Nicole Shenko has been busy. While on the one hand things are starting to fall into place for the Melbourne singer and songwriter, on the other it seems that there is no rest for the wicked. After the last few years, which have seen Nicole tour China with one band, release a critically acclaimed album with another (2005’s Alchemy) and live a divided life between Sydney and Melbourne, an average person might assume that a well-earned break is in order. Nicole Shenko, however, has other plans.

My first question to her is of course, what is she singing at the moment? As it turns out, changes have been afoot.

‘I’m in a new band called Lychee Martini,’ she tells me, then goes on to elaborate on how it came to pass. ‘I met Rob Bell, the percussionist, at a party about four years ago. He called me up a couple of months later and said ‘Do you want to come to Hong Kong?’ so I said ‘Absolutely, what are we going to do?’ He said ‘Why don’t you come down to one of our gigs, and just, you know, get up and do some improv, and see how we go.’ I said ‘Sure, I mean, why not?’ So I went down to this club, the band was playing, and I did a set with them. I’ve really never found a group of musicians that I’ve done that with as comfortably before. We just played and the songs just flowed and it was incredibly easy. So we went to Hong Kong, and we toured a bit around China, and had some great ideas to play together, but they had a different line-up at the time, and I was doing Shenko and I was living between Sydney and Melbourne. So it really wasn’t set up that it would work for us. I kept in contact with the guys, but we were in different places at different times.’



While Nicole was playing with Shenko (the band which shared her name), Lychee Martini had undergone some line-up changes and started working on some new songs. When she came and added some vocals, the musical chemistry that had occurred before was re-ignited. One sure sign that things were on track was the ease with which the group gelled together in the studio. Another is the way that Nicole’s face lights up when describing how things are proceeding.

‘They had been working for months on a whole bunch of instrumental tracks, and they called me up before Christmas, and said ‘Do you want to get together and have a jam on some of these tracks?’ and I said ‘Sure, why not, let’s just see how it works out.’ When we had this first jam, it was just after New Year’s, everyone had been partying for a week- so it was off to a rough start already. We got in the studio and from the first beat we were in, we just played for hours, and it was just so easy. It was fantastic. So I just pretty much just said, ‘I’m joining the band!’ That was January, and I still had a couple of months left in Sydney. I got back to Melbourne in March, and we’ve just been playing together ever since. Now we’re twenty songs in, and very close to gigging soon- very exciting!’



So I’m intrigued- how would Nicole describe Lychee Martini to someone who hasn’t heard them before?

‘Soft orange’ she says, and laughs. I can’t help but feel as if I’m missing something here. Fortunately, she goes on to enlighten me.

‘We came up with that the other day after a jam. It’s not like intense rock, like what I was doing beforehand. It’s like you throw it out, it’s pleasant, it hits you, but it’s kind of enjoyable.’ Noticing perhaps that my confused expression hasn’t entirely left my face, she gives me a little more detail.

‘It’s always difficult to describe what you do, but essentially, it’s deep groove, based on a dance sensibility. We’re all into dance music- all of the guys do remixes. All of us are very eclectic in terms of what we like, but essentially dance music builds, it has absolute peaks and troughs, and dynamics that make you want to dance, and so we play like that. With a music that’s deep groove with elements of hip hop, dance, reggae, jazz, funk, soul, little tidbits of everything, just lashing in on these solid grooves.’

With the addition of a vocalist to the Lychee Martini recording line-up, some re-writing of the material was inevitable. With the eclectic musical backgrounds and tastes of the band, it’s no real surprise to find out that constructing songs with a standard verse/chorus format isn’t necessarily at the top of Lychee Martini’s things to do list.

‘We’re kind of in the process where we’ve got twenty songs, and up until I came along they were probably about ten, fifteen minutes long each song. But of course, naturally when you add lyrics you’ve got the verses, or choruses, or bridges- whatever it is, there needs to be a form, in some shape, to sing to. So at the moment we’re just working out which songs will be structured more so than others. Because we just do improv so well we don’t want to become just a song-based band, because it would totally take away from why we’re really good. So we’re just kinda working out which songs we can keep relatively short, that require that kind of a length, and then which songs can be ten-fifteen minutes long, that are just dance tracks!’



Fortunately Lychee Martini’s transition from an instrumental sound to a vocal one has been seamless- Nicole puts it down to the consummate professionalism of her bandmates.
‘Because they all have studios, and they’re really into sound, there’s no egos competing when we play, there’s nobody trying to outplay someone else. And they’re totally respectful of what I do as a vocalist, because if you can’t hear the vocalist, then it’s not going to connect to the audience. That’s what you have a vocalist for, to connect to the audience. If you can’t hear that it’s frustrating- be an instrumental band! So they’re amazing, they’ll play to whatever level is required, so the singing comes in just on top of it.’