The Big Issue story: John Butler Trio
A story for The Big Issue #362: a profile of the Australian roots/rock act John Butler Trio ahead of their Australian tour throughout August and September 2010.
Click the below image for a closer look, or read the article text underneath.
John Butler Trio: Riding The Rails
Over the past 15 years, John Butler has strummed and sung his way to his present status as one of Australia’s most recognisable musicians. But people’s perception of the 35-year-old, who was born in the US and moved to Australian when he was 10, can vary widely, as Butler is all too aware.
“I think to some people I’m a blues artist. Some people think I’m a sensitive new age guy who writes songs about his children and his family. Some people think I’m somebody who’s lived in Australia for 24 years, and is Australian, and loves Australia but still has an American accent, he laughs. “I’m many things to many different people. I think some people hate me, some people love me and there’s probably a lot of people who don’t give a shit – and that’s probably a healthy thing.”
“I’ve tried to let go of what I hope people see in me, because for quite a long time I felt misunderstood,” he says. “I have these ideas: I do care about peace and justice, the truth, my country and its land and culture. For that to be pigeonholed; for that multidimensional point of view to be put into a single point of view of a ‘tree-hugging hippie’ was frustrating, for a long time. I felt that a lot of these things are not fringe issues. They concern us all; they’re everyday people stuff.”
Maturity has lent a new perspective to Butler’s interpretation of such misconceptions, though. “I’ve learned not to care so much about that misunderstanding,” he admits. “There’s bigger fish to fry. I’ve got two children who are amazing. I’ve got an amazing band. I have a fantastic, amazing wife. I need to worry about what they think about me more than how the general media is going to misconstrue me to make it more palatable to a reading audience.”
The Big Issue caught up with Butler in the midst of an intensive European tour, which immediately followed a triumphant series of shows in the United States. The US highlight was the Trio’s first headline show at a capacity Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, a buzz that Butler likens to his skateboarding background.
“When I used to skate really heavily – I still skate, but when I was riding and trying to get sponsors – I’d climb these eight-stair handrails and ollie, 50/50 grind on ‘em. I was thrilled by it, I wanted to do it, it excited me, and at the same time it scared the fuck out of me. I’d played Red Rocks seven or eight times before and always opened up for other people. To be headlining that show and playing to 8,500 people – the biggest audience we’ve ever had, anywhere in the world – it came like a huge fucking wave, a big wave that I dropped into and I was just trying to make sure I didn’t fall off. It was exhilarating, scary, exciting and daunting; all those things. It was like an eight-stair handrail.”
With so much time spent overseas, how does Butler retain his connection to Australia? He replies: “I know this almost sounds like a Qantas ad or something,” he replies,”But wherever I go in this world, I’m taking the spirit of our country with me… It’s like when they see AC/DC or The Cat Empire, or whoever else: we’re all ambassadors for our culture. Every time we play, we’re like – in a slightly, kind of defiantly arrogant way, but with great respect – ‘This is how we fucking roll. This is recipe and this is how we cook. Come to our kitchen, and let’s get it on!’”
The John Butler Trio song ‘One Way Road’ has been used recently on the One HD sports channel. How does Butler feel about being associated with TV advertisements? “I see these things as kind of like infiltration. I’m not really a sports fan, but I don’t have anything against sports.”
He starts singing the song’s lyrics to himself – They come, they take / It’s never enough because they can’t relate / To the real world, thinking that the oyster is just for the pearl – before interrupting himself. “Oh, big lyrics! Of revolution and progression. For that to be on a mainstream TV station?” He laughs: “I’ve infiltrated these mofos! I don’t have a problem with it. In a way, I’m using their forum to spread a message that I think is important. I feel like, okay: the revolution will be televised!”
But one thing should be made clear: Butler keeps control of which ads his music will appear in. “It doesn’t mean it’s a slippery slope to doing a BP ad, by any means!”
by Andrew McMillen
The John Butler Trio are touring Australia through late August until late September. For more details, visit johnbutlertrio.com
Elsewhere: the full transcript of this conversation between John Butler and myself, which was published on The Vine.
More John Butler Trio on MySpace. Music video for their song ‘Revolution‘ embedded below.
A Conversation With Matthew Condon, Brisbane-based author and journalist
I met with Brisbane-based author and journalist Matthew Condon [pictured right] in late June 2010, to discuss his newest book, Brisbane, for a profile in The Weekend Australian Review. You can read that story here.
Full transcript of our conversation is below. As mentioned elsewhere, this was a particularly enjoyable interview, as Matthew is one of my favourite feature writers – I hold his work for The Courier-Mail’s QWeekend magazine in high regard. Brisbane is a great read, too.
Beware: for those who haven’t read Brisbane, there are spoilers.
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Andrew: I read your book yesterday.
Matthew: Right.
