At the 2002 ARIA Awards, amid the likes of Kylie Minogue, Kasey Chambers, and Silverchair, was a new band that had taken the world by storm — The Vines.
Iconic international music magazines Rolling Stone and NME had touted the band as "the saviours of rock 'n' roll" and "the next Nirvana", but when it came time to present the ARIA award for best breakthrough album, it wasn't The Vines heading to the podium.
Instead, it was an unassuming Brisbane band named george, whose debut album Polyserena, while far less hyped than The Vines' Highly Evolved, had made a significant impact on the Aussie music scene that year.
The win over The Vines would lead NME to print the headline "Who the f*** are george?".
Band's fictitious beginnings
Like many great Aussie bands that began in the '90s, george came to life via the National Campus Bands Competition — the long-running music contest which still pits the country's best university and TAFE acts against each other.
"We started out as basically a hippy jam on the back deck of my sister Katie's 'student drop-in centre' that she was living in at the time," founding member Tyrone Noonan said.
"[Guitarist Nick Stewart] had previously entered what was then a fictitious band into the National Campus Bands Competition, and then one day at one of these hippie jams sprung it on us that we should be that band.
"And so, we just entered this competition, and we were just known as Nick's Band."
But Nick's Band — at this point an eclectic 10-piece featuring harmonica, cello and multiple guitarists — won its heat, and the next one, "and someone pulled over Nick's brother James and said, '"You've got to have a name".
"And [george] was the first thing that popped out of his head," Tyrone said.
"If we'd known the internet was coming, we might have come up with a less generic name."
'Start building your thing'
George didn't win the campus bands competition (the 1996 winner was Canberra rock band 78 Saab), but they continued gigging in earnest around Brisbane.
Members dropped off, including future Packed To The Rafters and Home & Away star James Stewart, who left to pursue his acting career.
Eventually, the group coalesced into a five-piece featuring Geoff Green (drums), Geoff Hooton (bass) and Nick Stewart (guitar), and centred around the songwriting prowess of siblings Tyrone and Katie Noonan, who like their opera-singing mother Maggie Noonan, boasted impressive voices.
Katie said the members took george "very seriously [and] wanted to do well with this thing".
"Early on, we got advice from Kim Thomas, who managed The Whitlams, and he said, 'You have to come to Sydney and Melbourne every two months, and just get people coming and start building your thing,'" she said.
"We did that, and we lost an enormous amount of money.
"We couldn't afford to pay for accommodation or for flights. None of us had a car big enough that would fit all of us, [so] we borrowed a friend's car and drove through the night to get to gigs and slept on people's floors.
"Our first gig in Sydney, we played for 10 per cent of the bar, which was about $27 bucks."
The band released a self-recorded self-titled EP in 1998, but it was their second EP, and its lead track Spawn the following year that helped take them to the next level, courtesy of triple j and community radio airplay.
"It meant that you could go to regional towns, and have people turn up to your gig because they'd heard you on triple j, so that was a big deal," Tyrone said.
Hooton left the band, replaced by Paulie Bromley, but the band didn't miss a beat.
Their next EP — Bastard Son/Holiday — continued george's success through to the end of 2000, with Bastard Son and Spawn both landing in the triple j Hottest 100 (at number 28 and number 61 respectively) and creeping into the lower reaches of the ARIA top 100 singles chart.
Misfortune leads to success
The band's early success was achieved without a major record label — instead, they'd used a DIY approach, with distribution through a small indie label.
And then the label declared bankruptcy, owing george about $30,000.
"We were going to use that money to fund the production of our first full-length album," Tyrone said.
"Suddenly, we didn't have this money."
With two years of hard work and the fruits of their self-generated success effectively flushed down the toilet, george turned to the major record labels.
The success of Spawn and Bastard Son/Holiday meant labels were already sniffing around the burgeoning Brisbane band, but george was desperate to maintain their independence.
So they sent a list of demands to their prospective industry suitors.
Katie said the band signed with Festival Mushroom Records because it was the only label that agreed to their demand for creative and artistic control.
"It was awesome that they gave us that level of respect [but] we had to [refer] to that clause many times," she said.
"We were never about making money. We were just about doing the best gig we could and wanting to sound like no one else — that was our obsession."
Creating Polyserena a 'dream process'
The band decamped to Mangrove Studios, now known as The Grove, situated on a sprawling property outside Gosford, north of Sydney, for two weeks to make their debut album, Polyserena.
"We could afford to leave our respective jobs or uni and just completely focus on making music," Katie said.
"We lived onsite and just lived and breathed music for two weeks.
"It was a dream process because we could take the time to be completely full-time musicians, which is a rare privilege."
Tyrone said it was an exciting and magical time.
"We were just trying to create the most original music that we could — that was the central aim of the project," he said.
Polyserena stands out amid the Australian music of the time as a vindication of george's attempts to sound unlike anyone else.
The songs blur jazz, funk, rock and pop into moody grooves before inevitably bursting into technicolour brilliance on the back of the incredible melodies and soaring vocals of the Noonan siblings.
Rolling Stone, which put the album at number180 in its list of the greatest Australian albums of all time, called it a "13-track ode to finding strength in vulnerability, captured [in] a unique sound world".
For a title, the band dug back into their own back catalogue, taking the title of a song from the You Can Take What's Mine EP.
