No Putting This Operator On Hold.

What does it take to write the perfect pop song?

Selfishness? Fearlessness? Hard-work? Talent? May be just plain luck? Sit down with Operator Please front-woman, Amandah Wilkinson, and you’ll discover that it takes a little bit of all of these things and a lot more on top

While we’re at home updating our Facebook statuses or glued to the season finale of Masterchef, she is meticulously mastering her craft. This relentless songwriter eats, breathes and sleeps music and her band’s success is primarily attuned to this. Chilling out after pretty much four straight years of touring and making hits, Wilkinson is twitching from anxiety, caused by the fear of getting a little too comfortable.

"A break?" she laughs, nervously. "Yeah I’ll have an hour after this interview and then I’ll get back on the guitar."

Wilkinson didn’t take any chances on the band’s difficult follow-up to their pop smash Yes Yes Vindictive. The 22-year-old putting it upon herself to shun big-name offers and single-handedly produce the pulsating, glittery pop of Gloves. "I had about ten nervous breakdowns," admits Wilkinson. "When it was all over I’m not going to lie, I cried when I got a copy of it in my hand. It was just such an intense kind of recording session and we never really got a chance to step back and appreciate what we were doing. We were living and breathing inside the record."

So much more than a bunch of kids who wrote a snappy song about an obscure Olympic sport, Operator Please have recently undergone a tumultuous stylistic and musical change. This transformation is showcased on Gloves, an album, which Wilkinson herself admits being a more grown up affair.

"Everybody keeps using the M word ‘mature’," she says. "I see it as a natural progression, we started this band as teenagers and we’ve grown into young adulthood, we were on tour together for three and a half years living in each others pockets and that kind of forced us to become better people. We got to go out and see the world and this helped us grow into the people we are now. I just see the record as a representation of who we are now, of the band we are now. "

The recording of Gloves went down sporadically between Wilkinson’s instrument-clogged lounge room and a quaint abandoned studio in the hills of Northern New South Wales. The reason for these budget-recording options was due to Wilkinson’s perfectionism, a trait, which is scrupulously poured into each second of the record.

"I guess making your second record and producing it yourself it is always going to take a lot longer because you want to have things exactly the way you want them," she says. "I was such a perfectionist on the making of this record, I would spend hours honing in on single things and as you know time is money. I think that with the music industry these days you’ve got to make your record the best and most efficient way possible whilst maintaining a strict budget so that what you’re putting out is just creatively good."

For Wilkinson each of her band’s songs is a finely tuned and integral aspect of their success. In the songwriting process parts and ideas are carefully taken apart and glued back together until the hit machine that is Operator Please is fully functional.

"I think the key thing about Operator Please is that it is always about the songs," explains Wilkinson "I have never really thought that we had a particular sound, for me it was always about what sort of songs I could write and about bettering myself as a songwriter rather than worrying too much about the aesthetic of everything. I think in music there is so much emphasis on aesthetic and genre, when really the underlying thing is always the quality of the songwriting."

The pop sensibility at the heart of her songs is really what Wilkinson prides herself upon. Despite the ‘indie’ pretext her band has been given, there is an engrained love for pop artists, which comes out in the luscious melodies of the new synth-swept tracks. "I’ve never thought of us as an indie band in the first place, we’ve always had that pop side to us because when I’m writing it is a natural instinct for me to go for a pop formula rather than what is underground."

This pop formula is perhaps what gets under the skin the most about Operator Please’s contagious tunes. There is a however, a difficult knack to writing the type of songs that make you want to quit you’re day job and become a professional ping pong player. Wilkinson believes this art lies in song structure, a craft she has been slowly mastering over the last few years. "I think structure plays a big part, you have to be able to introduce things and reintroduce things properly," explains Wilkinson. "In terms of going about things when we are writing it’s more about having a couple of key elements, which are highlighted and supported by the rest of your instrumentation, when we were writing Gloves it was really about having the vocal melody at the front."

Another facet of writing that elusive ‘chart-topper’ comes down to an aspect of song-craft, which Wilkinson has only recently become accustomed to. Like Lennon before McCartney and Jagger before Richards this young writer believed her songs were good enough to make it on their own, shunning any input from her band mates. However, just as her notable forefathers discovered, finding that magical songwriting spark with a collaborator can mean the difference between a hit, and a classic. It was drummer Tim Commandeur who came to the fore as Wilkinson’s partner-in-crime, putting the final piece of the hit-producing puzzle, into place.

"I’m not going to lie I used to be a really selfish songwriter and I did not take onboard anybody else’s ideas and stuff," admits Wilkinson. "But once Tim and I started writing together it was liberating, it was amazing. He is really skilled with melody, he is just a really talented person and ever since we started writing together it has just worked out to be a really good team, we really get each other" "I always look at it like Tim is the nice one and I am the mean one, when we’re writing we find that I always have the dirty melody where as he has always got the really beautiful melodies."

As the Operator Please whirlwind world tour begins to flair up once more, Wilkinson is attempting to expand her arsenal of hits in a different way. Together with Commandeur she has taken the thrifty step of co-writing and working with new and established pop artists. This enlivening experience ensures we will continue to see Operator Please’s brand of pop stamped over the charts for a long time to come.

"I think there is a lot of songs that Tim and I write that we would never use for Operator Please, songs I would never sing myself," she says.

"I’d rather not say who we are working with, but it is very exciting."

Operator Please open for Powderfinger at the Gold Coast Convention Centre, Friday 3 September and Riverstage, Saturday 4 September.

By Nolan Giles

ENDS