To give you a bit of my background, I grew up in Bundaberg, then came to Brisbane for university in 2006. Although my father’s from Brisbane, I’ve not paid a lot of attention to Brisbane’s history, so I did find it quite an educational experience. I liked the way that you blended it alongside your stories from growing up in this city.
Obviously, I had to include the history, but I wanted the book to move back and forth in time to try and get that effect of – ‘is the past still in the present?’, and so I structured it in that way, no chapters, that it would just meander, and that the present and past would constantly chafe against each other. There were little thematic links; I tried to stitch it through and run a few parallel narratives so that at least rather than a dreary history of a city, that it would have at least a few narrative lines that would pull people through it.
It definitely had a narrative arc, from your experiences as a child through to you telling your children about the history of Brisbane, and them asking questions.
That was organic, really, as the book grew. It was interesting how that line of it sort of came to the surface. I didn’t have an intention to write a book about children; however, maybe writing about Brisbane and my childhood is looking for the child that I was, and then seeing it perhaps in my children.
So, in a way, that too is the shimmering of the past and the present, which I think is unique. Ironically, even though we have very little historical buildings, my point of the narrative line of F.W.S. Cumbrae-Stewart and the monument was this; what does it say generationally about the people of the city that really aren’t that fussed with historical accuracy? What does it mean, and does it flow through?
Even though we had very few historical monuments left in terms of buildings and treasuring our historical sites, it’s still weirdly a city where the past is always somehow present to me. This is just my view, but is that nostalgia? Maybe it is. I don’t know. It’s a city that I think most Brisbane people who go away and come back, it’s a city that puts its claws into your heart, funnily enough.
The recurring metaphor you use, a ‘book without an index’, seems quite apt.
Yeah, a lot of people will get upset with that but I think it’s very true. When I went to look for my relatives in Toowong Cemetery, I’ve since been in touch with them and they’ve said “you can always come to the office and we’ll guide you,” but the point is if you want to wander in and visit your antecedents, it’s a very difficult thing to do. You wouldn’t think it would be that hard.
So to me, the cemetery in the end of the book became a microcosm of this entire city. Funnily enough, topographically, it’s sort of a miniature – it’s the leaders on the hills, the rest of us are down in the valleys, which is very much as Brisbane is now. The ridges are either populated by the church, or the wealthy, and that’s a paradigm that replicates itself in cities across the world. It’s not just Brisbane.
So what was the brief you received for this book? How did Phillipa [McGuinness, New South books’ commissioning editor] bring it to you?
The brief was probably the singular most simplistic, liberating brief that I’ve ever received. She just said “Look, you do Brisbane and approach it the way you wish,” which on one hand is brilliant. On the other, when you come down to practically writing, when you come down to trying to put your arms around an entire city, it was very difficult. It sounded great.
The task was very difficult because I had deliberated for months and months, how does one write and capture a city? How do you go about it? Then I decided it’s impossible, it really is impossible to do it thoroughly. It would be endless. The city is organic. It’s constantly shifting and changing, so I had to not be afraid of giving myself limitations, that it would be my personal view, and after months and months of deliberating and thinking the usual; does one do it by the seasons, or to give yourself this sort of predictable structure?
And then I tossed all of them through my mind and one day I just decided “Look, I’m going to go to where X marks the spot, where Oxley came ashore. That’s the Caucasian history of the city. I’ll start there, and I’ll see where it takes me.” I did that.
One day I just put a notebook in a bag and a camera, and I went down to North Quay, to the dreary granite monument, and I’d never stood before it. I’d seen it a million times, all through my life, and as I wrote. So I stood there with the traffic roaring on both sides, and something about it [laughs] I don’t know what it was, something about it struck me as wrong. The wording was sort of hesitant. It didn’t feel right. So I thought, “Okay, this is where I start. I’ll investigate the monument.” And that kicked the journey off, really.
I liked how you brought your investigative journalism with Qweekend into the mix. That’s probably what influenced Phillipa in asking you to do it, in that you’d been writing in and around Brisbane since you returned.
That’s a really good point, because I only realised halfway through the book how important it had been to be doing that journalism for five years, and how in fact I’d touched on many, many things across the city – both contemporary and historical – and I wasn’t as removed from it as I actually thought that I was.
I looked at this book personally as a way of trying to write my way back into the city. When I came back, I felt I knew it was the city I’d been born in. In those first couple of years, I’d drive past my childhood house several times. It was me trying to reconnect with a city that I’d lost touch with for 18-odd years. And something deep inside of me told me to do this book, because perhaps it would embed me back into Brisbane. In many ways, it did that.
It required me to concentrate on the geography, the landscape, where I was living, and to open my eyes basically. So, it served a very important personal purpose for me. Doing the book made me feel more comfortable and relaxed here now, and at home, in a sense.
And along the way you did touch upon some personal experiences, like finding that film canister in your great grandfather’s darkroom.
