"How are you going? I'm Mario. Nice to have you here. You doing gigs here soon?" Strange. He didn't take our order, but it's the manager himself who promptly appears juggling our beverages.
"Soon as you invite us, " replies Ella Hooper, two weeks shy of her 17th birthday and exuding warm, girlish charm. The teenagers discuss the possibilities of a gig mentioning the name off their mentor and manager, Paul Kosky, everyone nods and Mario reluctantly takes leave of the country's hottest rock property.
Ella's brother Jesse, 19, flicks back his fiery locks, "Where were we?"
Well he might ask. What seems like a blink of an eye ago, Killing Heidi were an acoustic duo playing "to two dogs and a tree" on the shire lawn o Violet Town in northern country Victoria. Now the band's debut single "Weir" has sold so many copies the record company decided to delete it in January to boost the second single "Mascara" straight into the Top Ten. Killing Heidi's debut album "Reflector" (released in March) is the most anticipated album at retail.
But who the hell are Killing Heidi anyway? Questions are being asked that maybe the band hasn't paid their rock & roll dues and the group's sound and look has been carefully manufactured by an overly enthusiastic manager. But spend any time with the members of Killing Heidi and it becomes clear they are a talented, savvy, tight-knit combo, who shrug off criticism with cool grace and winsome grins. After all, the band that sells the most records laughs the hardest.
But first some history. The Hooper family moved from Melbourne to the foothills of the Strathbogie Ranges when Ella was still a baby in the mid 1980s. "It's the most beautiful Australian bush, quite dry, lots of paddocks and gum trees. I love it," says Ella. When their parents divorced, Ella and Jesse, who were never "town kids" moved to the tiny nearby township beautifully named Violet Town. ?It's a typical, small rural community," Jesse explains "It has the footy club and the cricket club which most families have something to do with, but Violet Town also has a few artsy kinda families up in the hills. [Cartoonist] Michael Leunig's just bought a house not far from where we live."
The other side of the sleepy township coin is not so loveable. Though largely isolated from Violet Town's redneck element by their "alternative" family upbringing (their parents are both teachers with music and drama backgrounds), the pair recall one incident which illustrates the weird duality of country life. "There was one Christmas when we had the Melbourne side of the family up," Jesse recalls, "One cousin and his girlfriend were at the local milk bar and she has a shaved hear with patches of hair sticking out and these guys came up and started saying 'What's going on here? You a fucking witch or something?' They'd come across from the pub and they started pushing my cousin around and a brawl erupted. He had to leave town within five minutes" Jesse laughs in disbelief. "It's like 'Your different, you're evil, we're gonna get you'." Ella sighs. "They're so fucked in the head. They wouldn't do that to anyone they recognized but because he was a stranger..."
The Hooper kids went to high school in the (relatively) big smoke of nearby Benalla, where their early passions for music began to take a more practical shape. Local band Incursion has some airplay on Triple J, which had just been networked to the region and Jesse was optimistically learning the guitar parts from his treasured grunge CD collection. "I especially liked the Smashing Pumpkins 'Siamese Dream'," he says. "That was the one album I was clinging onto through my teenage years, listening to it non-stop."
Ella loved the Pumpkins too. I was just clinging onto Jesse's coattails, liking everything he liked," she says with a laugh. "I was also into Spiderbait and Regurgitator and I strongly kept the influences from before we got Triple J in Violet Town, listening to mum and dad's record collection which was a really eclectic range of folk and rock from the '60s and '70s. Dylan, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, anything old but good. It's so in there," she says, tapping long blue fingernails on her temples, "deeply rooted in our musical minds."
It was 13-year-old Ella who wrote the two tunes she and her brother unveiled on the Violet Town shire lawn. Immediately after the gig, local studio owner Jamie Durrant offered Killing Heidi free demo time suggesting they enter the songs in Triple J's upcoming Benalla Unearthed competition. A week later, they'd won it.
"It was a scary thing," says Jesse. I thought the only possibility of winning was because Ella was so young and that was a kind of hook. But when we got the call back it was like, "Shit, we've got national airplay and a bit of an interest and we've only got two songs." But at the same time it was cool. Like, if we can do this, we can do more.
"Melbourne-based producer Paul Kosky was in his old office at Kiss recording studios when he first heard "Kettle" on Triple J in the autumn of 1996. He loved it instantly but assumed Killing Heidi would already be inundated with record company offers. A few months later, he was surprised to find otherwise. "Unless you come from a total music background, it can be hard to see raw talent," says the 32-year-old founder of Wah Wah Music, a new record company with just Killing Heidi on its roster. "A lot of people in the business can only hear the finished product. What I heard and saw at (the annual Melbourne rock festival) Pushover was very raw, but to me, quite incredible. The arrangements were so-so, there was no performance, no movement, but there was this 14-year-old singer with a fantastic voice and a an excellent 16-year-old guitarist.
