away,” says Angus. “Growing a business and also being creative as siblings – it’s a difficult process. I think we’re at a place now where we’re inside our bodies, and our feet are on the earth. We’re connected in a very symbiotic way that allows us to function, with communication.
“It’s all about just making sure there’s space when it’s needed, and also being there when someone needs help. We’re in a good place.”
Julia smiles at her younger brother and nods. “You certainly want to be in this place at the beginning of a tour, that’s for sure,” she says.
After a pause, she adds: “Interview us in two months; one of us will show up!” At this, they laugh as one.
The writer travelled to Sydney as a guest of Sony Music Australia. Cape Forestier is out now via Sony. Angus and Julia Stone will perform in Brisbane (August 6), Sydney (August 7-9) and Melbourne (August 14-15).
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