Yeah; that’s a story from when I was about 12, and it just fitted into this book, in terms of me searching for evidence of myself and hopefully the wider populace of my generation in particular. You’re of a different generation, but as I’d mentioned in the book; when one leaves a city like Brisbane, the longer you’re away, the more the city that it was to you calcifies in your mind, and becomes fixed as ‘Brisbane the city’, your home city. But cities move on. People grow older, things happen, buildings get torn down, landscapes change, cultures change. Brisbane’s culture is phenomenally, vastly different from when I left.
When you come back you’re shocked. It’s not what you thought it was, because you’ve sort of fairytale’d it in your head. I realised only after I’d written it and read through it that the book is a partial examination of memory and the function of memory.
Indeed as you’ve noted, at the end of the book I test my memories against living contemporary people in my life. They say “No, that didn’t happen, that’s not here, no.” So it’s an examination of memory and how we fictionalise ourselves, so there’s that game playing in the book as well.
When that part came up, it was a real shock because it was almost like breaking the fourth wall, I suppose, to say “So this is what I’ve written, but these parts might be false. These might not have happened.”
Exactly, and it’s sort of a spring that unloads in the book, I think. And, when I wrote that little section, it’s not huge, I was trying to be as honest as I humanly could. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe all of that memory I have has altered, changed, mutated over 20 or 30 years. Maybe that’s what we do with memory, we fit it to suit ourselves, and we reinvent lines of family life and history. How do we do that? Why do we do that? Why does that happen?
Maybe it’s like the monument in that we ultimately end up believing that’s really where Oxley came ashore, even though in the back of our mind we know it’s wrong. So maybe that’s a sort of human trait that is obvious to most people, but it’s just something that grew as part of the investigation, and the journey through the book.
I wanted the book to represent a journey as well, because it was a journey for me. It was while I had young children and all of that was kicking in, and looking at my son; he stars in the book to some degree. There were moments when I’d look at him and go “That’s me. I’m time travelling here.” Some things that he would do, I did that, precisely.
And so there’s a way we can travel through time in that sense and I wanted to try, whether it’s even humanly possible to replicate that in literature I don’t know, but I was trying to do that, as best as I could to enunciate the passage of time, which has always been funnily enough a preoccupation with my work. Now that I’m older and have written several things, I see now, you see a recurrent theme. Now there’s a primary theme.
I like how you dwelled upon the issue of time in Brisbane, centuries ago, when there was no one clock that told the time, and it was driving people crazy.
[laughs] It’s always been a city that has an uncomfortable relationship with time I think. [laughs] I really do think that. To others, for decades, we were always seen as “behind the times” and you know; that’s a part of the fabric of this town, really.
I like the way that you segued into the city hall and the clock tower discussion, how you and your son were sitting in your home and you heard the bell chime from city hall.
Yeah, and that’s happened a few times since. I was just sitting there with my son. I remember my grandmother lives not far, around the corner from where I live now in Pennington, and I remember sitting on the back step of her tiny little old Queenslander and you could hear the clock. Then to hear it again through the business of a modern metropolis raised the hairs on my neck basically. That might seem uninteresting and minor to some people but it was like reaching your arm back in time 40 years. It was creepy.
And little things like that happened. When writers are doing a book they often go “Oh there was an incredible coincidence while I was writing the book, this happened.” I’ve had that for several books, that things – you go “That’s perfect for my book! I can’t believe that just happened.”
But I think when you’re working on a project, your antennae are so sensitised to what you’re doing that things come in and you notice things specific to your project. You’re more attentive to everything, and sensitive to everything. And they’re not coincidences; it’s just that you have a heightened sense of appreciation when you’re embedded in a project like that. That’s sort of what happened with this book when my son and I were down at the park opposite Suncorp [Stadium, Milton], as I wrote in the book.
I’d just been researching how that was the first major cemetery for the city, and that day after it had rained and he said “Daddy, it smells like skeletons,” and that’s a direct quote from him. I thought “Wow, I can use that.” [laughter]
I hope your son appreciates how much of a star he is in the book when he reads it.
At the moment he’s reading about dinosaurs and spiders, but he may. He narrated to me his first short story the other night. He’s almost five. It was called “The Mantis in the Plane by the Sea”. And so I transcribe it and read it out for him so that one day he might look at that and go “Wow, that’s interesting.” I guess I’m quite a sentimental person, human being as well. I’ll keep them; whether he addresses or not is not important but I’ll keep them for him.
Phillipa tells me that the series was pitched as “travel books when no one leaves home,” but you’re a bit of an anomaly to the book process because you did leave for the middle part of your life so far. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing because it allows you to step away and describe and outsider’s perspective of Brisbane and how you felt upon leaving and upon returning.
