Bull In A China Shop

It's funny how people assume that when they hear an acoustic guitar, mandolin or banjo on a track, it's got to be folk. The Beatles, U2 or Neil Young played acoustic guitars on various track and they're not folk. Neither is Central Coast band Elliot The Bull – even less so now they're a four-piece, though that's not what you hear on their eponymous debut EP.

“When we wrote the EP there were six members,” drummer Milan Savic explains, “and there were a lot of different tastes among all of us, all the different music that we listened to. But now we're four-piece we've been told that it's a bigger sound because there are less instruments; it's less cluttered. It's a lot tighter apparently as well, a bit more I guess in your face.”

The band began in 2009 around two sets of brothers – singer, acoustic guitarist and occasional banjo player Jake Dobson and guitarist brother Simon, and singer and mandolin player Matthew Hyland and singer/guitarist brother Justin. “They were doing this as kind of a side project, a bit of fun, because they were all in different bands at the time, and they were all changing instruments each song, just having fun basically. But when they decided to take things more seriously they wanted a set drummer, which is when they asked me to do it, and eventually they wanted a set bass player so they got Jared [Drennan].”

Recording a demo EP, the group struck it lucky in being invited to support Arizona indie rock six-piece Lydia on the Australian leg of their 2010 Goodbye & Farewell tour. The core of Lydia, singer and guitarist Leighton Antelman and drummer Craig Taylor, obviously heard something in the brothers Hyland because, having gone into hiatus for a year, they reconvened with the release of last year's Paint It Golden album and invited them to join their touring band. So Elliot The Bull became a four-piece, though not before the EP was recorded.

“We decided we wanted to keep pushing with Elliot The Bull while they were overseas,” Savic expands, “and basically [the Hylands] decided they wanted to do their own thing as well, but there was never a bad break-up or anything like that – we're all still good friends, we all still hang out all the time.

“Our first national tour as Elliot The Bull was with Lydia, and I'd only just joined the band at that time so I had pretty much two weeks to, like, learn all the songs and hop in and, like, roll with it! That was my first proper East Coast tour and I felt like we got a lot out of it.”

More recently, and significantly, the band has recently returned from a tour of China. “Crazy, crazy,” Savic laughs. “When we finished our EP, our manager sent it out to a lot of different people and there's a promoter over there that got a hold of it and loved it. He's originally from Australia and loved it so much he said he had to get us out there. It was amazing – best time of my life. We played a lot of different cities, from Shanghai to Beijing, all the way inland to Xian and everywhere in between that.

“So much travelling – we got trains everywhere, just because it was the quickest way to get around over there. We played two festivals and seven bar shows while we were over there and some of them were packed. The audiences were really receptive. We're touring there again next year.”

With the end of their Australian EP launch tour, the band are hunkering down to write and record a follow-up – and you can expect less 'folk', more rock.

Elliot The Bull will be playing the following shows:

Saturday 10 November - Phoenix Bar, Canberra ACT
Sunday 18 November - Lansdowne Hotel, Sydney NSW
Saturday 22 December - Reunion Festival, Entrance Leagues Club