Lime Cordiale on the REBOUND

Get ready, Darwin, REBOUND Music Festival is descending upon Darwin Ski Club with an exciting lineup of some of the best music acts getting around. Sydney pop rockers Lime Cordiale, fronted by brothers Oli and Louis Leimbach, are hitting the Darwin stage for the first time, after a whirlwind couple of years and a chart-topping album release during the global pandemic. We caught up with Oli for a chinwag.

A music festival – how exciting. Is REBOUND your first gig post COVID-lockdown?
It’s our first big proper gig, but we did a whole bunch of shows in Sydney, Brisbane and Newcastle, but only to 80-120 people at a time. We did two gigs per night and we did that for about six weeks, so it was about 35 shows all up.

That was pretty interesting because we were getting more and more used to playing to bigger crowds, and to snap back into those intimate shows was a bit of a shock to the system. But yeah, this will be our first proper show to a decent crowd, and also our first show in Darwin!

Darwin is very excited! Have you been here before?
Yeah, Louis and I came to Darwin when we were kids. I was eight and he was about six, and we drove from Darwin to Alice Springs and slept in swags on the side of the road. It was something our parents wanted to do, so we’ve got great memories of that. We’ve been meaning to come back to Darwin and this is the first time we’ve had a really good reason to get up there.

How long will you be in town for?
We’ll be in town for about three days. It’s Louis’ birthday on the 2nd, so we might try to get out and do something fun that night, then it’s the festival the next day before we head out of town on the Sunday.

It’s funny, in order to even be able to play this festival, we had to be out of a hot spot for two weeks before heading up, so we’ve been on the Central Coast north of Sydney doing recording and writing.

So, you’ve put a bit of effort into even being able to get up here?
Yeah definitely, and I was surprised when I told the rest of the band, “you know how we’ve got that Darwin gig?” and they just presumed it wouldn’t happen. I said “well, it can happen, but we can’t be home for two weeks before we get there, we’ve got to go up the coast” and they were like, “sweet!”

I was really surprised that everyone was just super down for it from the start. Everyone’s craving doing something like this – even just getting on a plane, let alone playing at a music festival. Everyone just jumped at it real quick.

Well we sure appreciate it – we’ve missed our music festivals! You mentioned you’ve been doing a bit of writing – as artists, how have things been for you over the last few months?
Well, 2019 was a pretty intense year for us – we had 103 shows during the year with two American legs and a big European tour, and this year was gearing up to be easily busier than that. It was almost a bit scary going into this year, because we realised we wouldn’t really be home and our relationships might be stretched a bit.

So, when the American tours were cancelled and Europe was postponed, there was a small sense of relief in a weird way – not that we were happy it was cancelled – but because we had an album come out in July, so it was already full on in itself.

Yes – your album 14 Steps to a Better You debuted at number one on the ARIA charts – that must feel pretty good?
Yeah, thanks! That was amazing. It was super-busy for us – while everyone else and all of our friends were isolating and getting bored, we were busier than ever promoting the new album and getting everything together for the release.

That lasted until pretty recently actually, and now we know what people are talking about not having that next thing to look forward to, not knowing what’s on the horizon.

Now we’re just kinda getting stuck into writing and recording, and we’re going to have a few more releases come out this year, just to keep everything going. That’s the main thing – how do you keep momentum up in a time like this? You’ve just got to change and adapt, really.

That would have been such a bizarre experience during your album’s success – not really being able to go out and perform at gigs and festivals as you would normally?
Yeah, totally. And that’s why a lot of people have postponed their releases. That’s what everyone’s used to – releasing an album and doing a bunch of shows and that promotes the album organically.

So, for us, we did do those small shows, but we didn’t want to delay the release at all. But it is weird not doing a whole bunch of shows to back it up, and I’m sure that’ll come, but we’ve had to come up with other things in the meantime.

What can Top End audiences expect from one of your live shows?
We like to always pull a bit from the unexpected – it’s pretty whacky. People from Darwin who may not have seen us play before will just know us from our recorded music. But I think it’s a pretty genuine experience – pretty weird and whacky – kind of like a bit of a house party experience.

And you’re in the band with your bro Louis – what’s that like?
We’re pretty co-dependent, but I don’t know if that’s unhealthy [laughs]. We’ve always lived together, we’ve toured together, most of our friends and girlfriends have had to spend a lot of time together. I guess the question’s more how do other people put up with it!

I guess we have some little fights, but we’ve been fighting our whole life, and we’re very good at getting over it in less than 10 minutes. People might be come up to me or Louis and be like “oh, is he okay?” and we’re just like “give him 10 minutes and he’ll be fine” because we know how everything goes.

We’ve really evolved in the same way, in terms of liking the same music and doing the same things. When we’re not touring, we’ll go surfing together and we even order the same coffee, so we probably should be factoring in a bit more separation – it’s probably healthier to do that [laughs].

REBOUND 2020 Music Festival
WHEN SAT 3 OCT | 2PM-MIDNIGHT
AT DARWIN SKI CLUB
TIX facebook.com/darwinevents | dtix.com.au  
INFO limecordiale.com | facebook.com/limecordiale | instagram.com/limecordiale

Photo: Brothers, Oli & Louis Leimbach. Photo by Jack Shepherd.