Exactly. I think I was in a unique position, having been born here, and left for important years of my life to come back and see this demonstrable change. On one level, yes, enormous change, but as I’ve tried to portray in the book, a constancy running underneath as well. The Brisbane light, the feel, the weather, the lushness, the vegetation – that’s the same as when I was a kid. Other things change around it and I think to get that perspective was unique in the sense that I did have that time lapse, came back to it with fresh eye,s I guess, and it may have been a very different book if it had been written by a writer who had stayed here.
I tried to give it justice and to give it fairness. If I’m a critic of the city, I’ve tried to balance it as I would my journalism, or whatever. But there may be some things in there that Brisbane people disagree with or are offended by. That’s great. That’s indicative of a grown up city. We should be debating, questioning ourselves, tilling the soil, and asking these things of each other because that’s what a civilised community is.
I do point out in the book that my supposition is that there are some traits that are in Brisbane people, have been from the start because of the nature of our birth, white birth; it was a very aggressive city, violent. There was death, crime and punishment just over the river there not far from the executive building that the current Premier sits. That’s where the convicts were flogged on the A-frame, the short walk to the Premier’s office 200 years later. Things change enormously but sometimes they don’t change that much at the same time.
So, our relationship with Sydney and the colony of New South Wales is always aggressive and we always felt we were poorly treated by them, and so a chip on our shoulder evolved from that. I think if you look and listen carefully enough, we still have some of that. The ghost of that is still around. While I think we’ve moved into the 21st Century to a large degree, there are those beautiful generational traits that only your place can give you and I think we still have them. I tried to examine that, but that may ruffle some peoples’ feathers and it may not. I just tried to be honest.
It wasn’t overwhelming, but there was I feel a recurring theme of romanticism that you brought to your experiences in Brisbane, how you said you “keep coming back to the light of Brisbane,” and you describe how that tends to bring people in. That’s the first thing they notice when they get off the tram, and so forth. Did you realise that before you started writing it?
I think I did because when I moved away, Brisbane was always my home. It was always where I was born, the place on the planet where I was born. It does have distinct, peculiar characteristics that delineate it from other cities in the world, let alone Australia. And [David] Malouf has written about this, Rodney Hall and others have written about this. They write about it because it’s very true.
The greatest, strongest memories of my childhood are the light, and the pitch blackness of the shadows, and that’s different when you live in other places in the world. It’s distinctively different. The smell, and in summer when a violent storm comes over the ranges, and the steam comes off the bitumen and the plants are breathing out, it’s unique to the city and it strikes you as something new every time. “Oh wow, that’s Brisbane.” And it’s something that you keep very deep inside of you, I think. I’m a lot older than you. The older you get these things sort of are like little drawers inside of your person and nothing will change them.
That may be romantic, that may be nostalgic, but as I said to you earlier; this is a city that from my own experience prompts sort of nostalgia and as a birth place, loss of heritage, mistreatment of the landscape and heritage; as a Brisbane person I feel that very keenly the way the Sydney people probably do about their own environment. This was where I came into the world. Nothing’s going to change that.
This is not so much a question as a comment; when I interviewed John Birmingham the other day, I asked him to comment on the divide between popular fiction and literary fiction. He brought up that he thinks you are one of the finest literary fiction writers in Australia.
God bless him. I’ll have him stuffed and mounted. [laughs]
This was without even mentioning that I was interviewing you for this book. He just came upon that. I thought that was a nice little turnaround.
I’ve known John for years and some of the old dudes are coming back home, artists, painters, writers, musicians, actors. It’s was a very different place when we left. It was very claustrophobic. I won’t say it was parochial, there was an element of parochialism to be honest with you, but the politics was suffocating, all of that. The assumption, right or wrong, was that if I’m going to make it I can’t make it here.
Twenty-five years later you can be in Brisbane and be making it [like you would] in London or New York or Berlin. Everything has changed, and the city has changed too as well, clearly, but the imperative to leave I don’t think any longer exists. We were sort of refugees for a reason that’s no longer here. Why do we come back? It’s a myriad of reasons for that. I just got tired of Sydney and it just became very hard to live daily. I was freelancing and doing all of that. Where do you go in that circumstance? You drift home and see what happens. Then my partner – now wife – fell pregnant, and now I’ve got two children, and it sort of becomes home again.
I wonder whether this project was more gratifying for you than your fiction work.
It’s very different. I found it exhilarating but very difficult in the respect that I’m not an historian. There are some brilliant historians in Brisbane that have combed the soil over, and over, and over; there virtually wasn’t a corner I could look into that hadn’t been effectively and interestingly covered by a gaggle of local historians. The city has been documented quite well, but I don’t know how they do it, historians.
The freedom of fiction, to me, is so much more pleasurable. That element is part of my journalistic work too. Obviously, I deal with fact every day and I wanted a book that was not mired in dreary history and it wasn’t a history book. But I would hope that someone visiting the city would pick it up and go “I didn’t know that about this place,” get a feel for the city, rather than a raft of facts.
