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Splashed across glossy-paged tabloid magazines (with their legs wide open, of course), trashy socialites like Paris Hilton have lent the word “princess” a bit of a dirty reputation in the past decade by adopting the label in a wild attempt to explain their arrogant behaviour.
But rewind back to your childhood, and think of the captivating tales of wizards and dragons, and knights rescuing princesses and all sorts of vivid tales of bravery. Though Melbourne duo Princess One Point Five’s name may come from the meaning of front woman SJ Wentzki’s moniker (Sarah means a woman of high rank, or “princess” in Hebrew), but their music is so magical that the shoe fits either way.
Princess One Point Five – known on paper as P1.5 – is a delightful musical pairing between SJ and her partner-in-crime Richard Andrew (Underground Lovers, Crow, Registered Nurse), and the pair are often joined by equally talented musicians over various instruments like Ben Grounds (Bluebottle Kiss), Libby Chow (Clare Bowditch and the Feeding Set) and Jed Palmer (Hope Diamond). The result of all this talent on one stage at the same time is pop music that gives out with a feisty punch and a cabaret snarl, swirled together with some heavy rock influences.
Paper-Deer had a date to chat to the lovely SJ Wentzki about collaborating, the irony of being featured on an anti-smoking campaign and choosing her musical family.
Paper-Deer has seen P1.5 been described as your sole brain-child and a solo project, whereas others have called it a marriage between you and Richard Andrew’s talents. For the record, which is it?
It started out solo, but when I started writing for a band, P1.5 just sort of expanded out. I’ve been working with Richard for some time, but he’s progressively taken over! Just kidding. For the record, he “produces” and I write. Somewhere in between, with a lot of stops along the way is the “band”. With this album we were a lot more collaborative with song writing and production, but our roles have pretty much stayed the same. The thing is that it’s always evolving, and really hard to pin down to one definition. It’s reflective of how indecisive I am, and who knows what it’ll be next.
How do the two of you choose who will join you for a particular recording or live show?
The short version is that it’s always been fairly organic. We’ve worked with many different people between us (Rich and I) and so it was pretty natural to just get those people in to record, when, for example, we need someone to play strings…since neither of us can. On a lot of our tours we’ve randomly sort of found people on the road to play shows (not literally “on” the road, but you know what I mean), which is bit European of us, really. Mostly that would be friends we’ve met or made along the way have some skill or other that we need (usually bass).
It’s part and parcel of being an independent musician. Most of the people you meet are other musicians, usually willing to jump up on stage and lend you a patch of the carpet to sleep on. It all depends on the show too – sometimes it’s a lot of fun to play as a two piece, and other times it’s much better to play as a “band”. P1.5 isn’t terribly prescriptive these days, and it’s more fun in a frightening kind of way to play it by ear and see what happens.
The P1.5 biography almost seems like it should be spread out over 20 years. Impressive prizes and nominations like the Australian Music Prize and the Noise/Qantas Spirit of Youth Award, plus impressive support slots and Triple J rotation. What’s your next big goal?
Getting our asses the hell overseas to tour, writing a top 40 cheesy hit, retiring on the royalties. Not necessarily in that order… Some of that may or may not be true.
Your most recent album, What Doesn’t Kill You, has received all sorts of praise and more thumbs up than we can count. Does the title stem from the phrase “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?”
Yes and no. It was an odd and sometimes difficult, time during the writing of this album – for so many reasons – but also liberating and quite inspiring. The title is really more along the lines of “what doesn’t kill you can fuck right off.” Success is relative and I think that writing this album was my way of figuring that out so that I could avoid being a complete sociopath… at least most of the time.
What’s your favourite track from What Doesn’t Kill You?
What Do You Know. It says a lot about my fascination with perception versus reality. You can never really see inside someone’s heart and so often, the face they’re showing is not their real one.
Reading reviews from the album, it seems that everyone has a different favourite song. How did you decide to give Today the honour of being a single?
Without being egotistical about this, I actually really love every song on the album for different reasons, and I think it’s the strongest suite of songs we’ve ever done as Princess One Point Five. It’s also really diverse stylistically, which is why different people take different things from each song. I initially thought that Quote Me should be the first single. Mostly because I was being a bit of an angry shit head… but when we’d finished recording Today it was a no brainer, and said more about how nonsensical everything is, ya know? Today was the best song to represent the feel of the album: catchy but bittersweet, sad but hopeful.
Define weird. The weirdest thing was that my boss at my day job told me about one of our songs being played at the Superbowl in America. The sync itself wasn’t weird. The antismoking campaign in America and Canada was ironic, but not really weird… I think what would be really weird is if we had something on the footy show… nope, that’d just be funny.
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By Paige X. Cho 
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