It’s been a huge few years for Kingswood. Their Hometowns Tour made headlines, 2023’s The Tale of GC Townes got the boys their first Golden Guitar Award nomination, and they’ve played to sold-out crowds across the country.
The group have truly made their mark in the fabric of the industry.
But don’t fret, as 2025 is set to be another massive year for the four-piece as they wander into the world of film, with documentary CLAPTRAP about to hit our screens.
This feature appears is the April edition of Forte’s print magazine – check it out here!
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“It’s [CLAPTRAP] been in the works for a while,” vocalist Fergus Linacre notes. “It was made in the first half of 2023 so it’s nice that it’s finally getting out and people can see it.”
CLAPTRAP came to life during Kingwood’s mammoth 112-date Hometowns Tour, where they were joined by 23-year-old filmmaker Darcy Newton. Linacre revealed how the group came to bring Newton on the road.
“We wanted to have a social media expert on the road, and we presented the idea to our publicist at the time to see if she knew anyone.
“She was like, “there’s this kid who I used to babysit, he works at Mushroom, and he studied film.
“He came on tour with us for six months, stayed on the bus, had his own little bunk, and eventually it was as if, he was just behind the camera, and when he was rolling, we didn’t really think that he was he was there, it all became quite natural.”
The documentary comes to life with an interesting point of view and unique idea; Linacre says the band didn’t want it to come across like an in-house documentary that can sometimes be a little bit contrived.
“It’s not the most accurate telling of the whole tour, but that’s okay, that would be impossible,” he says.
“I had to sort of take an angle and from the get-go we gave Darcy, the director, the reins, to make his own film.
“We realized that if we were too involved and trying to push it in a certain direction, that it would kind of become a documentary that’s one of those that is made by the artist, where the artist oversees it, and they kind of just puff pieces.”
Newton found an interesting approach highlighting the mindset of a band on tour, an element that doesn’t make its way into too many music documentaries.
“He’s made a really interesting look into the psychology of being on the road for that long and diving a little bit into everyone’s lives and personality,” says Linacre.
With the movie space jam-packed with interesting and unique ways of storytelling, guitarist Alex Laksa spoke on what the band looked at for inspiration for CLAPTRAP.
“We kept referencing Dead Man (1995, Johnny Depp). It’s scored by Neil Young, and a lot of the energy that you would find in like a psych Western, or an acid Western, It’s encapsulating that same feeling in a way psychologically. But it is not at all what that is.”
Kingswood and Newton looked at Dead Man to try and establish the unsettling nature of filmmaking.
“Dead Man was heavily spoken about in the tone, I think Darcy and the editing team have achieved whatever is unsettling in a positive way, and you experience in that film,” says Laksa.
“For us, at least, it’s unsettling in a positive way from judging from the way people reacted to it, I don’t think they found it unsettling.
“It’s probably because we’re perceiving ourselves in a petri dish, and then having to face our own realities as documented forever, which is why it’s probably more unsettling for us.”
Besides the documentary, 2025 is a great year to be a Kingswood fan, the pair note there’s some new music on the way.
“We’re gonna be dropping a song very shortly, it’s actually going to be a Tom Petty cover,” Laksa shares.
CLAPTRAP is making its way across the country, kicking off Friday 4 April at Melbourne’s Astor Theatre, before hitting Geelong’s Pivotonian Cinema on 6 April, with a Q&A session, before making its way across Australia throughout the month of April.
