You said that 1978 was a significant year for you, how significant was it, looking back?
Well back 1978 I had a 4 Band Radio Cassette Recorder, I was recording things off Four Triple Zed, and I recorded to cassette loads of Post-punk songs, which were being played on that radio station at the time.
I was eleven, so I was into this new, distinct form of music, which had started replacing mid-seventies prog-rock and at that time, the mainstream candy-floss-pop wasn’t very inspiring to me anymore.
Punk rock, as a youngster, in 1977, had changed things, and things turned Day-Glo, Sex Pistol, Clash, Damned, Buzzcock, Stranglers, Ramones … It was real stuff by comparison, real sound and real performance.
Lots of it was confusing too, to a young ear. I really didn’t know what a lot of the words meant.
I’d heard things earlier, from the earlier epoch, The Doors, The Who, The Zombies, The Floyd, Lou Reed, Bowie, but post-punk, Siouxie, X-Ray Specs, Ultravox, and Australian acts, like Radio Birdman, made me pick up the guitar.
My mum had arranged piano lessons for me beforehand. That went out the window after a couple of years.
And then from ‘78 into ‘79, when Post-punk had well and truly arrived, I began hearing The Cure and Bauhaus, and Joy Division, which then ingrained itself in me really.
That was the how and why of when I found that affinity I have, as a musician, with Post-punk. It was just timing.
I started going to gigs, concerts, and I started trying to write songs and jamming in bands.
Toxic Garden Gnomes was one band I was in for a couple of years, after they’d started.
I wrote a few songs for The Gnomes, but really, I realised I preferred to not perform in a band per se.
It was a struggle for me but I really wanted to write songs. I only had fragments of songs. So I had to collaborate.
You began your career as a soloist songwriter. What was the turning point?
I finally resonated, and it was things I was reading in the classics, novels, or things I’d read in paperbacks mainly.
Over time, I worked out some songs. I’d started, but they took time to finish. Wilderness, and Citadel, were among the songs that I’d completed in the run-up to my first gig in 1989 at the Bohemian.
I wasn’t bursting onto the scene, I was creeping in. I wasn’t the next big thing or anything. It was really hard to try to build a following when no one knew who the hell you were. Everything just started to occur in a kind of zeitgeist.
Definitely the Bohemian was the crucible for everything, from my songs to my sound, from that point on.
I’m still very much a story-based songwriter. I have a story-based approach to writing songs.
My music is sort of conceptual, I think. It harks back to a progressive rock idea, kind of like songs holding a purpose or meaning collectively, rather than individually, and with symbolism coming to the fore.
Wilderness and Citadel, I think of as bits of speculative dystopia, or metaphor for the times, worlds continually impacted by roller-coaster uncertainty, and all of us having this collective ponderment over what lies beyond.
When you started performing, what impact did that have on the music you were writing?
When I started performing, more tension and atmosphere crept into the music. Midnight has melodramatic lyrics.
Its lyrics have a Poe-esque tone, and I think of it as having this cinematic approach to the tale of a hapless dreamer stuck inside yet another dream. I did experience a dream within a dream, which led me to write Midnight.
That hapless dreamer was you, right?
I think it was the kind of theme that dwelt on sort of the self, reflected in songs like Crusade, which has a searching sort of concept, kind of ‘for’ something, yet it progresses toward a totally different outcome, like merely journeying.
When I was back in my teens I picked up Melmoth the Wanderer at the Toowong Library. I can detect this influence now in my lyrics, this much more Maturin tone coming through, with the benefit of hindsight.
That is a tone that is now more prevalent than ever, and it does come from past novels and novelists.
You mention these shift to a Poe-esque tone, to a Maturin one. Was each title and lyric inspired by a classic novel?
Well, yes, is the answer to that. The story-based approach also shifts back to the cinematic approach, both musically and lyrically, with songs like Waft Off and Neck Romancer.
It’s like being on the cusp of lots of big, sweeping, really massive, epic things. My lyrics are always trying to break that mould. I feel like I’m heading down a more conceptual path now, that it’s turned more into a working brand.
It’s achieving lyricism the way, for instance, Skin Feature has this kind of Nietzschesque tone, even though its basis is this sort of Maupassant style.
I think about this literary canon and its sort of connectedness in this way. But it does start repeating itself.
Put It On, Smashed and Tree, have what appears to be the fortuitous timing of earlier themes touched on in tracks like Wilderness, Citadel, and Crusade. You could say it comes full-circle.
Would it be something you might do yourself, become the author of a classic novel one day?
I’ve been “a writer”, stowmarries | Masques, which intersperses chapters with verse, inspired by aspects of lyrical themes touched on within these songs. It’s about finding ways to bring a literary canon into contemporary thought.
Behind The Songs
