If you’re born a Xylouris, there’s really only two ways you can go. You either embrace your destiny and pick up a musical instrument, or you reject it out of hand, and do anything but.
For siblings Apollonia, Nikos and Adonis – children of Cretan musical legend George Xylouris and his similarly musical Irish-Australian wife Shelagh Hannan – music won out. Albeit on their own terms.
Since 2016, Nikos, 32, and Adonis, 30, have been playing in Xylourides, performing traditional Cretan music in all-night sessions, in the same vein as their parents’ Xylouris Ensemble (father George also plays with the Dirty Three’s Jim White in the more rock-oriented Xylouris-White).
Apollonia, 27, dabbles in the traditional space too, playing a Persian drum called the tombak and singing. But it is as Frenzee, a high-powered punk-leaning trio that is rapidly developing a following in both Greece (where they played before 20,000 people at an anti-fascist rally in Athens) and Australia (opening at Meredith in December), that the three have found a space to call their own.
George Xylouris and his children Nikos, Apollonia and Adonis in Crete, from the 2015 documentary A Family Affair.Credit: Anemon Productions
“I reckon they definitely inform each other, energy wise,” says Apollonia, who sings and writes most of the lyrics for their blistering rock songs. “It might be a different setting, and a different kind of atmosphere, but the energy is just as raw, I reckon.”
In a packed front bar at the Tote in Collingwood on a ridiculously hot Sunday afternoon, Frenzee are pumping out a steady stream of that energy. There’s no stage, just a small space left by the audience. Apollonia struts around inside, and sometimes outside, this circle, jaw out, head back, as if to say, “I f—ing dare ya”. Nikos pounds the drums and Adonis reels off the riffs on electric guitar, the band’s influences – Rage Against the Machine, AC/DC, Nirvana – immediately apparent.
In 40 minutes, it’s all over.
Dripping in sweat after the set, Apollonia tells me she loves getting in the faces of the crowd. “It’s the best thing,” she says, beaming.
Frenzee is definitely their own thing, free of the considerable shackles of the family legacy (their grandfather is still performing, aged 84; their uncles and cousins are musicians too). “With the Cretan stuff, if you’re named after a certain person, people tend to compare, and we don’t like that,” Nikos says. “We just want to be authentic, no matter what lineage we’re in.”
But they’re not rejecting that heritage at all. Sometimes they’ll play a couple of sets of the traditional music over a few hours, take a break, then come back and blow the roof off as Frenzee. These musical idioms aren’t antithetical, Apollonia says. They’re aspects of the same thing.
Jim White and George Xylouris: Two potent musical personalities.Credit: Lara Bohdanowicz
“We grew up with all these gigs, we saw our dad do 10-hour gigs, the boys are now doing these gigs that last all night – no drugs, just making that very clear; people can’t believe that, right? Maybe a little bit of araki or gin and tonic, that’s about it. I feel that has been pretty hardcore training for them to go and do a punk gig for 40 minutes. It’s sick.”
The Xylouris kids were all born in Melbourne but moved back to their father’s native Crete when they were little (Apollonia was just one). They each came back to Australia separately for the final years of high school and university, and the boys started gigging professionally around 2016.
Frenzee was born during the pandemic when Apollonia moved back to Crete.
“It was quarantine, you couldn’t do anything, and my brothers were living together at the top of the village, looking out over the little mountains,” she recalls. “You’d go up there, and it’s all olive trees, you can see the sea in the distance, the cicadas – that’s the soundtrack in summer there. There’s five dogs running around the place. We set up the basement as a rehearsal space, and the house they were renting had a pool so we were just playing music all day and having a swim, hanging out with the dogs. It was very wholesome.”
It doesn’t sound much like what people might imagine the punk lifestyle to be.
The Xylouris family (plus Jim White) in 2013. Grandfather Psarantonis is at the rear.Credit: Jason South
“It’s very non-punk, to be honest, the setup,” she says. “Out in nature, nothing dirty or grimy about it at all.”
The energy, though, is another matter. The band’s album What’s Wrong with Me, which came out last October, clocks in at just 21 minutes for nine songs.
They’ve got about 24 tracks in the catalogue now, and the sound is evolving, Adonis says. “It’s heavier,” he says. So, not exactly mellowing with age.
Where does the energy come from?
“We always listened to a lot of rock’n’roll growing up,” says Apollonia, putting it down to the influence of her mother, who sang backing vocals with her sisters on Paul Kelly’s From Little Things Big Things Grow. “And I guess growing up between two worlds, there can be good things and bad things.
“Also, as a girl growing up in Crete, it can be pretty tricky at times. You feel a bit of an outsider, by just being female. Patriarchy exists in the whole world, but it’s pretty strong in Crete because it’s a very traditional place still. And it’s affected me, and the boys. So there’s a lot of shit to talk about, a lot of energy to let out, and a lot of shit to be angry about.
“You need an outburst so you don’t go crazy,” she adds. “And I feel since the band, I’ve definitely been a calmer person overall, and so have the boys. It’s been very therapeutic for us.”
Frenzee are touring Australia until March, and play a number of shows with Xylourides, including at the Brunswick Ballroom on January 22.
