Joseph Hathaway-Wilson

Few rock bands have ascended the rungs of Sydney’s live music scene like The Buoys. After cutting their craft in the local pub circuit, the all-female rock outfit are set to reach new heights when they support the Arctic Monkeys at their Sydney show this coming January. But what did the road to Harbour-City-stardom look like? Joseph Hathaway-Wilson of Vertigo sits down with front-woman Zoe Catterall to find out.

Images provided by The Buoys.

in conversation with

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with Zoe Catterall THEBuoYSTHEBuoYS 17

V: Who are The Buoys and how did you form?

ZC: Well, I’m Zoe. I sing and play rhythm guitar in The Buoys. The band came about really randomly after I graduated uni and wanted to start focusing more on music. I was always around the live music scene in the Shire and never seemed to get anything to work. One day my friend posted something saying, “We need more women on stage in the Shire”, and I sent him a message in response saying, “No shit, I’ve been trying to do this for years,” — I didn’t know that many women who played instruments. I’m from a science background, so my friends were doing different things with their lives.

He essentially set me up on a blind date with two girls I’d never met. I went to their house, we played some songs together, and then we were playing shows within a month. After a few weeks, the friend who organised for us to meet called us up and said, “Hey you’re playing next week; what are you called?” so we called ourselves The Boys — the whole incentive being that there weren’t enough women playing in the Shire and it felt a bit like a boy’s club. We weren’t intending for it to be spelt ‘Buoys’, but when we got to the gig and saw that the poster was spelt that way, we thought, ‘That is genius, we’ll take it’. V: That is iNCReDIblY roCk 'N' Roll.

ZC: It was so random how it happened, and all of us have been together for two years now. We met Courtney and Hillary, the other two members, through mutual friends. We’d seen Courtney play in other bands around the inner-west doing drums, guitar, and bass, so she was like an icon to me. I was going to three gigs a week, and she was playing at all of them.

V: Were you all aligned with the garage-rock vision or were there some musical differences that you needed to overcome?

ZC: It’s funny because we’ve gone through waves. When I first started The Buoys, it was very garage-punk/surf-rock, but with the new members coming in we wanted to avoid that style a bit. Even now, the music we play and listen to is so different, but that just means that we can mould the stuff that I used to write and give it a new face that everyone can get behind.

V: Are those other two members still in the band?

ZC: Nah, we played together for a year and a half, then we all went travelling. When I got back to Australia, our drummer, Sophie, was still in Japan and we kind of lost touch. Soon after that I met Tess, our current drummer, and it was a similar situation — I’d never met her before, I had gone on a date with her cousin, and I wouldn’t shut up about how I needed a drummer, so he set us up on a blind coffee date. It turns out she was a scientist as well, so we bonded over that, then a couple of weeks later, we played a gig as a two-piece in Newcastle. The rest of the band just built out from there. V: So, who were your musical influences?

ZC: Growing up, I listened to The Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin — I really, really loved Queen, especially when I was learning to sing. It’s similar to Pink Floyd; I really enjoyed how dramatic and theatrical they were. In terms of sound, when I first started The Buoys, there were these two venues right next to each other: Space 44 and El Sol. Space 44 is now a label who manage Ruby Fields (who I also grew up with), Skegss, and Pist Idiots. As those bands were always in Cronulla at the time, they very much influenced what I was doing. That’s why we started with that very simple punk sound. I was also very limited by my skills and had only started playing electric guitar when I started The Buoys.

V: When you started the band, did you have any big ambitions for what you wanted it to become or was it just a passion project?

ZC: It was just a passion project, and even now the goal is just to write music and play it. Obviously there are dreams which would be so cool to fulfil, but at the root of it, our main goal is just to write music and play together.

V: What about your science background? Do you ever feel like going back to that?

ZC: I still have a science career! So does Tess. I graduated from UTS actually. ZC: It’s very different every time. I was always one of those “if it’s not working straight away, then it’s not meant to be” kind of people, which has changed dramatically over the past two years. I’ve learnt that putting in that extra effort can make a lot of difference. Usually, I’ll sit down with my guitar, find a riff or some chords that I really like, then just start singing and see what comes out. If it doesn’t come out easily, I’ll put it away and maybe revisit it. I like to write fast. I don’t like to overthink.

