The Al Bairre Experience

For a fairly young band you have accumulated a fair amount of success. What do you attribute this to?

Good manners. A please and thank you can get you a long way. Please put our song on your radio station. Please have us at your festival. Thank you so much.

Can you give us some background on the creation and recording process for your latest album?

We sure can. We recorded it at Digital Forest Studios and worked with a producer called Francois de Klerk who is an absolute wizard. He just knew exactly what we wanted and he gave it to us. He gave it to us hard and fast. All night long.

If the album was described as a meal, what would it be and why?

Oven-roasted chicken with country vegetables in a reduced honey dijon glaze over long grain white rice. It was an obvious choice.

Your music videos have quite a retro quirky aesthetic. How do you come up with concepts for videos? Is the band involved in the creative process?

The music video for our latest single, Let's Fall In Love Some More was actually written and directed by our very own Nicholas Preen. Usually we choose a director we're in love with and then play him the song and go with his vision. But, as you know, Nicholas is a peacock and we needed to let him fly. So we gave him some money and threw him off the roof. We were very pleased with the final product.

We love the song and video for the PH Fat colab for Caviar Dreams. What was this process like?

It was voted as the most stressful thing we have gone through since inoculation day in grade 0. The up side was we procrastinated a lot during those three weeks so we all became great friends. We must have gone to Woolies Cafe every day. We basically put the owners kid through varsity.

Other than that it all came together in the last three days when we got to record the church organ in City Hall. When we heard that we started again and rewrote Caviar Dreams around the organ. That was two days before deadline. Like we said, it was helluva stressful. But now we are besties and have fish braais every Sunday at Smooth Michael's house.

If Al Bairre was an animal, what would it be and why?

A beaver. Because we're immature.

What local artists are you currently excited about?

Cute Couple have it going on. We're all growing our hair out because of them.

What's next?

Ponytails for the whole band.

Buy the mini LP on iTunes.

albairre.com