Frente! share how the tall poppy syndrome stole the shine from their 90s global pop success

The founders of Aussie indie band Frente! have revealed some secrets about their biggest hit, 30 years on from its debut.

Frente’s Simon Austin and Angie Hart share how they ignored the haters when they rose to the top of the pop charts. Picture: Supplied

There was an unwritten rule in ’90s alternative music which Australian indie band Frente! dared to break.

By making a clutch of classic pop songs that breached the mainstream charts in Australia, the US and UK, they defied the alternative artistic community’s creed of “thou shalt not have commercial success”.

Frente! polarised music critics and fans in Australia back then, despite the endearing amiability and joyous stage presence of the band’s founders Angie Hart and Simon Austin.

As they celebrate the 30th anniversary of their platinum-selling debut record Marvin The Album with a reissue and national tour, the pair recall the vehemence directed at them because their smash hit Accidently Kelly Street, with its unintentionally misspelt title, became an inescapable pop earworm.

Frente!’s Simon Austin and Angie Hart are celebrating their 30th anniversary. Picture: Supplied

“I remember sitting on a tram and someone just randomly came up to me and said ‘I really hate that new song of yours’,” Austin says.

“I got upset about it for like five minutes and then I made a commitment to myself to not care. I got to the point where it was like, ‘If you like it, you really like it, right? If you don’t like it, put fingers in your ears’.”

The misspelt title was the fault of a Mushroom Records staffer who had printed off the labels for the single with the wrong spelling, and the band decided to keep it. Probably at the insistence of someone else at the company who didn’t want to pay for corrected labels to be printed.

Frente! began their fledgling indie pop career as Triple J darlings with the song Labour of Love making the 1991 Hottest 100.

They were then signed to Mushroom’s White Label imprint and their next single Ordinary Angels reached gold status after its release in 1992 and won them the ARIA award for Breakthrough Artist.

After Accidently Kelly Street confirmed them as Australia’s newly minted pop stars, their success spread internationally courtesy of the stunningly beautiful reimagination of New Order’s dancefloor hit Bizarre Love Triangle as a folk ballad.

Because of that cardinal ’90s altrock rule, the members of Frente! struggled to navigate success and how it changes everything inside and outside of a band.

They weren’t the only ones. Bands on the opposite side of the music fence, grunge heroes Nirvana and Pearl Jam, did not cope well with their alternative rock music suddenly ruling the pop charts.

“It was a thing around that time that the gap between starting a band and becoming known was getting smaller and smaller, and when success happened for us, we really were still forming as a band. It was also when indie went mainstream,” Hart says.

“I was in my teens when we started off and in my early twenties when it really hit and we were quite an eclectic group together. We were not high school friends, we were people that had kind of found each other with our very different tastes in music.

“So anything outside of that, that was negative, was definitely difficult for us to navigate because we weren’t quite a unit at that time. And fame, for anyone, is an odd thing.”

Baby Frente! in the 90s. Picture: NCA.

The ’90s was also an era when artists and songwriters were stubbornly opposed to their music being categorised by genre. Rock bands didn’t want pop anywhere near their name and pop acts who happened to play guitars were regarded as pretenders.

“If you look at indie then and indie now, it’s very different,” Austin says. “Back then, it was just stuff that hadn’t been categorised yet.

“But indie now, there’s a very specific sound, a very specific kind of attitude, it has a tradition, and it’s a whole milieu of music.”

Yet the title of their debut record, Marvin The Album, screamed indie attitude. What did it all mean?

It’s a little disappointing, that it didn’t then and doesn’t now, mean anything.

“Yeah, it’s stupid,” Hart says, laughing.

“We don’t know what it means either. We just called it a name, because the album was like our child, so we had to give it a name.”

Austin adds: “Post releasing the album, we decided to give it a little bit of meaning by saying it was for all the Marvins we admired, Marvin Hamlisch, Marvin Gaye … and yeah, Marvin the Monster.”

In America, the UK and Europe, Frente! were able to escape Australia’s tall poppy syndrome and were taken at face value as an intriguing pop act whose music was landing on the big television shows of the time including Melrose Place.

“I felt like the tall poppy syndrome put a lot of steel into our spine, even though it was hard when our peers were going ‘Bleurgh!’” Austin says.

“Then we went overseas and there was no tour poppy syndrome and people were saying ‘This is fantastic!’ But I was suspicious of that kind of praise because I’m Australian.”

Ultimately both Austin and Hart quit Australia for several years to pursue their songwriting and artistic careers based in America.

This reunion – featuring some new bandmates – for the 30th anniversary will have staying power. They are planning to record new music once their touring commitments are done.

But the one thing they refused to do for the anniversary reissue of Marvin The Album was to correct that spelling mistake.

“Now everything’s auto corrected, you actually have to intentionally type it back in,” Hart says.

Frente! kick off their tour at the Castlemaine Festival on March 24 and then play the Corner Hotel on May 6, Sydney’s Oxford Art Factory on May 25, Brisbane’s The Zoo on May 26, Adelaide’s The Gov on June 9 and Badlands in Perth on June 10.

Originally published as Frente! share how the tall poppy syndrome stole the shine from their 90s global pop success