Mushroom Music Publishing

The butterfly 9 story starts in suburban Sydney and Queensland, takes in LA's notorious Van Nuys district and ends up on the radio in every car and caf? in Australia. The duo's self-titled debut is a revelation. The songs provide a soundtrack for the post-pub rock generation. If you've ever loved, left, lost, shared a house, played football in the park, got drunk, got dumped, gone to America...you'll swear Suzy Connolly is singing about you.

Suzy spent her childhood in northern Sydney, trying to avoid piano lessons and bragging to her friends that Dad wrote the theme tune to Play School. Richard Connolly is a composer, who counts writing There's A Bear In There amongst his less serious achievements.

Suzy, one of nine Connolly kids, remembers The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel dominating her teenage years. Jazz came courtesy of a musically minded elder brother. 'He played in a jazz-rock fusion band. I used to go to his gigs and get inspired.' So Suzy got the jazz bug, became a huge Billie Holiday fan and went on to sing in clubs about town. 'I never really felt satisfied doing covers, however good they were, so I started writing my own songs on guitar. From then on, I really focused on developing that,' she says. At first, she didn't perform much. 'Back in those days I was painfully shy about singing my songs, but eventually I plucked up some courage, got a band together and started playing gigs.'

Which is where Matt comes in. He was born in Gympie, Queensland into a family of guitar wielding women. His grandma, mother and her three sisters all played guitar, so it's hardly surprising he's handy with a plectrum. 'My father's about as musical as a brick but he always loved listening to records,' he says. That's how Matt discovered The Beatles and James Taylor, and learnt piano and drums before finally succumbing to the Fell family inheritance. 'I used to play drums in my high school rock band, until I realised I was too far away from the girls in the front row so I took up guitar.' He went on to study contemporary music at university in Lismore, where Joe Hansen from Grinspoon was in his class. Seven years ago, he moved to Sydney, produced records for a string of local bands and played bass for the likes of Kasey Chambers and, as fate would have it, Suzy Connolly.

Not long after that, a friend played one of Suzy's tapes to some people in LA. It looked like the door was open, so she jumped a flight to the City of Angels and a year of trying to write radio hits while chasing an elusive record contract. 'Matt came over with a view to producing.

We'd never written together before, but sharing a house in LA we discovered this writing chemistry,' says Suzy. What followed was a period of feverish creation, which culminated in the bitter-sweet perfection of songs like Another Perfect Day and Goodbye Angel.

'We were living in Van Nuys, the porn capital of LA. We'd be watching car chases on the news and then we'd see our house! There'd be helicopters over the roof,' recalls Matt. 'But I think because we were so far away from home and didn't really know many people, it put us in a really good space to create.'

The pair dispensed with formulas and surrendered to instinct. Sometimes Suzy wrote lyrics and Matt created the music. Sometimes it was the other way round. And in the end, they made magic. By the time they left LA, in the summer of 2000, they'd written half the album and BUTTERFLY 9 was formed.

Back in Sydney, they continued to write, striking gold with the Beatles-tinged Growing Pains and the melancholy folk rock of Monday.They recorded the tracks in bedrooms and lounge rooms all over the city, wherever they happened to be living. 'Because we had our own gear, we had the luxury of taking our time. It was a very organic process,' explains Matt. The resulting record is self-produced and features Matt on guitars, bass, drums and keyboards. The band brought in Paul McKercher (You Am I) and Chris Dickie (Dave Matthews Band) to mix, then took the finished record to ABC.

And the rest, as they say, is history.