"That really came about from struggling to come up with a name for the album," Tyrone said.
"It's a made-up word. It's kind of pseudo-Greek — 'poly' meaning 'many' and 'serena' meaning serenity."
Song motivates DV survivors
Once it was finished, Polyserena sat in the can at Festival Mushroom Records for several months as the label continued to drip-feed singles to radio and the public.
The record included previous singles Spawn and Bastard Son, so by the time the album ran its course, Polyserena effectively yielded six singles.
The four new singles — Special Ones, Run, Breathe In Now and Breaking It Slowly — all cracked the ARIA top 50 singles chart, with three of them also voted into triple j's Hottest 100s (along with non-single Release) of 2001 and 2002.
The song that struck the biggest chord was Special Ones, which had a profound impact on many women who perceived its lyrics to be about domestic violence and abuse.
"I had so many messages from women much older than me, saying, 'This song gave me the resolve to leave my husband,'" Katie said.
"I got literally hundreds of messages of that type, which was incredible, but also very overwhelming [because] I was very young.
"Katie said it was difficult and hard to deal with.
"But it wasn't about leaving a romantic relationship, and it's definitely not about domestic violence or abuse because I have never been a victim of that situation," she said.
"I wrote that song about the end of the friendship, and a lot of people presumed it was romantic, but it wasn't at all, but it was a significant relationship."
The song has remained in Katie's setlists throughout her post-george career.
"I've since come to realise how much of a gift that [song was]," she said.
'Five-year overnight success story'
As the release of Polyserena approached, george had become one of the biggest buzz bands in Australia.
"People were saying to us, 'You guys are going to go number one,'" Tyrone said.
"We were like, 'Yeah, sure.' How does a little indie art-rock band from Brisbane go number one?
"But then it actually happened."
The band became just the 10th act in the ARIA charts era to have their debut album land at number one on the album charts.
Tyrone remembered hearing the news while at a pre-gig dinner "somewhere in Western Australia".
"It was incredible," he said.
"We were jumping around like Looney Tunes, and I think everyone else in the restaurant must have been like, 'What are these guys on?'"
The album sold about 150,000 copies.
"We were the five-year overnight success story," Katie said.
George was nominated for six ARIA awards, including album of the year, best group, best pop release, and breakthrough artist (album), winning the latter award, and beaten in the other categories by Silverchair, Kasey Chambers and Kylie Minogue.
"Backstage [at the ARIAs], suddenly all these great luminaries in the industry were coming up and having photos with us … people like Olivia Newton-John and Kylie Minogue," Tyrone said.
"It was just surreal."
The band embraced the NME headline of "Who the f*** is george?", using it in their marketing campaign as they set their sights overseas.
They played sold-out shows in Ireland and Britain and won fans across Europe and Japan, but record label troubles were again on the horizon.
'Classic rock 'n' roll' tragedy
Despite a growing fanbase overseas, Polyserena wasn't released in Europe or the UK due to "a disagreement between the label who was going to be releasing us in Britain, ourselves, our Australian label, and management", Tyrone said.
"It's a classic rock and roll tragic story," he said.
"It was a real shame because I think we could have definitely had a good career in Britain and the US if things had worked out."
Tyrone said the international issues had a lasting impact on the band, but they pressed on, releasing Polyserena's follow-up Unity in 2004.
The album went debuted at number five on the ARIA charts and earnt a gold record, while the lead single Still Real reached the top 40.
Katie and Tyrone consider the more-ambitious Unity to be superior to Polyserena, but it wasn't as successful.
It was one of a number of factors that eventually led to the band going "on hiatus" in 2005.
"We didn't really get the support we were hoping for the second record — that was part of it," Tyrone admitted.
"There were other personal reasons, as well, for why it seemed like it was probably the right time to just kind of have a break."
Katie said the band had "come to the end of our creative path", but personal factors also made the need for a break more pressing.
She said she was focused on becoming a wife and a mother.
"When you are in a band, it's a serious commitment. You'll miss a lot of family gatherings and special things during touring," Katie said.
"I knew that I couldn't commit to a band anymore because my new 100 per cent commitment was my child and my husband, and I wasn't prepared to put anything else above them.
"[But] our last gig was at the Sydney Opera House forecourt, and I was six months pregnant, and that was a pretty amazing way to go out."
Siblings reunite to perform
The hiatus lasted over a decade, with the band reuniting to play a handful of gigs in 2016 and 2017 and again last year to play Polyserena in full in their hometown of Brisbane.
Tyrone and Katie have enjoyed busy careers outside of george.
Tyrone released a string of EPs and singles, and his most recent album Utopia? was named Rolling Stone's album of the week upon its release in 2020, while Katie has released about 20 albums in 18 years, mixing originals and covers and often pursuing her love of jazz music.
The siblings have reunited for a new tour performing Polyserena in full, with a backing band that includes Katie's son Dexter on drums.
"The music's kind of timeless," Tyrone said of playing the 20-year-old album now.
"It doesn't feel like you're playing old s*** that should be gathering dust somewhere — it feels fresh, which is awesome."
Katie said it was very special to be performing Polyserena.
"It's sort of like, 'Hey, this is a cool song,'" she said.
"It takes me back to a very happy place, that's for sure."
