Organisers of this year’s Good Things Festival have managed to find a way to open the showcase event up to an even larger percentage of Australian bands.
Rather than select the final band to play on each of the three line-ups themselves, organisers instead threw that challenge over to fans who first voted online to narrow the potential candidates down before pitting the best-supported bands against each other in a play off to decide who walked away with chocolates.
Emerging Brisbane progressive metal outfit Citadel were one of the many bands to have been enriched by the experience, with frontman Russell Miller joining HEAVY to share the love, unfortunately on the back of their narrow defeat at the hands of Apate the previous evening in the Brisbane heats.
Rather than dwell on the negatives we instead ask Miller how the experience enriched his band.
“It was really cool,” he offered, still obviously a little deflated by the events of the night before. “Even just being able to play last night with the line-up of Apate, Bad Neighbour and us was sick, just being able to play with two bands that we admire, two bands that have hustled and ground their way to success. Both play very different music, really good music, so it was a lot of fun. We made a lot of new friends as well. It was good to be back at The Brightside. It’s been a few years since I played there.”
In the full interview, Russell explains the mentality of going into competitions like this where you are essentially competing against your friends in a situation where the victor gains a massive step forward in their careers, finding the balance between taking it seriously and having fun, structuring a set list to give yourself the best chance of progressing, who he would have liked to play alongside at Good Things, what Citadel as a band will take out of the experience, their recent debut album Decompose and the early reception, the themes of death and sorrow that permeate through the release, focussing on the music rather than the genre, future plans and more.”
