A friendly hello

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A Friendly Hello
Andrew Murfett
July 20, 2007


Forrest Kline is not short of friends. He has 652,288 of them, according to his band's MySpace page.

The 23-year-old frontman of Californian power-pop act Hellogoodbye says the number is a touch unrealistic.

"Most of those people on MySpace are not my friends," he laughs. "Most of them are probably like internet robots or porn pages."

Kline and his bandmates arrive in Melbourne this week for their first Australian headlining tour. It follows a brief jaunt last year playing support to the All-American Rejects.

The band started in Kline's bedroom in 2001. The bespectacled singer was messing about writing synthesised punk-pop songs on his computer.

Attending Huntington Beach High School, he and buddy Jesse Kurvink aspired to make music simply for their friends.

Kline says: "I'd gotten a guitar when I was in the sixth grade and was always in little bands through high school. But it got more and more serious as I got older. We never sent the songs to record companies or anything; we just put them on the internet."

The band's name (taken from the Beatles song Hello, Goodbye) raised eyebrows and helped it get on the bill for numerous local support slots. Soon, they were in a perpetual motion of touring.

"The first tour we did, we were pretty much stupid kids who didn't know what they were doing," Kline admits.

"Most of the bands that played with us were rolling their eyes at us. But I liked playing support. There's less pressure. If the crowd shows the slightest clue of enjoyment, you're stoked. You'll come off and say, 'They bopped their heads! That was awesome!' "

Line-up issues (they shed four drummers and three bass players) and a crippling tour schedule meant the band struggled to put time aside to record an album.

After signing with Drive-Thru, they finally blacked out a couple of months and headed to Los Angeles. In two sessions split over six weeks, they recorded and tracked what would become their debut, Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs! The electro-pop sound (think Jimmy Eat World meets XTC) found a niche in the US power-pop scene.

In between, the band had been featured on the MTV program Real World: Austin. The show saw them followed around South by Southwest by a team of MTV-picked contestants aiming to market the band to the US music industry. The ensuing exposure helped land the band heavy airplay on MTV and a top 10 US single, Here (In Your Arms).

Still, Kline is eager to downplay the series' impact on the band's popularity.

"Look, it's hard to quantify what it meant for us," he says, wearily. "It definitely exposed us to a group of people that would not know who we are at all. I'd like to think that doing so much touring and playing with so many different bands has helped just as much."