Perth duo Danny K and Jay LeKat are an unstoppable fun time machine. Exploring Darling Harbour we chatted ferris wheels, unicorns and glitter with GRRL PAL.
Photos by Liam Cameron
HAPPY: Okay the ferris wheel is moving!
JAY: Oh no! We’re spinning! And we just had breakfast! Oh fuck we’re really high up, I don’t like it up here!
DANNY: Are we safe? I don’t know. There’s a really weird echo in here too.
JAY: We should record in a ferris wheel. That’d be interesting wouldn’t it? Or we could do it for a film clip. Danny you can be in one playing drums, Jake can be in one playing bass, I’ll be in one singing and in the others there can be people pole dancing.
DANNY: Just strobe lights going all the time.
HAPPY: On a scale of 1 to 10 how exciting is this interview right now?
JAY: Oh, very exciting. We love you guys!
DANNY: 9 I’d say, 10 if we were on a roller-coaster. I swear I stayed in that hotel over there with my parents once.
JAY: That’s a ritzy hotel, go Donna and Steve! Donna and Steve are Danny’s parents, but they’re also like my parents. They’re the band’s parents. We practice on Wednesdays and Thursdays and they cook us all dinner and they also drive us to shows when we want to go to shows and get drunk.
DANNY: Turns out dad gave Jay some money before we left Perth.
JAY: Stevo gave me 100 bucks! Dan would be like “Jay, I think I’m about to run out of money” and I’d say “Here, do you want some of the money your dad gave me?” (laughs).
HAPPY: Thats pretty cool, having band parents to look after you!
JAY: They’re the best. Donna will have a wine with me, the boys won’t drink with me at band practice but Donna will.
DANNY: Mum just likes it coz Jay will have a wine with her.
JAY: I’m the son she never had. (Jay almost drops her bag through the hole in the bottom of carriage and begins to laugh)
DANNY: Jay has this endless loop of a laugh. You know when you get feedback distortion and you don’t know how to stop it. Oh, and now we’ve stopped. Imagine if we got stuck here at the top and we had to climb down that ladder there.
JAY: Oh fuck! Dan, do not even joke about that!
HAPPY: Yeah, I’m scared of heights too so I’ll take my chances here.
JAY: Me too! There’s a hole in the bottom, we could pee out there.
DANNY: This article is gonna be titled ‘Dumb shit Jays said’.
JAY: Oh man, I accidentally talk about peeing all the time
HAPPY: All the time?
JAY: Yeah, like one time the boys went on stage and I was doing a wee and I heard the opening to our song and I was like “Are you kidding me?!?” I had to pause the flow and run on stage.
HAPPY: (laughs) So you’re options were finish or pause…
JAY: No! I had 15 seconds to get on stage!
HAPPY: How do you pause?
JAY: Girls are better at that than boys. Apparently that’s a real life thing, that’s why we’re better than you.
HAPPY: Well the battle of the sexes has been decided then, because girls…
JAY: Girls can stop mid flow! (laughs)
HAPPY: Wait, Danny did you know where Jay was?
DANNY: We had these in ear headphones and I said “Okay we’re playing now“, and Jay was like “Nugh ugh“…
JAY: I said I needed to go to the loo quickly and they started going on stage when I was in there.
DANNY: She had a good two minutes with the intro.
JAY: Not with Amazon mate, that has 30 seconds.
HAPPY: That’s a pretty awesome song too!
JAY: It was inspired by that Futurama episode, the one with the Shnoo-shnoo. Everyone thinks it’s about feminism and stuff but really it was completely inspired by that episode of Futurama.
DANNY: This interview is going to be heinous.
JAY: It’s GRRL PAL uncut and totally wild!
HAPPY: It’s an adventure!
DANNY: I reckon that’s what our music is always about at the end of the day, just having fun and expressing that with others.
HAPPY: We definitely felt that when we received your EP in the mail. We get so many boring work mail stuff and then we open yours to find stickers and pink and bright yellow.
JAY: We had so much fun putting that together. I wanted to put glitter in there too!
DANNY: Jay, no one wants glitter in their mail. They’d open it and it would get everywhere and ruin their day.
JAY: That’s impossible, how could glitter ever ruin someone’s day?
DANNY: Our friend we were staying with in Melbourne brought glitter home and threw it at us.
JAY: I loved it. I loved the next morning when I shook my jacket and all this glitter came out.
DANNY: I was just imagining our bond for the rental car with all the glitter. The one thing we get in the car is fucking glitter. This shit just doesn’t get out.
JAY: I feel we should throw glitter at people who do good things. Like Beno! Do you know Beno? I think he’s a Perth thing.
DANNY: He’s a mate of mine, he a talented musician who plays in Tim and Jean and used to play in Blud. And now he’s a comedian. So we watch a lot of his videos.
JAY: I’m pretty happy with my daily ‘best of cat videos’ from BuzzFeed sitting in my inbox.
DANNY: Jay is easily amused. Sometimes she’ll come to practice and say she can’t write. I’ll ask why and she’ll be like “My email, it hasn’t come through” (laughs).
JAY: That is a lie! But it’s part true. When we record we try to get a lot of the attitude and the happiness and the fun and the silliness into the vocal. Sometimes I tell him to make unicorn noises. Do the unicorn noise!
HAPPY: Really?!
DANNY: No!
JAY: It’s a like a high pitched whiney.
DANNY: No it’s like “Heeeeeeiiooogh“.
JAY: (laughing) Yes! That’s what it is! And it makes me sing better every time. Sometimes I put a pen in my mouth, because sometimes I’m grumpy.
HAPPY: You put a pen in your mouth?
JAY: It makes you smile. As you’re biting out you’re forced to smile and because you feel so stupid you start laughing.
DANNY: I’d be like “Jay, it’s time to put the pen in your mouth“.
JAY: We do ridiculous things to get good takes. I’d run to the end of the driveway and do star jumps back.
DANNY: She’s not even joking. (The band take a couple of pictures) If you search the internet you’ll never find a good photo of us.
JAY: Especially at the start, we didn’t know how to pose. It was the blank face look.
HAPPY: How long did it take for you guys to realise your look? That can be pretty important, how people perceive you and all.
JAY: It just happened organically. We were just meant to be trolls (laughs). It is pretty important. We just don’t take ourselves seriously at all, so we try to inject as much fun as possible into every little thing we do. I guess that’s the purpose behind the music, to get people to enjoy themselves and let go and be stupid and silly and fun, and to be okay with it.
DANNY: That’s what we like people to do.
JAY: It’s the best! And then I dance with them if they’re being silly and stupid enough…
DANNY: Because we’re already being silly and stupid enough on stage.
HAPPY: Well speaking of getting on the stage, you guys will be playing on that massive Gang of Youths tour as well! Which is so awesome and so weird at the same time. How did that happen?
DANNY: We played CoLAB, and Joji was at the gate and helped us lift all our stuff out. And then Jay had parked car and another had parked really close to us.
JAY: I took a picture of it!
DANNY: So she runs over and says “Look at these assholes, look what they did!” And Joji was like, “Oh, yeah that’s our van“.
JAY: I was giving so much attitude, and here they are being nice to us and being really high on on the festival lineup. They accepted it though. I had to climb out passenger window, they were that close. Then we supported them at Mojos and all of them is a genuinely wonderful people. We’re staying at Joji’s house now. So we just really get along really well.
HAPPY: Sweet! Well our last question I feel you’ve already answered, but what makes you happy?
Both: Laughs
JAY: This whole thing makes us happy!
DANNY: Adventure Time, Beno, glitter, unicorns, cat videos and wine.
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