I don’t know how you’ll feel about this, but upon finishing the book; I thought it’d be great and very apt to see that book start appearing on high school recommended reading lists.
I’d be very happy for that to happen! [laughs].
Because as you said, it’s not a dry, factual, historical piece. It mires in your personal life as well, which I feel is more important than ever to put a next generation of Brisbane residents to come across.
That’s a really nice idea. Just to elaborate on what I was saying then; I hope the book gives people a sense of what the city has been like, and what it’s like to live here. I would hope that it gives them that deep connection to their heart, rather than just their head. That’s a huge ambition for a little book. That was underplaying everything that I was trying to do with this piece of work. Whether I achieved it or not, it’s a big question, but that was my aim to do that. The other important element, too, is that I was really loathe to actually write about my own life here, because in all honesty it was quite dreary, suburban, unremarkable.
Yet you made it sound remarkable.
I thought, “How am I going to do this?” I didn’t want to be self-indulgent or dull, and then I thought “I’ll employ a fictional technique, and just look at a boy in Brisbane.” That boy is largely based on me. The minute I stood back from that boy, all the details, fine details, the smells, the senses, everything came in. If I’d written just about myself, and I started to do it, it died on the page. When I stood back and looked at myself as a novelist and journalist, and looked back at this separate figure, everything unlocked. All these memories and things that I hadn’t thought about since I was five years old rushed in.
So that’s the liberation of using a fictional technique on fact. It was a really interesting process for me as a writer to do that. I’d played around with it. “Should I try it, should I not?” The minute I started doing it, bang. It just bloomed.
Many elements of this book were a journey for me, in writing, in memory, in trying to get back to what the city meant to me, what it is now. In many ways, when I finished it, I wasn’t quite sure what I actually had. There were so many new paths I was taking in this little book, so in that sense it was a very gratifying project that gave me more than I had imagined when I first agreed to do the commission.
I think [the City series] is a terrific idea, which has been done loosely in the northern hemisphere. Kerry’s book on Sydney, and there have been books on Paris and Evan White. I found it a really interesting and obvious idea. I was surprised no one has actually ever done it, but we would get writers to do the major cities of the country, so as a series project it was very attractive. But yeah, that was the trip.
Phillipa tells me that when she read the book, she was struck by your love for Brisbane. It really shone through, and I agree with her summary, the way it ends from the character as a child through to standing in the cemetery; it’s quite beautiful.
Thank you. It’s a recognition that one is mortal… [laughs] and the next wave [of children] is out there. I’ll always love Brisbane. There are things I hate about it, there are things that annoy me, that frustrate me but that’s like any resident I guess in any city. But since coming back, it’s given me a lot as well, I think. It’s been wonderful to come home with my own kids and I may move from the city; I don’t know. Who knows? I’m not saying I’ll be here forever, but yeah it’s been a very pleasurable reacquaintance.
As an extension of Philipa’s comment, do you think it’s fair to say that it’s a kind of love letter to Brisbane?
Yeah, in the way that some love letters are raw and honest, can be confusing and upsetting, but if it’s a love letter, its heart is in the right place. I agree. It’s a nice phrase. At the end of the book, I pay homage to many writers. Several of them aren’t quoted in the book but I felt it was important to say thank you to all of those others that have written beautiful stuff about this place.
Jared Lee, when I was young, when I read his novels, what I understood from that was I could write about Brisbane and it’s okay. That was a vital breakthrough for me. When I was at university in my late teens I read him and thought “We can do this.” When I read Thea Astley’s It’s Raining In Mango and all of those, I thought “I can write here. This is going to work. I can do it.” And so they were vitally important to me. The great Peter Porter, [David] Maluof… So I hope this adds another page to that homage to a place, and others will do it again. My son might do it!
That’d be nice.
That’d be interesting. God save him! [laughs]
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I highly recommend ordering Matthew Condon’s Brisbane through the publisher, NewSouth.
Rolling Stone album reviews, October 2010: Washington, Ben Folds/Nick Hornby
A couple of album reviews for Rolling Stone, which appeared in the October 2010 issue.
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Washington 
I Believe You Liar
Charismatic newbie delivers an impressive debut album
Following a string of EP releases, Melbourne-via-Brisbane singer-songwriter Megan Washington delivers an impressive debut album, whose 12 tracks were written and performed by the eponymous singer alongside producer John Castle. On I Believe You Liar, the pair play all the instruments that comprise her heady mix of piano-heavy pop. The star here isn’t just Washington’s impressive vocal range, but the clever wordplay and knowing sense of irony that sees her question whether she makes us hum in “Sunday Best”, and write an entirely danceable chorus around the concept of not wanting to dance (“Rich Kids”). Such additions are cute without bordering on kitsch. While most tracks swing with contagious joy, the album’s handful of slower moments – like the morbid “Underground”, which deals with the singer’s preference for cremation over burial – reveal an introspective bent. Given the singer’s ability to compel with both modest and garish modes of songwriting, Washington’s debut is a consistently enjoyable listen.