V: We love to hear it. Now, you said that you’ve been writing songs since long before The Buoys formed. What does your process of songwriting look like?

V: The track, 'Linda', is one example of a song written about a very specific person in your life, and I've heard you decided not to change the subject's name?

V: Has writing songs about people ever made for awkward encounters?

V: We hear a lot about Sydney's 'non-existent' music scene. What was your experience like trying to break through the pub rock scene in Sydney and Wollongong?

ZC: (Laughs) No — we thought about it, but Linda sounded so much better than anything else.

ZC: Not too much. The closest I ever came to an awkward encounter was very wholesome. When we released the first couple of songs from our second EP, I met up with my ex, who I had been broken up with for years, got dinner, and said, “Look, a few of these songs are about you, and it’s pretty obvious.” But when I showed him the songs, his response was beautiful. He just said, “Yeah, I did do those things, so it makes sense that you would write about them. I was a dick.”

ZC: We were very lucky that we made all that effort to gig as much as possible before the Big C came to be. I was already a heavy punter — like, minimum three gigs a week — and had made a lot of friends around the scene, so when I told people that I was starting a band, they would pass it on, and gigs would pop up. We never had a problem finding gigs. Wollongong was a bit different because they already have such a strong scene down there, and not being from Wollongong made it a bit harder to tap into. But we ended up going down to support some other bands, and nowadays, we get to go down to North Gong quite a bit which is very nice.

V: What's your favourite venue to perform in?

V: What do you think are some of the issues within the scene for newer artists?

V: What do you look for in a support act when you're picking who to play with?

V: Who is your favourite support act to play with?

ZC: Ah, that’s so hard. I love playing at The Lansdowne. I think it's because it’s our hometown. Jeff, the main audio engineer there, is the coolest, nicest person ever. The staff are lovely, and it’s a little bit rough around the edges, but it’s always fun.

ZC: One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is, “What would it have been like if I was coming up now?” [New artists] have so much time to work on material and often can’t perform anywhere. Gigs are back, which is awesome, but the lack of international acts coming through is a big thing because that’s where smaller to medium-sized bands can reach a new audience of people who weren’t buying a ticket to their shows. Also, we’re still coming out of a slump of not having done much for two years and there’s a lot more social anxiety because people aren’t used to going to shows. That’s not true for everyone, but I have noticed that.

ZC: We always joke that we pick bands for very selfish reasons because we always choose bands that we really want to see. Maybe they’ll be bands that we haven’t seen before, but which we have heard are super fun. Usually, it’s someone we can dance to.

ZC: Greatest Hits! They’re like a pre-show warm-up. They’re also the kindest people ever.

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V: Earlier this year, you embarked on an east coast tour of Australia. What was that like?

V: And what about getting on the Hottest 100 of 2021?

V: So, 10 or 15 years from now, you are: a) GraMmy winners, or b) unrivalled legends of the SYdney scene whose work has never been sold overseas. What option are you taking?

ZC: It was amazing. We never expected that so many people from different cities would be at our shows and know all the words to our songs. It was so surreal. One thing that I love about our shows, which our support acts always comment on, is that our fans are the loveliest people ever. They get there for the first band and the venue is packed from start to finish. There’s none of that ‘rocking up to see the headline act’ business.

ZC: None of us expected it! As soon as #98 was done, we were like, “Nah, no chance.” We thought there was a slight chance we could have been up around #98 or #99, but that was it. We started drinking a bit more and loosening up, then our song came on [at #85], and we all started singing, dancing, and crying at the same time.

ZC: Honestly, I wanna go to the Grammys. But those options would both make us so happy. This is the scene that supported us and made us feel special. V: And what advice would you give to someone just starting out in their music career?

V: Finally, do you have any major regrets looking back on your music career?

ZC: Go to gigs. Go to gigs and make friends. It’s about being a part of the scene as well as contributing to it, and understanding what it’s like to be a punter makes you a better artist.

ZC: Nah, no ragrets. Not even one letter.