Having overslept, Loz – the feminine half of Johnny Boy – was supposed to do loads of things in preparation for the group’s impending tour to Japan and then Australia today, and now she’s running around trying to get twice as many things done in half the time.

Back in the studio, Loz and bandmate Davo are currently beginning to experiment with ideas for their second records. “When we signed to Mercury we used a lot of that money to buy a lot of equipment,” she explains, “and bought ProTools and set up the equipment in my flat. So we’re constantly doing stuff and constantly working on the new record.”

It took the group a long time to complete their self-titled debut. Whilst it only has ten songs on it, Loz explains that they were pulled from quite a lot of songs, as each writes new material. “We’re always kind of working but there’s quite a lot of stuff to do all the time,” she says, “because if it’s not our music we’re doing it’s a remix, or the video, and when we play live we have chopped-up video stuff that plays over all the tracks.”

Each member has a different starting point when it comes to writing the songs – some songs might start and it might be a complete thing in each individual’s mind, or alternatively they may help each other out with finishing the lyrics. “Or there’s been times where I’ve found some of Dav’s lyrics and I’ve had a loop that fitted perfectly, and that’s how that connected. For “Theme From Johnny Boy” I wrote the lyrics in a stream of consciousness and Dav wrote the music for it, because he already had loops. We wouldn’t like to go to any system to do it, and it’s really organic.”

When they perform live, they also have additional band members; a bass player and a drummer who can also complement the guitar playing and singing of Dav and Loz. From there they add loops, runing in sync with all the videos that they’ve put together. “So it’s quite a monster really,” Loz exclaims. “It’s really good in small clubs, so it’ll be really good in Australia. We’ve always thought of it as a show but an art thing as well, because we were fans of the Velvet Underground.”

When they put together Johnny Boy it took them a long time to weed out songs and put in other ones, because their aim was to make ‘an album’. “We think it flows really well from the first song to the last one,” she confirms. “We’ve always thought of it really cinematically, and that’s how all the video stuff started to come together. It’s like a little cottage industry! It’s going back to the punk thing, where basically nowadays with a little know-how you can do anything, and I think it’s becoming a lot easier now and I don’t understand why other bands as soon as they get a little money don’t think it’s a good idea to invest in equipment, because you’re self-sufficient then, which is lucky for us.”

With their debut being such a short album, Loz agrees that they do want to expand for the second release, but assures that they’re not going to turn into some 1970s prog-rock band. “The thing is,” she makes clear, “the tracks have a lot in them – they’re really dense.” For instance, the single “You Are the Generation Who Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve” has got 126 tracks on it, and the length and the structure to it is only there because it works there. “When we write a song we start from the beginning or the first verse but don’t ever map it out, but always try to organically let each song grow to see where they’ll end up for us really. “Generation” grew into a monster from Davo doing one verse of it and then a more pushing rhythm, and then I woke up and had a dream about the lyrics going over the Phil Spector drums and I put that one while he was away, and then when he came back the song built from there. It takes a lot of listening to a lot of other songs and a lot of other influences.”

Dav is the freak of the band – he’s the one who can listen to a record, think that’s in the same key, and the trumpet featured there is going to fit in with what the band is doing. “That’s why it takes us so long to do stuff,” she says. “We don’t think of it as a throwaway thing, and we want people to listen to these songs forever.”

With two years between “Generation” coming out as a single and their debut album appearing, they certainly can’t have claimed to rush it. They never put time frames on what they do, and Loz guesses that this is why Johnny Boy’s short-lived relationship with Mercury didn’t last – record companies rely on things being run on time and on schedule. “It’s just a natural thing and what we really love,” Loz says of the sound of Johnny Boy. “It has to go through our quality control before anything, and I think that’s why we’re rubbish in the music business because we can only sort of think of it as ‘art’. Davo will kill me for saying that, but it’s only done when it’s done.”

After leaving Mercury, the band were able to own all the songs and all their music, meaning that they have been able to license it in each territory – from Speak n Spell in Australia, to a different label in Japan and a different label in Scandinavia. “We’re dealing with different people over here now to put it out,” she says of the release of the album in the UK. “It’s a real back-to-basics thing, and for us it’s what we probably should have done from the start, but when these people come around and say ‘sign here, and it’ll be great, and you want to do that, well, we want you to do that too’ but when you sign they change their minds, and they want you to go through the whole band treadmill of doing this then, and that then, and if that had happened I don’t think the album would have ever come out. You have to play it by your heart really, and it’s worked for us because people seem to like the songs.”

Johnny Boy’s debut album is out now. Dates:
August 17 - 34B, Sydney
August 18 - Spectrum, Sydney
August 19 - Northern Star, Newcastle
August 20 - Candys Apartment, Sydney
August 24 - Oxford Tavern, Wollongong
August 25 - East Brunswick Club, Melbourne
August 26 - Rocket Bar, Adelaide
August 27 - Hi Fi Bar, Melbourne