Key tracks: “Rich Kids”, “How To Tame Lions”, “Clementine”
Elsewhere: an interview with Megan Washington for The Vine
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Ben Folds/Nick Hornby
Lonely Avenue
Piano tinkler gets together with pop fiction’s poster boy
It’s a music geek’s wet dream: American singer-songwriter Ben Folds collaborating with British novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About A Boy). Here, multi-instrumentalist Folds uses Hornby’s emailed short stories as the lyrical basis for 11 tracks that sparkle with irreverent humour. Take “Levi Johnston’s Blues”: a hilarious character narrative written from the perspective of the “fuckin’ redneck” who knocked up Sarah Palin’s daughter. Folds’ musical vision wheels between the rollicking, piano-led pop for which he’s become known (“Working Day”, “From Above”), and more subdued compositions like “Practical Amanda” and “Password”, which feature stunning string section interjections courtesy of arranger Paul Buckmaster (David Bowie, Elton John). “Your Dogs” – a tale of suburban discontent set to catchy, taut instrumentation – can be counted among the finest moments of Folds’ career. Lonely Avenue is a meeting of two brilliant minds in near-perfect sync. Hopefully, it won’t be the last time they get together.
Key tracks: “Your Dogs”, “Levi Johnston’s Blues”, “From Above”
Rolling Stone story: Halfway
A story for the October 2010 issue of Rolling Stone on the Brisbane-based alt-country/rock band Halfway.
Click the below image for a closer look, or view the article text underneath.
Halfway: Between Alt-Country and a Rock Place
Brisbane collective embrace pared-back approach, Forster wisdom on third LPby Andrew McMillen
Three albums into a ten-year career, Brisbane alternative country act Halfway have hit their stride with An Outpost Of Promise, released in July through +1 Records. If you’re unfamiliar with their earlier work, fear not: their latest is “definitely a good place to start,” according to Halfway’s John Busby, who alongside Chris Dale forms the band’s core duo. “It’s the least country record that we’ve done before, so maybe that makes it more accessible.”
Put Dale and Busby in the same room and you’ll soon find them finishing each others’ sentences. Both in their late 30s, their friendship was forged in the central Queensland city of Rockhampton in the 1990s before they relocated to Brisbane and formed Halfway in 2000. But while the pair are the heart of the band, they are bolstered by an extended family – all Halfway’s eight band members meet twice a week at ‘Halfway House’ (a room underneath Busby’s mother’s house) to “have a beer, play music, and just talk,” says Busby. “It’s never really toil. I love hanging out; it’s the best part of being in the band.”
The country tones that coloured their first two albums – 2004’s Farewell To The Fainthearted and 2006’s Remember The River – are marginalised on Outpost, which features 10 songs played “straight up, with tension and drama,” according to its producer and former Go-Between Robert Forster.
Forster’s wisdom triggered a shift in the pair’s approach to songwriting. This time, the pair ensured that every song worked with just guitar and vocal first, before soliciting embellishments from their bandmates. Busby suggests Forster gave them confidence by exposing each song’s acoustic core; “rather than just trying to make a lot of racket”. “That’s how we ought to go forward,” Dale concludes.
“Just let the songs do their thing.”
For more Halfway, visit their MySpace. I reviewed An Outpost Of Promise for Mess+Noise earlier in the year. It’s ace!
triple j mag story: ‘Music Counts For Something’
A feature for the September 2010 issue of the recently-renamed triple j mag, which discusses what Australian musicians make from selling music as a proportion of their overall income. The full article text is underneath.
Music Counts For Something
by Andrew McMillen
We asked some top independent artists to speak specifics on the art of selling music in the digital age – and to advise up-and-comers on how not to get rorted.
Throughout the history of recorded music, album sales were a strong indicator as to artists’ personal wealth. The equation used to go: gold and platinum record sales + sold out tours = money in the bank. But in 2010, people are less and less likely to pay for recorded music, with the equation continuing to shift away from sales toward touring.
The Presets’ Julian Hamilton is blunt when discussing musical economics, as an ambassador for APRA – the Australasian Performing Right Association – might well be. “These days, if you want to be a working musician can’t just rely on record sales to make money,” he says.
According to Julian, music sales through publishing account for “around a third or a quarter” of The Presets’ overall income. “But it’s tricky because the way that musicians earn money is so varied, through so many different revenue streams that come in at different times. Some months, you might make no money.”
His advice to aspiring musos: “Try to keep the creative and business sides of the bands different: don’t talk about money when you’re rehearsing, and don’t talk about lyrics when you’re in a business meeting. Set up a group account under the band’s name, where all members can see where the money’s going.”
“If you can sort the shitty business side out, so that you don’t worry about it, that’s gonna make the fun stuff even more fun.”
