Institut Polaire are literally Perth’s next big thing.

Down the barren end of Oxford Street, far away from the sneaker shop, late night café, independent cinema and cat accessory shop, there is a purple house. Erik Hecht and Dave Phirkettle-Watts, respectively the singer/guitarist and bassist in Institut Polaire, have parked across the road, the second last stop on a tour of their rehearsal spaces in Perth. They’re telling me that the inauspicious outside appearance of the house is an accurate reflection of its inauspicious inside appearance. The rusted roof, rundown walls and window grills are matched by power points hanging off their sockets in a house shared by four bands at a time, each with their own room. The Tucker Bs, the Stickfigures, Adam Said Galore and a long line of great Perth bands have called this place their collective home.

“This is Band House,” Hecht tells me. “It’s been our practice space for, what, two years up to now. It’s where we started to have the big line-ups.”

Institut Polaire are about as famous for having an ever-expanding roster, the closest thing in Perth to the Polyphonic Spree, as for their excellent pop. The two previous houses we’ve been to saw the band grow from Hecht and Phirkettle-Watts to include a drummer, a second guitarist, to the current line-up, birthed at Band House. It seems whenever they pick up their amps and move on they bring with them some extra mass, a rolling stone that somehow gathers moss. These streets we’ve driven through, while increasingly middle-class, have the perfect combination of friendliness and comfortable poverty that bands call their lifeblood. In this sense, though Hecht and Phirkettle-Watts (and you might as well get used to reading that name) are foreigners -- from America and England, respectively -- there is something quintessentially Perth about Institut Polaire.

“All right, last one,” Phirkettle-Watts says, and we go up Scarborough Beach Road into his old North Perth neighbourhood, past the McDonald’s and BP.

“Perth shocked me by how it wasn’t different from where I was from,” says Hecht. “Perth for me has a lot of things about it that are very similar to America, especially now that the BP-station-and-McDonald’s-on-every-corner thing is starting to take over. It’s just very similar culturally.”

Hecht has lived in Perth for nearly a decade. He fell in love with an Australian exchange student in his senior year of high school and maintained a long distance relationship with her for four years (which is a funny story, keep an eye out for it) before finally taking a punt on his girlfriend’s home on the west coast of the continent on the other side of the planet.

Phirkettle-Watts, originally from England, moved to Perth when he was 10. They met through Hecht’s girlfriend, Monique Archer, who became Phirkettle-Watts’ friend after she returned home from her time abroad. She now manages the band. When they met they found that Archer wasn’t their only common point – their love for The Smiths and The Stone Roses was also mutual, as was their hunger for new music of all kinds.

“I probably listened to punk music more than Erik did,” Phirkettle-Watts says, “but Erik gave me a Dead Kennedys T-shirt once.”

“I think our tastes were concentrated in different areas, but I don’t think there was much that either of us liked that the other severely disliked,” Hecht adds. “Maybe some of the noise bands Dave liked.”

“Whereas I didn’t like much Abba,” Phirkettle-Watts says.

“Two of the greatest pop songwriters of all time,” Hecht asserts. “You can quote me on that.”

We round the corner on a cream-coloured house with a big front yard, Italian columns and pot plants. They’re the trappings of a more family-oriented place, the second that Institut Polaire called home. It speaks of wealth and space and lacks the personality of their later joints, which were more cramped, more haphazard, looked more like they were upkept by struggling artists. Phirkettle-Watts pulls up the handbrake and looks at it through the passenger side window, the sun catching his huge, fluffy sideburns.

“This is the second place we rehearsed the band in,” he explains. “We lived next door to a very understanding and interested neighbour here. I went around to tell him we were going to practice and he wanted to listen.”

We pause for a bit, having nothing much else to add. As we look at the house it occurs to me that this information isn’t exactly important and I try to remember why I asked them to take me on this tour. But still we look, me at a house I’ve never seen before and barring some strange circumstance won’t ever see again, them at a house that cradled the thing that they now dedicate most of their lives to; the place their band lived in after they lived in another house and before they lived in two more houses; before they almost finished their first EP; before they lit up the live circuit in Perth and were welcomed warmly; before they were asked to tour the country with Camera Obscura and joined Popfrenzy’s roster; and before they planned to release their first, long-in-the-making album later in the year. The pause continues, slightly heavier than before, while I realise that this information is important.

“Do you need a ride home?” Phirkettle-Watts eventually asks me.

Hecht was born in south Ohio but grew up Cleveland. Middle America lacks the gritty urban intelligence of the east coast and the glitzy creativity of the west coast, and while Hecht admits that his town alternated between tourist mecca in the summer and shit boring in the winter, he says it wasn’t entirely dull.

