Youth Group

Youth Group are an Australian rock band, formed in Sydney in the late nineties. They have released four albums in Australia, with the three most recent albums also gaining releases worldwide. The founding members of the band are singer Toby Martin and drummer Danny Lee Allen. Guitarist Cameron Emerson-Elliott and bassist Patrick Matthews joined in 2004. Principal songwriter Toby Martin is the grandson of Hungarian-born Australian poet David Martin. Founding bass player Andrew Dymock Cassell retired from bass duties in 2003 to concentrate on being one of three partners in Ivy League Records and Winterman & Goldstein band management, Youth Group's Australian record label and management respectively. He is a relative of Australian Test cricketer Geoff Dymock. Founding guitarist Paul Murphy left the band in 2004 due to creative differences. Cameron Emerson-Elliott played guitar with Sydney punkers John Reed Club in the late 90's and has known Toby since their school days in Canberra when they wrote songs together as The Morris Brothers. Patrick played bass in The Vines before joining Youth Group. Versatile Sydney musician Johnno Lattin (also of La Huva) played bass in the band during the Skeleton Jar period around 2003. Built around the pure vocals of Martin and clean production of Wayne Connolly, the sound of Youth Group is reminiscent of indie rock artists such as Teenage Fanclub, Pavement and Death Cab For Cutie. However it is Martin's insightful and empathetic lyrics which distinguish Youth Group from comparable bands. Able to create vignettes based around the emotional dynamics of his characters, often female, Martin's lyrics are typically unsentimental but rarely unsympathetic. Martin had been the song-writer in Canberra-based band Velveteen in the mid-nineties. He relocated to Sydney in 1996 and Youth Group formed shortly afterward. Their first show was in November 1997 at the Warren View Hotel in the inner Sydney suburb of Enmore. Remarkably, Danny Allen had only been playing drums for a couple of months prior. Their first album Urban and Eastern was released in 2000. While the band always had a dedicated following in the inner cities of Sydney and Melbourne, their career was unremarkable until a series of chance happenings lead Epitaph Records boss Brett Gurewitz to hear their second album, Skeleton Jar in 2004 and release it in the U.S. in 2005. Despite sounding nothing like the California punk that Epitaph is widely known for, the support of a US label was the crucial break that Youth Group needed to find a wider audience. In 2003 the band played at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas and performed on 4 dates with The Vines and The Music on a US West Coast tour. But it was a chance to support Death Cab for Cutie in 2005 on a coast to coast US tour that saw their profile rise most quickly internationally. Their single "Forever Young", a cover of the song by Alphaville, was used in the television show The O.C. and heavily featured in promos for Australian TV station Channel Ten at the beginning of 2006. The song debuted on the Australian charts at no. 2 in March, 2006, and eventually peaked at no.1. It was also no.1 in the first ever digital download chart. During 2006, they supported Coldplay in their sold-out tour of Australia. In July 2006 the band released their third album, Casino Twilight Dogs, which features "Forever Young", along with the album's second single, "Catching and Killing". As of July 24, 2006, Casino Twilight Dogs debuted at no.10 in the ARIA Album Charts They also supported the Kings Of Leon on their 2008 tour of Australia. There is a widely-circulated theory in the music community that the band name Youth Group is a clever twist on the name of the Scottish indie rock band Teenage Fanclub, whom vocalist Toby Martin has cited as a major musical influence during his childhood. Youth Group won a 2006 ARIA award for "Break-Though Single" for "Forever Young".