Lime Cordiale

From rocking festival stages to pushing for climate action, Lime Cordiale are doing more than simply writing Aussie summer anthems. Teen Spirit caught up with guitarist Oli Leimbach to chat their climate-focused festival, early band days and advice for emerging artists.

Words Millah Hansberry // Image Oliver Begg

Starting out as a DIY band project formed by teen brothers in the Northern Beaches of Sydney, Lime Cordiale strummed their way into being one of Australia’s most beloved surf-rock duos. Their values on this planet are clear; create hooky feel-good tunes like ‘Robbery’ and ‘Temper Temper’, and look after planet earth through initiatives like their brand-new climate action music festival Lime Green.

Lime Cordiale launched Lime Green in April. What inspired you to create the festival with such a focus on sustainability?

We’ve been trying to bring down our carbon emissions and do good things for the environment with all of our touring for quite a few years now. We've found that after booking a show or a festival, it's too hard to convince the festival to switch to a battery when it's not your festival. They often don't know anything about it, so are scared of blowing up their PA system or lights or something. Then the only things that we can really do is donate money or try and get an electric car every now and then. So, we were like, “okay, we need to do it ourselves, create a case study so we can show that you can run a festival on a battery.” It's been done on smaller scales, but never to this extent. We’re pretty excited to be the guinea pigs.

Could you talk us through how you’re making this festival as green as possible?

The main thing is that it’ll be battery powered; the first big event that we know of in Australia that's doing this. Quite often you see festivals that leave behind apocalyptic scenes: cheap tents left behind blowing around, rubbish everywhere, there's no sort of recycling. That's not what we’re going to do.

One of the biggest emissions is people's travel. We're going to drive there in electric vans from Sydney and recommend people find alternate ways to the festival like busses or trains. It’ll be an adventure!

The Conservation Foundation Australia is one of our big supporters as well, we've got Adam Bandt who’s their CEO, and used to be the Greens [political party] leader. He's doing a DJ set, so that'll be mad.

We’ve also got FEAT. on board who we’ve been working with for years, putting a dollar from everyone's ticket sales from Australian shows towards some sort of climate initiative. We hone in on one area and choose what we want to do each tour; we've planted rainforest trees up around the Byron area, we’ve put money towards converting a bus to biodiesel in Europe, we’ve supported surfers for climate. This one will be towards the algal bloom in South Australia.

Are you looking to do more green festivals like this in the future?

Yeah, totally. We’re using it as an example to be able to put these shows on anywhere. We want to put it on every year, but we also want to evolve with the technology. This one's battery powered, but maybe next year, we’ll do one fuelled by green hydrogen or something in the renewable tech space that's just constantly evolving. We want to constantly change and evolve with it. 

Lime Cordiale was formed by you and your brother Louis as teens. What made you decide to start a band with your little bro?

I had bands in high school that would just break up because the bass player or something decided he didn’t want to do it anymore. I just got sick of other people and I was like, “all right, well, Louis is a good singer and he started playing bass. So, I'll start one with him. He can't break away from me because we're tied by blood haha.” It was kind of me forcing him into it a bit. He wasn't really into the idea at first, he was so shy, but once he'd played one or two, then he was hooked.

What’s it like working with your brother every day?

It's good. We're weirdly, crazily close, you know? I've got to give him a little bit of time away from me every now and then though, I'm the bossy one a little bit haha. Because we play music together, we tour together and then we hang out together all the time, I've got to let him have time away from me sometimes! It's just your classic sibling relationship really, where you get into each other's faces, but it's also really fun.

Early on in your career, you were mentored by Iva Davies, Icehouse’s frontman. If you could step into a mentor role for a young band, what advice would you give them?

I'd say that you really need to just get good at your playing, singing and songwriting. Now with people using AI to craft songs, for anyone in the industry looking at that, it’s not impressing people. What's impressing people right now is the rawness of singing with an acoustic guitar or at the piano or whatever, singing genuinely good songs. People want to see that firsthand. People want to see raw. It's not about the bells and whistles anymore, which is kind of cool and refreshing. You can still record and write a song at home, even if you can’t book any gigs or festivals.

We’ve heard whispers that you're putting finishing touches on your fourth album. Are the rumours true?

They are. The only thing that we're waiting on right now is Louis's vocals. He’s been on vocal rest because we’ve had a hectic year last year, he got sick and he kind of kept losing his voice. So, the only thing that we haven't done on the album is Louis's final vocals. So as soon as he gives us the green light, the album gets finished. Then we can start releasing! So, that'll be exciting.

Will this be marking a new chapter or sound for you?

It's really hard to know from our perspective. I'm always like, “is this good or is this just more of the same?” But then often people go like, “whoa, this is a sick new direction”. I'm very excited to hear what people think.

Listen to Lime Cordiale here. Learn more about the first edition of Lime Green Festival here.