“Cleveland’s had a bit of a renaissance of late,” he says. “The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is there now, it’s considered the home of rock & roll. When I was growing up it was a real industrial town, you might have heard about the river catching fire because of all the pollution, the Cuyahoga, but it’s been really renewed. The town I lived in has one of the best amusement parks in the world, but there’s nothing to do in the wintertime whatsoever.”

Coming from a musical home where his mother taught piano, Hecht received music lessons from an early age, being tutored in piano and guitar from primary through to high school. Cleveland wasn’t a cultural hole and Hecht wasn’t picked on for his artistic side, but he did march to the beat of his own drum.

“I fit in in general,” he says. “I was a bit strange because in America we really do have those divisions like you see in the American Pie movies, the jocks and the geeks. Not too many people in middle America were into the Smiths and the Stone Roses. I got along with everyone, but I definitely was an individual.”

His music education wasn’t limited to what his teachers taught. Not only did he travel once a month to import record stores in Cleveland to blow a month’s pay from a shitty after-school job on a stack of CDs and the latest NME and Select magazines, he taught himself to play a wide and unusual array of instruments and made his own home recordings. His early experiments with music were Cure- and Ride-influenced drones, bedroom cassette deck multi-tracks of reverb-drenched, 12-minute barely-there songs.

“I tried to get my hands on as many instruments as I could and try out the combinations they made,” he says. “It sounds really super cliché but [it was influenced by] getting Pet Sounds and things like that, hearing instruments that sounded like one instrument but finding out that they were two instruments that, if you put them together, make a completely new noise. I taught myself bagpipes, played saxophone for a while, brass as well.”

He attributes his music discovery, among other things, to his short attention and his yen for exploration. Here’s where the funny story about his long distance relationship with Archer comes in.

“I met her in my final year of high school,” Hecht says. “She was an exchange student living a couple towns over, I knew her through mutual friends. She left America a few weeks after I graduated high school. Then I basically went into the air force for four years.”

All that mental work you did not to link Hecht with the military-industrial complex just because he’s American, and it turns out he was in the air force for four years! Hecht was stationed in Panama, followed by an Icelandic NATO base for two years each. He didn’t fly planes, didn’t kill people. He played CDs.

“There was a marine recruiter one day who wouldn’t take no for an answer so I went in and talked to him, said there’s no fuckin’ way I’m doing this, but, I do like the sound of getting out of here and living overseas so I’ll see what else is on offer, never really seriously considering it. Then I spoke to the air force people, I got a guaranteed job as a broadcaster, kind of like Good Morning Vietnam, guaranteed that I wouldn’t be killing anyone, guaranteed overseas assignment.”

The air force was a mixed blessing for Hecht. It satiated his wanderlust and provided him some technological skill in sound and recording, but after 18 months the novelty of living overseas wore off and the obvious shortfalls of being a soldier took over.

“As much as I wasn’t an outcast in high school, I was definitely an outcast in the military,” he says. “I mean 20 per cent of the people are really cool and intelligent, but 80 per cent of the people you’d run into are your stereotypical flag waving, commercial country listeners.”

He struggles to find many positives to take away from his service. The lessons he learned were few and perfunctory.

“Um… don’t sign up to something for four years that you can’t get out of… If someone tells you they’ll do something there’s a 50 per cent chance they’ll do it… It’s strange, as much as people come out of the military brainwashed, I think I came out with my sense of self and identity more established and stronger than it’d ever been in my life. I adapted to the games you have to play in that situation but I never wasn’t myself.”

It’s a rare rainy February day in Perth while we talk over a few beers at the Scotsman, Phirkettle-Watts’ local. Hecht stares out at the rain and says he loves the cold and rainy weather, while barflies mutter indignantly about the sudden break from summer’s routine. I’ve known Hecht as an acquaintance for something like two years, even been to a couple of parties at his house, but had no inkling whatsoever that he had been a military man. The conversation about his air force career is brief and over before I have time to fully come to grips with it.

“I didn’t know you were in the air force,” I say. “Is that common knowledge?”

“It’s not something I’m ashamed of,” he says. “People ask me if I flew planes and sometimes I’ll just be like, ‘Yeah yeah’. But at that time, as much as any government makes its mistakes, this was all pre-Bush and it wasn’t quite as crazy as it is now. I think I got out of there just in time. Give it a few years down the track and God knows what would have happened. I probably would’ve run away to Canada.”

I turn off the recorder to ask him some off topic questions about Australians writing off Americans as idiotic, TV-consuming patriots. Hecht, very firmly, turns it back on. He begins reciting some internal script that he’s seemingly been practicing for long before today.

“I find that most people who haven’t been to America voice the strongest opinions about it. They can’t separate the government from the people. I find that some of my most gung-ho anti-American friends have gone to America and absolutely loved it. We have a friend who spouts CIA conspiracy theories left and right, he’s just gone to America and he doesn’t want to leave. I think people really need to go somewhere before they pass judgment on a place and its people. Government, that’s another thing, but Australia’s got its own problems there as well.”

