Boy In A Box

BOY IN A BOX

It takes a certain kind of four-year-old to dedicate every single Sunday, from wake until sleep, to listening to the Beach Boys on repeat. Some would say a wildly precocious or even (but don’t quote us) mildly freakish one. Tobias ‘Tij’ Priddle, the 23-year-old behind the glistening riot-pop anthems of Boy In A Box, was that kid. To his mother’s allowing sighs, a bright-eyed Tij would each week bathe in the saturated West Coast harmonies of the Wilson brothers from dawn ‘til dusk, drawing records from the vast collection his parents kept in their Northern Beaches, NSW, home.

Perhaps the early interest in thick Polaroid-pop production was the direct influence of his father, an architect who used to drag Tij around to the recording studios he was building, including the famed Big Jesus Burger and Alberts Studios in Sydney. Or maybe Tij sensed he’d have plenty of time to explore the nether regions of rock’n’roll history over his oncoming years in Patonga, a fishing village with a population of just over 200 and little to do besides making bike ramps out of leftover construction materials.

And Tij would certainly explore. Years later, a move to Melbourne would see him expand on a musical obsession that had gripped him since high school – the clattering hooks of the UK punk era and the everyman stance of Americana, as well as elements of early soul and grainy FM pop – to inform the heart of Boy In A Box. The Clash is in there, as is Springsteen and even hints of a young Midnight Oil. “Right now I’m stuck on the seventies,” Tij considers of his influences. “As well as Nina Simone and Frank Sinatra.”

There were, of course, bands and bedroom projects that came before Boy In A Box’s inception, but those became irrelevant when Tij’s father passed away at the beginning of 2010 and Tij gave up on making music altogether. “I was kind of like, ‘Oh, f**k, I have to do something, I have to make a change,’” Tij explains. “He always said to me, ‘Do whatever you want and, if something’s not working, don’t do it.’ And being in bands didn’t feel like it was working.”

Instead, Tij decided to follow in his dad’s footsteps and build recording studios. Grabbing work for the man who would eventually coerce him back to the mic and become his manager, Tij put his hands to work, pushing thoughts of ever again performing to the side. His guitar, however, wouldn’t leave him alone, and a bit of serendipity stepped in when, on the job, Tij’s boss told him he was looking for a song to feature in the 2010 Blue September campaign, aimed at raising awareness of cancer in men. “So I’m like, ‘Well, I wrote this song at home last night, do you want to hear that?’” Tij shrugs. “And a week later I was thrown into the studio and it was like, ‘Oh no, it’s happening again!’”

Jump forward a couple of months and ‘Moon Comes Up’, with its celebratory gospel chorus and Tij’s brylcreem vocal, would be all over Triple J, cementing the future(****kicking off a great start for) of Boy In A Box.
Tij 's musical compadres headed down from the coast and joined him in Melbourne to take what he had in his head and land it onto the stage. Kris Scott (guitar) and Athan Hewett (bass) moved in next door, whilst fellow Melburnian , Tom Crimmins (drums) threw his lot in to form a communal hub of creativity and no doubt any neighbour’s worst nightmare, or best free night out.

Not that long hours are spent toiling over and jamming out the songs of Boy In A Box. That’s where the compulsive nature of Tij’s childhood listening comes back in. With a hand in everything from production to mixing, Tij says that when the songs appear in his head, they come with every instrument, every detail, included. “My whole method is: if I can’t have a song completely written, structure and everything down, in 15 minutes then I have to scrap it.”

A little extreme? Maybe, but not entirely irrational. In his early teens, Tij used to catch a ferry from Patonga to his cousin’s house in a nearby town to kick around with instruments and ideas. With a limited amount of time together before Tij had to return home, they came up with a game called the ‘Power Hour’. “You’d have to write, record and have the song finished and mixed in an hour,” Tij recalls the game’s rules. “So I’d get there and I’d have a song in my head and I’d quickly bash out some drums – I can kind of play drums – and then put some guitar down, and while I was doing that I’d be thinking of a melody and scribbling words down. So that’s just what I’ve done for years. If I find myself toiling over a song for longer than even half an hour, it’s like, ‘What’s the point?’”

Ask him to explain his lyrics and Tij is more likely to change the subject than pore over every thread, however the themes that filter through Boy In A Box’s songs are relevant to why the group has been causing whispers amongst real people who go to real gigs. As heard in the up-all-night chorus chant of ‘Moon C