Back in the 1990s, Donna Simpson had a system for getting the Waifs’ albums in shops. She’d call up the record stores of every small town the band was set to play in and ask if they would stock their CDs on commission. Then, with just a little subterfuge, she’d even convince the big chains to buy their music.
“I was getting them into Kmart all on my own by pretending that I was calling from the Waifs’ office, which was actually my bedroom floor,” Simpson remembers. “I had thousands of CDs stacked up, I had my own shopping trolley, and I’d buy express post bags and bubble wrap in bulk. I’d be walking through the street in Bondi with my trolley full of post bags.”
As her sister and bandmate Vikki Thorn sees it, this is basically the entire story of the Waifs.
“The reason the band exists is because Donna is this kind of person,” Thorn says, speaking over Zoom alongside Simpson and Waifs guitarist Josh Cunningham. “When we were at school, Donna had the idea to go around Australia and play music. We’d been playing music in the local pub, [and] I don’t think we were particularly great at what we did. But she has this can-do attitude … and that attitude carried us through and really created that independent spirit.”
The Waifs have now been together for 30 years and are still every bit as independent as they were back in the beginning, when Simpson and Thorn met Cunningham at a pub in Broome and asked him to ditch his band to join theirs. (Thorn and Cunningham soon started dating and were together for 12 years before splitting up – but remaining bandmates.) In that time, they’ve never really stopped – just slowed. Simpson now describes them as “FIFO musicians” who come together from their disparate bases around Australia to perform every now and then, spending the bulk of their time raising their children, working on other projects, mentoring upcoming artists and, in Simpson’s case, doing “a lot of gardening”.
But later this year the band are reuniting for a comprehensive 40-date Australian tour to mark the 20th anniversary of their breakthrough album, the earthy and unfussed folk-rock classic Up All Night. As well as the big cities, they’re hitting everywhere from Ballarat to Broken Hill – the sort of small towns reminiscent of their early marathon tours.
And while those years of nonstop touring weren’t always easy – “there was a lot of fighting back in the day,” Simpson says, including the time she walked up and “walloped” Thorn with a tambourine on stage – Up All Night is a worthy reason to get back on the road. That LP achieved double platinum certification, won four Aria awards, and hit No 3 on the Triple J Hottest 100 with the single London Still, a quintessentially Australian ode to missing home from afar.
The trio often disagree about how certain moments in their three-decade career went down: “Can you imagine if the police ever tried to interrogate us about something that happened? They’d just give up,” Simpson laughs. But one thing they’re sure of is the absurdity of how the Waifs were branded an “overnight success” after Up All Night stormed the charts. The album introduced them to a wider audience, but they had already been playing together for 10 years at that point and had put out two previous albums.
“We’d been on tour for so long and so intensively,” says Thorn, “that we had this weariness about us. And I think that’s what made the album pop – because we stopped caring so much.”
The other big factor in that album’s success was that for the first time the Waifs had brought on a manager, Phil Stevens. Up until that point, the band had been suspicious of those who approached them about management. When the well-connected Stevens came on board, they made it clear certain things were not going to change.
“[We said], we’re not interested in a record deal,” Thorn remembers. “We’ve already established ourselves as recording artists in Australia –”
“We keep our money in a sock, not the bank,” Simpson interjects.
A sock?
“Yeah, we paid for the recording [of Up All Night] in LA by sitting on the floor in the studio and pulling out the sock of money,” Thorn says.
The sock full of cash – or, in boom times, multiple socks – came with the band everywhere. Occasionally they were misplaced; left in the bathroom of a bar or lost somewhere in Sydney airport after a long-haul flight.
“We were driving to a gig one time and I stopped suddenly at a stoplight. This thing came sliding down the windscreen and landed on the bottom of the car. And it was the sock,” Cunningham remembers.
The rest of their operation was equally as ad hoc. In their early years, Cunningham booked the gigs, Thorn handled press, and Simpson, of course, did distribution, stuffing the van full of CDs.
“One time we were driving through Albury-Wodonga – remember how the back of the tour van would never close?” Simpson says, addressing Thorn and Cunningham. “And thousands and thousands of CDs all fell out right in the middle of this intersection, smashed all over the road and held up traffic. We picked them up and tried to package them and sell them anyway.”
She even put their phone number on the back of CDs – which led to calls from both fans who couldn’t believe it was actually the band when they answered, plus the odd label which tried – and failed – to nab a slice of their success.
“I remember a record company called us up, and I said to them, what can you do for us that we can’t do for ourselves?” Simpson says. “He said, we can get you $2.30 per album profit. And I said, well, we’re actually making $20 per album profit. And we have a sock! So you can get fucked.”
Their independence meant they were somewhat unprepared for the tremendous success of Up All Night. The band had relocated overseas prior to its release and would check their email occasionally to see notes from friends saying they’d heard London Still on the radio.
“And I would think, ‘oh yeah, three in the morning on ABC’,” Simpson recalls. “I had no idea that it was getting played so much until we returned to Australia and then everything just went bang.”
Suddenly, everyone was watching. “Our publicist Stacey was horrified that I wanted to wear my op shop pants on the Arias red carpet,” Thorn adds. “They had a hole in the bum. She sewed up the hole before [we went].”
In the years that followed, the band kept going as they had before – just with a little more financial freedom – and released four more studio albums while endlessly touring. “We went out and played all over Australia,” Simpson says. “We never relied on – and you can’t rely on – just radio and word of mouth. You can’t. You’ve got to get out and do the hard yards and tour.”
It was an easy decision to get back on the road for Up All Night. But as significant as the release was on paper, it didn’t change the marrow of who the Waifs are.
“We didn’t ever really aspire to hit fame or the big time,” says Cunningham. “We were just travelling around, having an adventure and playing music … We got more accolades and more notoriety [after Up All Night]. But what got us there hadn’t changed.”
The Waifs are touring Australia with guests including Josh Pyke, Mick Thomas, Jeff Lang, and an appearance in Melbourne by Missy Higgins, 1 June – 24 September