After producing TV shows in Panama and jockeying Super Furry Animals in Iceland, Hecht quit the air force, went home, saved some money and came to Australia. After teaming up with Phirkettle-Watts and playing a few gigs as a three-piece, then a four-piece, his songwriting ambition for the band started growing. Once Ash Blakeney moved from drums to guitar and local music writer Chris Havecroft picked up the sticks they began to resemble the cinematic sound that now typifies the band.

“I think the songs in the beginning were extremely basic,” Hecht says. “I started off the band with visions of having the numbers it does today, but at that point we had to strip it way back. The ideas were still there but I think it was inevitable that the population of the band was going to explode. Each little piece that was added to the puzzle made me hungrier to reach for that big sound I had in my head.”

That sound is a stately and graceful celestial arm of melody. While the Bank Holidays, who Institut Polaire share a 7-inch with and have been on many of the same line-ups as, pack in a lot of hooks and are heavily structured, Institut Polaire’s MO is to create a wall of sound, rich with intersecting parts. At any point the lead may be taken by violinist Cath Colvin, trumpeter Elliott Brannen, or guitarists Hecht and Ben Blakeney, while Sam Wass on acoustic guitar, Phirkettle-Watts on bass and drummer Stuart Loasby beef up the chord progressions. Through a bad PA a lot of the subtleties are lost but the basic structure of the songs keeps them trucking, but through a good PA it’s The Wizard of Oz. The body can feel the delicate bumps of the in-and-out trumpet, the gentle bulge of the melody-making guitars and the tickling tip of the harmonies. When as one the musicians shift up a key the effect is a transcendental movement felt through the entirety of the listener’s being.

“I am a fan of having things come out of left field and slap you in the face,” Hecht says. “I think different songs have both [subtle and obvious] elements. A song like ‘City Walls and Empires’ may have subtle swells, then there’s songs like ‘Winds That Shook’ where people are enjoying what they hear at the beginning then it kicks in out of nowhere. I’d like to think we had the ability to do both things.”

After a couple of hours of conversation we walk to Phirkettle-Watts’ house in suburban Mount Lawley, a few dozen metres up the road from a lawn bowls club. From here we’ll start the drive around the sleepy, leafy northern suburbs of Perth on the rehearsal space tour. While Hecht puts on the latest mix of their most finished song from the upcoming EP, Phirkettle-Watts visits his bathroom and I look around to see what he’s got on his shelves: Fargo, The Making of Doctor Who, The Science of Superheroes, a deck of Magic: The Gathering cards, an Altered Beast PC game box. A lot of CDs, a lot of DVDs, a lot of nerdy shit. I’m not yet fully listening to the music when Hecht tells me, “These are all really, really, really rough mixes.” He seems to feel physically sick while giving me this preview. He doesn’t stop pacing and walks in and out of the room half a dozen times while it plays.

He needn’t worry – the song sounds great. It’s unassuming at first but that tendency for an Institut Polaire song to let its hair down and become suddenly sexy is unavoidably present. An unfamiliar and soulful girl’s voice harmonises with Hecht’s vocal lead and he tells me it belongs to the newest addition to the band, acoustic guitarist Wass, who has never played in a band before. The quality of the track makes me lament that, with their Popfrenzy signing, the Camera Obscura tour support and Hecht’s admitted inability to stay in one place forever, it seems unlikely that this band will stay in Perth for too long. It makes me wish I could convince Hecht to stay right here where I can keep an eye on him. But he doesn’t seem the kind to stay.

“If you sit down and look at the lyrics a lot of the songs are about isolation,” he tells me back at the pub, “and not belonging to a time and feeling gypped that I was born in the year I was born. I would much prefer to be in Europe in the ’50s or something like that. Most of them are about not feeling like you belong where you’re at. They’re kind of coping and escapist.”

What do you mean?

“The world in the ’50s. It was a much simpler place, everything was prettier… I’ve got a real nasty aesthetic streak in me. I don’t gel well with this urban decay, sort of, fuckin’, graffiti tags on every fuckin’ post box sort of thing. I prefer some idyllic scene from the ’50s with picture perfect everything.”

You don’t you think that’s more of an idea than the reality of how things were?

“Oh, of course it was, of course they had the same kind of problems, I’m sure. It’s very much an ideal and it’s very much escapist and I think that represents a large part of how I think. If you took a look at my movie collection you’d see that I don’t care much for things that represent the modern world.”

It makes a sad sort of sense that while he’s in it, he refuses to sit still. But if this is the music he makes while he’s on the move, it seems worth the mercury.

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