DMA's guitarist and his brother are ready for the Biig Time with their debut UK tour and 200K album launch

That’s not to say the act, comprised of brothers Johnny and Matthew Took, will be fresh off the boat, so to speak. Johnny is guitarist for the successful rock band DMA’s (their last two albums went top five in the UK), while Matthew has also toured internationally with his band Planet.

Talking with The News over a Zoom call from his home in Wollongong, about an hour south of Sydney, Matthew is laid-back, engaging company.

“Yeah, it’ll be our first run of shows, not even in Australia. I didn't even think about that, actually,” he laughs.

Biig Time released their debut single, It’s You, in 2020, but there were never any long-term plans for the project – it was just the brothers messing around with something fun.

“We had no real intention of playing live or doing anything. We just wanted to get something out. So we did that then. We didn't even do a run of shows or anything outside of that. We just went, oh, video clip, single... and that was it. “John was definitely busy with all DMA’s stuff and I was doing lots of Planet stuff at that time as well.”

Biig Time was brought out of suspended animation when Matthew returned to Australia following a six month stint of living in Liverpool. With Planet also on hold he set up camp in Melbourne – where his brother was now also living.

“I ended up coming back home and chilling for a bit and I hadn't recorded or written much music in a while.

“But when I moved to Melbourne I started writing heaps and heaps and heaps.”

"We have a studio that was set up there as well, so we had this studio, we had heaps of songs, we had some time on our hands, and we're like, all right, do you want to write an album?"

Over a series of weekends, the pair would get together and work on it.

“It was a refreshing way of doing it, instead of just being in a room for a month straight and just writing and recording,” explains Matthew. “Every Saturday and Sunday, we’d just chill, have a couple of beers and tick off some boxes for the album!”

Both of them brought songs to the table for the album.

“It was pretty much just songs that were in the vault. We didn't really write anything specifically for this album – it was just all the songs that didn't really work for Planet or DMA’s. But we put them together, tweaked them together and then re-recorded and did all that.”

The album’s insanely catchy lead single, Bigger Than Nothing, is representative of the rest of its tracks, says Matthew.

"It’s heaps and heaps of pumpy songs, which is good. Lots of fast stuff, which is sort of nostalgic in the way of bringing it back to our roots. It was like pretty much every song was real crazy and a bit riff heavy, and summery as well. Which is really fun. The majority of the songs are like that, but there's a couple of ballads in there as well….”

And the album’s name, 200K, comes from their old covers act when they first started playing together.

“It was pretty much just going to the local pub, playing for three hours, learning songs. We were doing it pretty regularly, like three or four nights a week for a while, which was cool.

“We played under the name 200K, so that's why we decided to call the album that. There’s no meaning at all it it, it just sort of looks like ‘Took’, our last name. That's about it!”

While brothers working in bands have a notoriously chequered history, Matthew insists he and John (the elder by four years) get along just fine.

“It's great, he's super chill. We're quite similar, but very different in lots of ways, and I think that moulds really well. But we've been good mates even as soon as we left school, we've always been pretty close, which has been great. No biffs, it's pretty good.”

"Yeah, fingers crossed,” he laughs, “nothing like a good UK tour to really shake things up...”

They play The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea, on Thursday, May 22, and will also be doing a meet and greet/signing session at Pie and Vinyl, Southsea, the same day at 1pm.

Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.