Under the pseudonym Gotye, Wally de Backer put himself $30,000 in debt to fund his ARIA Award-winning album Like Drawing Blood in 2006. That risk paid off: following mainstream interest in his independently released second LP, Wally eventually made over $100,000 in album sales and royalty payments.
At the release of the first Gotye album, 2003’s Boardface, de Backer got the feeling that “making music wouldn’t ever be more than something I could produce and finance in my spare time from ‘real work’. Having been a full-time musician for a couple of years now, I’m amazed at how much time can be spent dealing with accounting, chasing and checking royalty statements, managing budgets, and basically financial planning so you don’t end up in a bus in middle of Eastern Europe with a maxed out credit card and the bank foreclosing on your mortgage back at home. I’d rather be on top of everything and organise my music-making time accordingly, rather than remain oblivious and potentially have tax and income issues down the track.”
His advice for young musos: “If you can cover all or most bases and get your career off the ground yourself, then you’re in a strong position to negotiate good deals later on, rather than being at the mercy of ‘industry standards’.”
Melbourne rock band Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s third album, Rush To Relax, debuted in the ARIA top 20 earlier this year.
Despite their popularity, the band’s guitarist (and manager) Mikey Young is frank about how he and his bandmates treat the project.
“We all have other ways of making money. We treat this band like a hobby. Outside of shows, we get a random few grand every so often from record sales, APRA and publishing, but once it’s split between the four of us and we put a bit back towards the band, it’s really just bonus pocket money.”
“None of us could solely live off [the band’s income]”, he continues, “But that’s our fault and not due to the state of the music industry or anything. We choose to keep our band a thing we do for fun when we feel like it, so we’ve never made that leap into having a crack and living off it.”
Tim Levinson – better known as MC Urthboy, in addition to being a founding member of The Herd and head of Sydney independent label Elefant Traks – reveals that royalties from album sales comprised 14% of his overall income in 2009. The majority of his earnings came from touring and label-related revenue.
“If a musician has only ever had a part time job to sustain their real passion of playing music for a living, you can understand how vulnerable they become,” says Tim. “It’s important to take this into account when understanding the significance of how much sacrifice artists make to pursue their music.”
For all but the biggest fish in the Australian musical pond, Tim confirms: “If you’re a musician, you can never piece together anything resembling an income without including some sort of regular or fall back job. But if you’re instinctively passionate about it, you have no choice. You are compelled to do it. It’s art that is created out of just a necessity to express yourself, and that’s a great thing.”
Philadelphia Grand Jury’s manager, Martin Novosel, runs us through the economics of a popular, self-released indie band. “Once a quarter, the band will see approximately $8-9,000, minus 25 per cent in distribution, minus pressing costs for the albums (if more needed to be pressed), minus any marketing costs, minus mechanical costs, and finally, minus management commission on profit. In real money terms, this equates to something in the vicinity of a couple of thousand dollars per quarter for the band members.
“However it does go up if you are a commercial act,” he continues. “The reason for this is because bands are kept in consumers’ minds through media presence.”
Martin acknowledges that the indie market is very live-driven; “An act needs to be playing often to keep its currency with media to get that exposure. And an act can really only tour Australia twice or three times in an album cycle before it has overplayed and needs to provide new material”.
Compared with their income from touring, publishing and merchandise, Novosel estimates that the Philly Jays’ music sales comprise only 5-10 per cent of the band’s overall income.
The Butterfly Effect’s bassist, Glenn Esmond, suggests that about 25 per cent of the band’s yearly revenue is from album sales.
Though he grew up idolising the glam rock model of luxury and privilege – private jets and the like – as he got older and started playing in cover bands at local pubs, Esmond realised that “it’s just enough to be able to pay your rent, and have a bit of money left over at the end of the day to buy a beer.”
He suggests reading the book Music Business, by Shane Simpson. “You might decide to be independent or you might go with a label, but at least you’re informed about how the industry works, and how deals are recouped. I’ve read about some bands who signed deals where the label makes 85% of the band’s income while retaining the rights to the masters. It’s insane, man. How does anyone ever make any money? Sometimes people don’t, and that’s the reality.”
With a laugh, he concludes: “You’ve gotta do it for love until you get too old, or your missus goes, ‘Sorry mate, you’ve been doing this for ten years and you’ve made no money – you need a real job!’”
Australian Penthouse story: George Sotiropoulos interview
My first story for Australian Penthouse: an interview with Australian UFC fighter George Sotiropoulos, which appeared in the September 2010 issue.
Excerpt below – all text copyright Australian Penthouse. Click the image for a closer look.
Caged Fury
Aussie fighter George Sotiropoulos is taking the UFC by stormby Andrew McMillen
He grew up in Geelong, completed a Bachelor of Business and worked in finance before dedicating his life to the pursuit of elite mixed martial arts (MMA). Meet 33 year-old George Sotiropoulos: Australia’s strongest contender in the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship), the world’s largest and most prestigious MMA tournament. Undefeated in the UFC (6-0) as this issue goes to press, George’s overall fight record reflects an impressive 13-2.
