Amy Meredith: Young and Restless

21 July 2010

by Poppy Reid

What started innocently enough as an embryonic crush on a baby-sitter; has since spawned into a fivepiece Sydney band. With lyrics like “I can be your porn star,” Amy Meredith have school girls falling at their Facebook footnotes.

The now 24-year-old frontman Christian Lo Russo fell for his sitter (Amy Meredith) at the age of five, so much so, the little tyke even wrote about it. “I found this little diary with all these things I wrote and she happened to appear in some of them. It was just scribble, incoherent stuff like ‘went to bed and tucked me in’.”

With the success of hit singles Porn Star and Lying, the tables have now turned on the indie/pop singer with tween fans bombarding the band’s chatroom and their phone hotline where they can leave a message for the band.

“It basically stemmed from boredom and being in a van for such long hours…But because I’m poor at the moment I don’t have credit to top it up [the Hotline phone] so I’ve just left it off for a bit.”

There’s no doubt Amy Meredith (the band, not the babysitter) are in touch with their fan-base, with MySpace playing an integral part in their success. But with every social networking website covered, there was bound to be some stalking…

“The weirdest stories are the ones where they change their twitter name to your last name and so you think they’re a cousin. Then there’s the young kids who are like “I want your body,” all weird creepy kind of stuff, and they’re like 15 or 16 and then you delete them and they’re like ‘why did you delete me from your Facebook?!’ and you’re like ‘oh my God’.”

As bubblegum-pop as some of Amy Meredith’s fans might be, Lo Russo doesn’t see pop as a dirty word.

“The only way it gets worse is if you try and fight it, then you end up confusing your audience…I would have to say it’s a tip of the hat to new-wave [their music] but also modern like pop as well.”

Lo Russo is eclectic in his own genre style and that of his influences, he says The Cure, The Smiths, The Killers and Phoenix all inspire him to write music that is “as accessible as possible.” It’s this concern with audience opinion that reminds us of just how fresh they are on the music scene.

“Sometimes I try to make it light-hearted and sometimes I can be almost a bit too honest and wear my heart on my sleeve.

“I’ve had people in my life that come up to me and say ‘Um I can tell that that’s about me’. But you know what, sometimes it’s right and that’s where I get in trouble, like Lying for example and Black Eyes.”

With the release of their debut album Restless, almost 100,000 hits on their Lying video (which features the cast of last seasons Australia’s Next Top Model) and a national tour underway, Amy Meredith are understandably excited. Backing them all the way is internationally acclaimed mix engineer, Mark Needham. Lo Russo personally sought Needham because of his diverse style of mixing.

“He just gets every kind of style… I decided he’d be perfect for our band which in my opinion he was, he just brought it to another level.”