The two members of Jackie Onassis didn’t just randomly meet and share their mutual love for music. Rather, Kai and Raph’s history goes further than that.
“We've known each other since we were 12,” Raph explains. “Myself and Kai, we're a part of the One Day crew which is a kind of collective of different hip hop artists such as Horrorshow, Spit Syndicate and Joyride. Most of us went to school together, so we've kind of known each other since we were [pre-teens].
“Kai and I used to kind of muck around and make music together when we were much younger, like teenagers. [But] we only started getting serious with it a couple of years ago.
"I went travelling through South America and lived in Canada for a while, and Kai was studying psychology, and when I came back I started studying. I was doing an arts degree, so we didn't see too much of each other until a couple of years ago [when] we bumped into each other in the one subject that we had together, which was American history.
“We went to the bar after the lecture and showed each other our music and, well yeah that was two years ago now.”
A lot has happened in that time for Kai and Raph.
“[Spit Syndicate] have really helped us out since day one in that Kai and I kept our music to ourselves for quite a long time. We didn't say we were in a band to anyone except for those guys. And they were the first ones who really showed interest in our music; you know, we showed them a couple of tracks and they were just super encouraging and immediately wanted to take us out on tour.
“A few years ago Horrorshow were playing at a sold out Come Together festival, and they got us backstage tickets and we were hanging out with them, and seeing those guys and the Spit Syndicate guys that were on stage with them at the same time just play a show that massive, and them saying 'you guys should be here' — it's incredibly inspiring. And the music they make is of such a high quality.
"Spit Syndicate and Horrorshow, they're two of the biggest hip hop acts in the country and the music they make is so professional and of such high quality and high standard, so that certainly pushes us and inspires us.”
Jackie Onassis recently finished their first national headlining tour, 'Smoke Trails'.
“We just wrapped it up a few weeks ago, but yeah that was really cool. We have been on the road before supporting other artists. We supported Spit Syndicate on their national tour, and we supported the east coast leg of Illy's tour last year.
“But yeah that was our first time that we were the headliner, so it was really cool to be able to get out there and meet the people who have been nice enough to listen to our music and support us. It was really cool, [we] really enjoyed it,” explains Raph.
“The first leg of the tour was Queensland and we had no idea what to expect ‘cause we've never been out on the road as a headline act before, we really didn't know what was going to happen.
"And we went to [Alhambra Lounge] early on and it was a little bit quiet and then all of a sudden when we got on stage there was a few hundred people there and most of them knew the words to everything. We were blown away, it was cool.”
Aside from a busy touring schedule, Jackie Onassis have also spent plenty of time at the studio working on another EP.
“We've got a new EP coming out in December, it's just being finished now. It's called 'The Juliet EP'. We just put our first single out for that two weeks ago, which is the title track.”
Jackie Onassis play Valley Fiesta November 22-24.