British India are heading out on a Farewell Tour
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British India are heading out on a Farewell Tour

Eleven years since the release of their debut album, Guillotine, it’s been a love of music and a driving determination that has been the key ingredient to the success of four budding musicians of British India. The band’s creativity certainly flourished since their hay day of 2007, taking bold moves to represent their identity as a band and saw them to go on and release six albums, including their 2017 recent release Forgetting The Future, which truly represents the evolution of British India as a band, delving down a pathway of raw emotion in its most honest form.
Now the band are evolving again, but this time it comes from guitarist and founding member Nic Wilson who has announced he will retire from music at the end of this year, finishing up with one final tour – the Nic The Poet farewell tour – spanning 24 dates across Australia.
“It’s all happening, but I think we all feel good,” reveals drummer Matt O’Gorman. “It’s a shock when you actually hear it but I don’t think it was much of a surprise. Nic’s recently married and he’s started a business with his now wife and that’s going gangbusters. Definitely writing and recording wise he absolutely loved it; but the touring is too hard. It’s too hard to work a 50-hour week and then get on a flight to Cairns and then get back at midnight on Sunday and then wake up and go to work.”
In a statement, Wilson thanked the band’s fans and revealed he has other things he wants to try his hand at, as the time had come to say goodbye to the band who have notched up eight entries into the Hottest 100, released six albums, played every major festival in Australia and have headlined over 700 shows since their beginning. Despite the sadness, the boys are excited to celebrate Wilson’s awesome career and plan to send him off in style with one final tour with their best mate.
“A lot of bands, when they lose members, it can be so sudden and it can end badly, but this is the best of both worlds. He’s still our best mate, we still love him, and we’re still lucky enough to do one more tour with him,” O’Gorman smiles. “We’re going to really send him off; he’s going to hate music by the end of it. He’ll never pick up a guitar again. It’s like you want to leave, we’re going to make you hate it,” he laughs.


With one final tour to go for Wilson, does this mark the end of British India?
“As far as post this tour, we haven’t really decided yet,” he continues. “We’re just doing this tour, and then we’ll probably take a couple of months off I guess and just kind of figure out what way to go from there… It’s really weird, I know. Everyone’s just kind of putting it to the back of their minds, so it’s weird. We finish touring at the end of January so there’s no real rush to decide and we’ll have a fair idea though during this last tour whether we want to. It’ll either be god it’s not the same and everyone’s over it, or it’ll be like ‘Oh well that was really fun, we want to keep doing it’.”
With more than a decade spent in the closest of confines, and a solid reputation for their explosive live shows, O’Gorman admits that it’s the little things they’ll miss the most upon Wilson’s departure.
“The gigs and the festivals are obviously awesome, but I think what we will miss are the car trips in-between gigs; that’s where a lot of the funny stuff happens. It’s all the in-between stuff we’ll really miss because we’re just so used to it and we are all so close. Usually, you’ll be going a six-hour drive and will just want to be home watching TV and chilling out, but this time it will be a different mind frame. Everyone will be thinking, ‘this is the last time we’re doing this’. It will be weird not to have that again going forward if we do decide to do that.”
Expect the unexpected; this will be the last chance to see the original British India line up on stage.
When & Where: Tap House, Bendigo – November 30 & The Barwon Club, Geelong – December 1
Photo by Kane Hibberd