super FLORENCE jam release ‘60 Big Ones’

super FLORENCE jam

60 Big Ones

Influential but long-dead Sydney rock four-piece super FLORENCE jam no longer exist – but, undeterred, they have nevertheless released a new EP: 60 BIG ONES.

Recorded in 2012, lost for a decade and then unearthed by sleepmakeswaves’ Alex Wilson for final overdubs in 2023, 60 Big Ones captures the band in a mood that is exuberant, melancholy and anthemic.

Revisiting and advancing their themes of ennui, lust and the passage of time, it further hones the band’s unique sound—with noise pop, revamped garage rock, 60s harmonies, paranoid bluesy rave-ups and at least one explosion thrown into the mix—and adds a raft of new songs to complement their EPs super FLORENCE jam and We Always Knew It Would Come To This as well as their live album You’ve Had It Too Easy For Too Long.

For more, music journalist Hugh Robertson:

Sydney, Australia – that Emerald City – has produced a storied procession of knaves and ne’er-do-wells. Hugo Weaving, AC/DC, You Am I, Healthy Harold, Arthur ‘Neddy’ Smith, the rum corps. But their favourite sons must surely be the men of super FLORENCE jam.

As with all world-changing cabals, this small band of dedicated revolutionaries formed in 2005 with big ambitions and even bigger flared jeans. The band cut their teeth busking in Pitt Street Mall at a time when Sydney's music scene was clad in day-glo and chewing pills at 180bpm in windowless caverns, Adam Krawczyk (vocals, guitar), Laurence Rosier Staines (vocals, guitar, keys), Mike Solo (drums) and Alex Tulett (bass) dared to be different, writing original rock and roll that was unapologetically maximalist.

An early press packet described them as "a volcanic mixer that’s two parts guitar, four parts vocals, two parts bass, one part keys and one part drums – but there are only four of them", and those first couple of years were every bit as outrageous as that mix. Anyone who witnessed their legendary 2007 concert at Hermann’s Bar – where the number of guitar necks onstage outnumbered band members – knows that this was a band who deserved to play Wembley. Sadly sFj never got much further than Willoughby.

Like Icarus or the drummers from Spinal Tap, super FLORENCE jam's total commitment to their art was brought undone by circumstances well beyond their control. In 2006, they were mere runners-up to indie darlings Cloud Control in Sydney University's Battle of the Bands. The same year they were booked to headline Nepal's Freedom Festival, before the festival’s cancellation due to clashes between the royalists and the communists. In 2012, their four-hour rock opera about Ugandan cult leader Joseph Kony was gazumped by a viral video campaign for a competing project. Around this time, the band were almost flown to Los Angeles to record their first album in a studio co-owned by Eric Clapton and a tech billionaire whose midlife crisis unfortunately resolved some other way.

Despite these missteps and misadventures, the band's enthusiasm – and output – never wavered, maintaining a cracking pace of live performance and recordings, all the while bestriding the divide between razor sharp songwriting and outrageous, ostentatious virtuosity.

In their first six years as a band – known to fans (or 'jammers') as the super FLORENCE renaissance – sFj released multiple demos, two EPs, a 50-minute long recording of improvised material – pugilistically titled Fisticuffs – and perhaps their magnum opus, the Triple (!) A-Side Anastasia Won't You Sleep With Me (I hear she may have). They played more than 300 shows that were every bit as frenetic and fabulous as those, blowing the likes of British India, Shihad, Dallas Crane, Philadelphia Grand Jury and – finally – themselves off the stage, an act of musical self-immolation that made The Vines look like The Monkees.

It was in 2012 that the band played their final show – in Sydney's glittering Bondi, co-headlining with Mental As Anything. Much like the kale colonic irrigation beloved by the beachside locals, what seemed like a good idea at the time had come to a chaotic end, and the band announced their hiatus. The world turned from Technicolor to black and white.

After a long, barren musical winter of discontent, jammers were briefly titillated in 2020 when sFj released You've Had It Too Easy For Too Long, a live album recorded at the band's 300th show which captured this phenomenon at their most irreverent and bombastic. Now, in 2024, 60 Big Ones either re-opens or finally closes the book on one of the world's greatest 'What If' bands, a magical, mercurial musical mystery that could have been anything had the relentless pressure of a corrupt capitalist system not demanded of each of them such trivial concerns as 'rent' and 'sustainable careers' and 'money for food’.

Both a decades-spanning greatest hits and a frenzy of new material recorded in the final hours of the band’s blistering existence, 60 Big Ones is a collection of coulda-beens and never-weres without equal, including six new tracks – Ocean's Way, Haunted, Holds Tight, European Vacation, The Elusive Obvious and Want It Now (how fitting) – that show the band's strange and irresistible alchemy was there right til the end, and likely beyond it.

Perhaps the most fitting epitaph for the band comes from Richard Kingsmill, the sine qua non of Australian music (RIP), who once stated that super FLORENCE jam was “just not the triple j sound.”

I can think of no higher compliment.

Hugh Robertson

March 2024

Finally, a note from the band:

It’s not quite right to say that this EP will take you back to 2012. It is completely timeless. It serves as a greatest hits compilation because our best work was usually our most recent, and it’s called 60 BIG ONES because each one of these songs is worth ten normal songs.

We are indebted to sleepmakeswaves’ Alex Wilson, without whom this 21 minutes and 27 seconds of us contending with our younger selves would never have seen the light of day. We would also like to thank everyone this EP is for – whoever you are. Here lies super FLORENCE jam … still alive.

60 Big Ones is out now via Bird’s Robe Records on streaming services and CD.