theaussieword.com meets with Giring, Oh and Andro from NIDJI in this exclusive interview!
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1. What can you tell our readers about you? How and where did it all begin? It all began at Andro’s mini studio. We are all high school and college buddies. We started writing our own stuff far before our first gig. We started doing cover versions of The Cure, New Order, Coldplay, Keane and The Killers. A talent scout found us and arranged us to play regularly at one of the biggest malls in Jakarta. For six months we played there and one night a famous music producer/label owner of the biggest recording company spotted us while we were performing. It’s like in the movies. We signed a record deal with them and the rest is history.
2.What had you first interested in music? For the six of us music is like our basic need in life, and Nidji is the best thing that ever happened in our life. We get to go all around the world and do the only thing we love, performing live.
3. Who motivates or influences your quest to make great music? We motivate ourselves to make good music, when we play music together, we feel like we’re making some kind of magic. And for us – great music is when we create honest songs.
4.Do you have any planned tours coming up? Early next year we will be doing our first Australian tour and will then go directly to the UK to perform there. Maybe after that we will plan to do our first Southeast Asia tour, that’s my targets. hahaha
5. What are some of your biggest goals you hope to accomplish as an artist? There is only one goal for us as artists and musicians. To play what we have written and create music for the rest of our lives. Rock’n’rollin’ till we are old!
6. What can fans expect from you in the coming months? 2013 is going to be a great year for us. As we mentioned before, we will be in Australia sometime in February doing our first Australian tour. Nidji will also have our own variety show in one of the biggest TV stations in Indonesia. And Giring will also participate in the Indonesian version of one of the biggest talent searches on TV right now, The Voice.
7.Success, what is the secret to it and what has been your biggest career highlight so far? We think that we’re not even close to success, but we are really grateful for all the things that we’ve already accomplished. We think there are a lot of highlights in our career – won a lot of awards, played more than 500 times all across the globe, traveled across borders and met a lot of great new friends. But for us the definition of success is simple, when someone come to us and says that our songs had become the soundtrack to their life, I think that really makes us the happiest artists in the world.
8.Which stars of the music industry do you find inspiring? I think U2 is very inspiring. From their work, songs, performance, management and social aspects.
9.How would you best describe you and your music to your fans? I think only people and our fans can describe who we are and our music. For us, we are still college buddies that love to play music together.
10.What can you tell us about your latest album? So far Victory is our most liberating album, we had a great time making it. Produced by our Indonesian Producer and our international producer Steve James. Our recording sessions took place in Melbourne, and Melbourne is so inspiring. In the making of Liberty and Victory, Nidji rented a villa in the highland of West Java. We spent a week to work new material and let go all of our ego. Liberty Victory is a democracy album where we give all the best ideas and respect to every single idea that came up – because at that time the band almost broke up. We passed that moment and cast away all of our past mistakes. That’s why the album is all about us fighting our ego and star syndrome.
11.Are there any new exciting projects in the works? We are now close to releasing four new songs for a famous novel-based movie called 5cm. It’s a very famous novel about 5 best friends who decide to climb the highest mountain in Java.
12.The music industry is huge, where do you see yourself a few years from now? Nidji is more than a band now. We are a brand. People love us and hate us. We don’t care at all. What we care is to be do the best we can and it’s what we love. Play music. And with the digital world we surely can be heard all across the globe. We just released our new single called Liberty Victory and we made the music video collaborate with Manchester United team and Mister Potato. The video hit 250.000 views in 7 days and a lot of comments about people loving it, and there are a lot of haters that came from all over the planet too! We don’t care because the haters saw the video and now they know there is a rock band from Indonesia named Nidji 🙂 It’s part of our branding. For our Indonesian fans, this is also their victory.
13.Name a few of your favorite Aussie artists. There are a lot: The Bee Gees, Natalie Imbruglia, and of course my favorite, Nicole Kidman. hehehehe. Oh Baz Luhrmann is also an inspiring director.
14.The shape of the music industry has changed significantly over the years, including the use of social media, how do you feel about the industry as a whole and what does it mean to you in getting your records out into the public eye? The social media opens a lot of opportunities for everyone, especially for musicians. Now Nidji can be connected to our fans across the globe and it can be used to promote everything about us. The challenge is to create something that is relevant and memorable to every ear in the world. And that is not an easy task for us who don’t speak English as our main language. If people don’t connect with us in our first attempt to go international, we won’t stop. We are going to struggle over and over again. About the industry we predict that the future of music will be more community-based. The internet lets us discover songs that we love and like and also the freedom to choose what we want to hear.
Thank you for the interview! What can you leave fans of theaussieword.comwith here today? Please do listen to our music and continue to support us by requesting our song on the Australian radio stations. And thank you to The Aussie Word and readers for giving us the chance to be heard in this interview. And we hope to see you guys very soon on our first Australian tour.