Kosky is less effusive about Killing Heidi's original rhythm section, Aaron and Rowan, school friends Jesse has roped in after a handful of duo gigs. Band and manager stress that their departures in 1997 were ultimately their own decisions, but the latter happily admits that there was no place in his master plan for "just OK".
Kosky was a house engineer at Melbourne's Platinum Studios, pulling sound for Pseudo Echo, Kids in the Kitchen, and the Models when he was just 17 years old. Five years later Kosky was sharing a joint with Tim Finn that led to their collaboration on Periscope Studios, which Kosky built with Finn's money in the early '90s. Here he worked on Crowded House's Woodface, and albums by The Clouds, Weddings Parties Anything, Kate Ceberano and Deborah Conway. But anything less than complete creative control was starting to bug the self-confessed music biz maverick. "I'd constantly be making albums and thinking 'that' is the first single. They [record companies and management] would then choose the wrong one and the thing would stiff. That happened often enough for me to get pretty annoyed about it."
Hence, the idea of Killing Heidi a band he could manage, produce, direct and generally groom for the massive success he knew how to find. It has been gestating in his mind for years when "Kettle" sent him to Pushover 96 for a casual assessment.
"We were 'so' not ready for a big concert," Ella laughs, remembering the Pushover gig. We started songs in the wrong key and oh, I don't even want to talk about it!"
"The best thing I remember is that we were onstage about one o'clock in the afternoon but halfway through this 30-minute set, all these people started coming over to check us out. It probably didn't sound that good, but it sounded different. When we played 'Kettle' there was a bit of recognition and by the end we had a really big crowd.
"Most importantly, Pushover 96 was the beginning of a two-year development plan with Paul Kosky. Ella remembers "expecting some dudes in suits. But Kosky is anti-suit." What he is, is pro-song, and that's what he wanted to hear from Ella and Jesse before anyone signed a contract. The pair started writing and came back with five more songs on a tape, two of which, "Astral Boy" and "Superstar", sent their future manager's heart racing.
"I knew that we weren't great, that we had potential, but as a band we were just not there," admits Jesse. "We could pull off the acoustic stuff alright but when it came to having a tight rhythm section, well, we didn't have one."
Enter Adam Pedretti (22), former drummer for Perth band Non-Intentional Lifeform, and bassist Warren Jenkins (26), a session player with Rick Price, Merril Bainbridge, Deborah Conway, M People and plenty more on his resume, Kosky is clear about his role in the shuffle. "I gave Adam the opportunity to see whether Killing Heidi liked him and whether he liked Killing Heidi, that's all I did, 'You guys tell me'. A few days later everybody was loving each other. Same with Warren."
In a sense, the presumption that the band has been manufactured represents a rather old fashioned view of rock & roll credibility. The radical different between Killing Heidi and every other young band slogging their way to airplay on the Australian pub circuit is well, just that. The endless grind of the road has no part in Operation Heidi. It's "old school" according to Ella Hooper, perhaps the face of a new era of credibility manufactured pop-rock acts.
"I think that's a fine assumption in many ways," she said when the M word is raised. "I wouldn't go off at anyone for saying that. What's manufactured? Who can tell these days?"
"I guess we have definitely been helped along much more than other bands," Jesse says, "But if you compare us to a lot of bands on the pop charts we've been far less manufactured than them. If you compare us to a garage band, sure, we've had a producer come in and spend money to help us where we wanna be.
"Kosky is now hoping the band's debut album "Reflector" will lay the groundwork for a proposed smash global career in 2000 and beyond. "This is my shot at trying to get it right, as right as I can," says Kosky. "And I'm glad I set this up around Killing Heidi because I love them dearly."
At the end of the day (well, three years on anyway) the feeling is mutual. "There's never been any puppet strings," Ella says, "There's never been any high power behind the scenes. Paul is very much our fifth member. It's not like he's telling us do this, do that. It's a working relationship. It's not a controlling thing."
"For me," says Jesse, "It's better having one person doing all these things than having a corporation of 200 people who don't really give a fuck about us. When people say 'So you've been signed to Wah Wah and they've only got one band and you're it,' I'm like 'Well exactly!'"
"Fully," Ella says, brown orbs twinkling with possibility. "Aren't we lucky?"
