B2M
Local RnB legends B2M are back at this year's Darwin Festival, supporting celebrated rockers You Am I. It’s another big gong for the group, following an overseas tour and ahead of a new album due out next year. Frontman Yellow Simon gave Off The Leash the goss.
B2M have toured throughout Australia and Asia over the last 10 years – but this year you took your music further aï¬eld than you’ve been before – to Ireland. Why Ireland?
We were invited by a group of traditional Irish musicians which gave us an opportunity to collaborate and share our culture with the Irish people. We were blown away by the similarities of our cultures, and our music connected well with theirs.
How did the Irish like your music? Were they interested to ï¬nd out about your home on the Tiwi Islands?
The Irish people are very welcoming which made our music easy to receive, in turn this made our time in Ireland very memorable. Amazingly, we found a few people who had been to the NT and had heard of the Tiwi Islands. We even had dinner at an amazing restaurant called Uluru. We got to have kangaroo steaks and barramundi – in the middle of Ireland. The owner of the place was so happy he gave us free dinner and asked us to name a new cocktail he’d made, so we called it Budju Juice.
You’re just about to head back into the studio to work on a new album, what can you tell us about this upcoming recording?
Project Songlines is something we’ve been thinking about for a while. It involves recording traditional chants from cultures around the world, including ours, and putting these ancient songs to catchy beats everyone can enjoy. It’s about making culture cool for everyone and teaching young ones their identity through infectious beats. Seeing Mark Grose (Managing Director, Skinnyfish Records) dancing all tribal in Discovery is how we will measure the success of Project Songlines come 2018.
You opened the Darwin Festival in 2014 with Tina Arena – and you’re back this year performing the ï¬rst show of the festival with You Am I at Mindil Beach. What will you have in store for us?
Hopefully we can put in a good solid performance for our Darwin fans. I think they can expect the same B2M flavour with a few surprises. Remember we dropped 'Billie Jean' at the Tina Arena concert and no one expected that, so I think people can expect something different this time around. An Ed Sheeran cover might do the trick, but who knows. We'll have to see what happens on the night.
Darwin Festival Santos Opening Night Concert | Thu 10 Aug | 6.30pm | Little Mindil Lawns, Mindil Beach
