Noah Learmonth is the sort of frontman that classic bands are built around. Talk to the wryly amusing Radio Free Alice vocalist, and you’ll find a leader who knows exactly what he wants his band to be: hook-laden yet self-aware; full of nuance, humour and a strange kind of joy; a group for those who often find themselves on the margins of the party, but a unit whose dreams are also ambitiously, unashamedly massive and fully on display with their debut record, What’s In Between.
“I don’t know if I’m an especially joyous person. I wish I was more joyous. But I want to be somebody that makes joyous music. I think it’s a self-deprecating record but, if I can say so myself, I think there’s something very charming about the album,” says Learmonth. “If the album was a person, it’s the sort of person I’d want to be.”
Radio Free Alice began as young teenagers a decade ago, playing covers of Radiohead and Mudhoney and The The to school assemblies full of baffled peers. Now, they’re about to unveil their debut album via Atlantic Records to an increasingly fervent, increasingly global fanbase who’ve taken the Melbourne-based group’s insatiable earworms and idiosyncratic worldview to their hearts. Externally, everything has changed. But Learmonth has always known who Radio Free Alice are from the start.
“I think, from a very early age, we had a sense of the band we wanted to be. In Australia, a lot of the alternative rock that was being celebrated, I was just completely confused by. I just didn’t resonate with it at all,” he recalls. “A lot of them were these Birthday Party-esque, very dark art-rock bands, but I always felt like, hold on, where’s the Pulp equivalent? Where’s a band that is very artistic but also just unbelievably fun and you don’t have to be a music nerd to love it? There wasn’t a band like that, and that was the big inspiration for us.”
Absolute, steadfast belief in the cause has always sat at the root of Radio Free Alice. Learmonth and guitarist Jules Paradiso started the group at school in Sydney before moving, aged 18, to Melbourne to fully pursue music. With their previous bandmates staying behind, they soon found bassist Michael Phillips and drummer Lochie Dowd at Melbourne University. A move 500 miles across the country might have been a big jump, but finding a place that could nurture and provide a home for their ideas was the only logical option.
“We were playing a lot when we first moved to Melbourne and it really seemed like, from the first show, people resonated and were having a really good time,” Learmonth remembers. “It was like, OK, we’re onto something. Because even though we’ve got three monthly listeners, every time we play live it seems to grow.”
The frontman was no stranger to a little uprooting, either. Having spent the first 10 years of his life living in the UK, it’s perhaps those early years that explain Radio Free Alice’s proudly Anglophile sensibilities. But you get the idea that, childhood experience or not, Learmonth would always have been a man drawn to the world’s more self-deprecating, sardonic characters.
Central to the band’s outlook are the intelligent outsider figures – Pulp, The Smiths, The Cure, Belle and Sebastian – that you’d probably be able to root out from Radio Free Alice’s own frequency of pop-minded indie-post-punk. But also… “Jules and I joke about how, if we never watched The Office UK, we wouldn’t have a personality,” Learmonth laughs. “There’s a line in ‘Lunch Money’, and no-one’s picked up on it yet but it’s literally taken from Peep Show.”
