5 things you didn’t know about Sticky Fingers

In October, notorious Sydney band Sticky Fingers claimed their debut Australian #1 on the ARIA charts with their third studio album Westway (The Glitter & The Slums), making it the 17th album to reach the top spot in 2016.

Despite their aptitude for lewd behaviour and obscene antics, the band have ward off critics and managed to build a legacy that has seen them become one Australia’s most popular and highly regarded recording artists.

At the second annual Australian Music Week Conference last week in Cronulla, TMN sat in on an interview with band manager Neal Hunt who shed light on the rise of Sticky Fingers and their long road to success, while sharing some of the band’s more curious and intimate stories.

Healthy habits eventually pay off

The first interactions between the band and Neal Hunt occurred on the streets of Newtown in Sydney. Hunt would often ride his pushbike down King Street, bumping into the boys out the front of hotels and pubs.

“I would regularly run into the Sticky boys and we would chat a lot about music,” Hunt recalled of the band’s formative years.

From there, the band’s relationship with Hunt would prosper, with Sticky becoming the principal artist on the roster of Hunt’s label, Sureshaker Music.

An untimely sushi craving in the US led to a logistical disaster

Six members of the band and their tour entourage missed a connecting flight from New York to Los Angeles (presumably the five members of the band and a touring member). According to Hunt, the debacle was the result of an unnamed individual “disappearing to get sushi” while the rest of the group admirably waited for him.

Hunt recalled: “I spoke on the phone to our tour manager Jimmy, who is also a member of Bootleg Rascal. He said ‘There was one guy ahead of me who went to get sushi and the other guys waited with the person who got busted with something he shouldn’t have been carrying through security’.

“Jimmy was the only person who got on the plane,” Hunt laughed. He was waiting 15 minutes and he couldn’t see anyone, so he just jumped on.”

The boys are not fond of buses…or bus drivers.

Along with cancelling three sold-out shows over the past few weeks, the band somehow managed to rip the door off their US$35,000 tour bus while in Montreal, Canada.

“The door got knocked off the bus at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. I had the bus company calling me and the driver was really upset because he hadn’t been paid all tour,” Hunt said.

Furthermore, the boys went through four different bus drivers on their 2015 US tour. “We lost the first one after like three days,” Hunt confessed. “It was a four week tour, that’s a pretty good fucking average.

“Everyone hates being in a bus with them. As a rule of thumb, if the driver likes being in a bus with them, they hate being in a bus with him and they start complaining about him and trying to piss him off.”

Sticky’s relationship with the Enmore Theatre is nearing at breaking point

Even though “the boys were pretty good” last time out at Sydney’s Enmore Theatre, it appears that their past is coming back to haunt them.

“The guy at the Enmore has obviously been briefed to give us hell,” Hunt said as he talked of his fractured relationship with the venue.

“He started listing the litany of things they’d done like breaking a table, letting off the fire extinguisher, ripping buttons off the pillows and wrecking their chairs. The venue rep told us ‘We don’t want any of the shit that happened last time to happen ever again’.”

Booking the band is a thing of the past for Hunt

“We don’t book the band anymore, we use an agent […] I eventually just gave up.”

Hunt claims the band “stopped listening to him in New York a year ago” and, since then, has given up on booking Sticky’s shows after over five years of carrying out the laborious task.

The band’s unappreciative posture towards Hunt eventually boiled when Hunt furiously told them “I’m saving you 10% so you can just go and get hammered? There’s no way I’m doing that anymore!”