Coffee House Sessions: President Street

Naming Prince, Avenged Sevenfold, and Mariah Carey among their musical influences, President Street are an eclectic band headed by songwriter Pete Moses and based in Melbourne, Australia.  Sarah Staniforth caught up with Pete, Ruby (lead vocalist), and Gav (guitarist) at Curiositea for an interview following their Coffee House Session on Wednesday the 20 March.

Sarah: For our readers who don’t know your music, could you give me five words to describe it?

Ruby: Oh, that’s a hard one to pin down really [laughter].

Pete: I suppose that most people would call us a fusion outfit, but we try and not stay in one lane.

Gav: We’ve heard folky, we’ve heard rock and we’ve heard pop fusion from people, but I agree, it’s very hard to pin our music down.

S: That being said, then, how would you describe your collective influences a band?

P: Well we’re pretty eclectic, so I think it’s a super varied mix. Often we find that we all have a completely different set of influences to each other.

G: If we had to narrow them down though, I would say as a guitarist, Nirvana has been a huge influence on me and also some slightly heavier stuff with Avenged Sevenfold. But then there’s also that eclectic mix again because I would label the Red Hot Chili Peppers with John Frusciante as another big one. I guess you could say that variety, across those three bands, has made me the guitarist that I am.

R: Vocally, I’d say Mariah Carey, which again is a bit of a contrast against Avenged Sevenfold. When Pete said eclectic he really did mean eclectic! [laughs]

P: I suppose as the songwriter I’d be throwing in like Prince and you know more like R&B and soul genre-wise. Artists like Maxwell have been a big influence on the songs I write.

S: So you write all of the songs then do you Pete? No influence from the others?

P: I do yes but these guys bring a lot to the whole process. They certainly have a huge impact on the songs that we get by the end. Both create and add to it, but I guess you could say that the core of it all starts with me writing the songs.

G: I suppose any band though you’ve always got a songwriter who it starts with. They’re Pete’s lyrics generally, they’re Pete’s start of the chord progressions, and we tend to go from there. I think most bands are like that.

S: Pete, I read on your website about how when you got into music there was an ADHD-driven focus? Could you tell me a bit more about that?

P: [laughs] Yes, I mean that was a bit of a throwaway remark in hindsight. Still, so my personal story is that I grew up in a very musical family — my mum’s side of the family’s very musical. My mum and three brothers and sisters were hit by a car when I was two, and so I never received much exposure to music, and then my dad died when I was 13 so I was sort of orphaned at that point.

For me, it was like I had to make my life work, so I sort of stumbled my way into music without having any lessons, or having any experience with it, and then it just sort of grabbed me and took over everything in my life really. That’s where that quote came from really. I think it’s a trait of ADHD that when something grabs your attention you tend to dive in after it, and that’s what happened for me. It took over all my conscious focus.

S: You can tell that there really is a personal influence in these songs now that you’ve elaborated on your own life experience. I also noticed how the name of your band, President Street, comes from the street you grew up on. Would you say this theme of home is something at the centre of your music?

P: I suppose it’s the street I was living on as a child and also where the car accident happened, whilst also being where my dad died… So I suppose you could say it’s me trying to reverse its meaning for me personally. It was a street where a lot of bad stuff happened and now that I’m making great stuff happen with amazing people, under that same name. So from that perspective, it’s not necessarily just about home per se as it has this other side attached to it. As a name, we thought it sounded okay as well. It’s a pretty decent name for a band but it’s also a great way of reversing that negative legacy, that’s a really positive thing for me.

S: Looking forward, then, are you feeling good about the future as a band? What are your next plans?

P: Take over the world [laughter]. No you know we’ve been very lucky that we’ve got some good support over the last year in the UK, both on the radio and in the media, which has been fantastic. We thought it was probably time to go over to the UK to do some live stuff and so the first step was this acoustic tour. What we’re hoping is that this will continue to grow and we’ll come back and when we come back it’s a full band and we’ll get noisy. We’ve always got new music coming out, and so we’re just going to keep releasing music and keep trying to find our base in the process.