MMA seems to be one of the purest forms of professional athletic endurance – it’s two guys in a cage using their training to try and take the other man down.
That is part of it. In a street fight, anything goes. People can utilise any object as a weapon; they can literally take a person’s life. MMA is a sport with technique. The only way you’re going to win is utilising real skills and technique, from boxing, taekwondo, muay thai, wrestling, judo, jiu jitsu and any other martial art style out there.
Skill is effective, not brutality: that’s the big misconception. MMA is a new sport which only been around for approximately 20 years. People are not fully informed about the facts, so that’s why they jump the gun. But that’s going to change; UFC is the fourth most viewed sport in the USA. Pay-per-view numbers are in the millions, and up to 20,000 punters attend events. It’s mainstream now.
What does your average week of training look like?
It’s a very gruelling and intense training schedule. I train three times a day from Monday to Friday, and I usually train once or twice on the weekends.
Is there any difference between training in a gym with your team and fighting in front of 20,000 people?
No; you train day in and day out for that moment. All scenarios, possibilities, techniques and strategies are covered in training. Then on fight day, the work has already been done. The training is harder than the fight.
Visit the Australian Penthouse website for the full interview. You can also read the unedited transcript of our conversation here.
UFC videos are pretty much impossible to find for free online, so I can’t show you footage of George in action. Instead, I’ve embedded an interview recorded after UFC 116, where George defeated Kirk Pellegrino.
Video: Interviewing The Dandy Warhols in Portland, Oregon
Last week, my girlfriend Rachael and I won a trip to the United States.
The competition asked, in 25 words or less, which Parklife 2010 headline act we’d would like to interview and why. We both chose The Dandy Warhols.
Why? Two reasons. We both dig their music… and the competition terms mentioned that the interview would take place in Portland, Oregon.
Pretty sure that The Dandy Warhols are the only Parklife act who live in Portland, Oregon…
We brainstormed for around 20 minutes. I entered: “The Dandy Warhols, because it’s been ten years since the release of their career-, genre-, and generation-defining album, Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia.”
Rachael went with an entry that name-checked a bunch of song and album titles: “I’ll step inside the monkey house of Portland’s true bohemians, The Dandy Warhols, for an illuminating interview that illustrates why everyday should be a holiday.”
Rachael won.
So a few days later, we flew Qantas to LAX for six nights.
Below is a short video montage of the day spent in Portland with The Dandy Warhols. We interviewed them for around an hour at their studio, The Odditorium, and watched them perform a rare acoustic set for local radio station OPB, wherein they covered songs by The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and The Brian Jonestown Massacre.
It was badass.
Thanks to Fuzzy, Virgin Members Lounge, Pedestrian.TV, The Dandy Warhols, and Pedestrian’s video producer, Matt Dempsey.
Click here for the full interview transcript.
The Vine interview: Megan Washington
An interview for The Vine.
Interview – Megan Washington
Megan Washington is on the cusp of something big. Her recently-released first album, I Believe You Liar, debuted at #3 on the ARIA charts. During her current album tour, she and her band are playing five sold-out shows at the 850-capacity Melbourne venue, The Corner. Successful album tours aside, she’s booked to play (at least) eleven significant music events for the remainder of 2010. Put simply, people are going bananas for Washington.
Most people, at least. One of TheVine’s critics, Everett True, wrote a contentious review of I Believe You Liar, which was published the day before we spoke. Hours ahead of Megan’s sold-out show at The Zoo, my girlfriend Rachael and I sat cross-legged on the concrete floor of a nearby car park with the singer, who smoked five self-rolled cigarettes over the course of our 50 minute conversation.
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So tell me: what were your first feelings when reading Everett’s review last night?
At first it was…I don’t think it was a particularly compassionate review. I think that you can state your opinion, whilst not being overly hostile. You know what I mean? It was a bit hurtful, but I guess everybody feels like that about their art and the thing they try really hard to make.
Then I read it again this morning and realised that it makes no sense. It starts by saying that pop’s doing fine by itself, thanks very much, ask Katy Perry, blah, blah, blah. Then he said the production is ‘too pop’ on the record. How does that make sense? The production’s too pop, and [yet] pop’s doing fine.
Do you know what I mean? I guess you’ve got to be adult enough to understand that people have opinions and even though if I really thought… he didn’t even mention the songwriting. He said the lyrics were quirky, without actually discussing any of the lyrics. Why are they quirky; how are they quirky? I thought it was more of a vehicle for him to voice his opinion about the state of the music industry in Australia.
Full interview on The Vine.
This was one of the most relaxed and fun interviews I’ve done. It’s another occasion where I’m glad I was writing for the web, as I wanted readers to see it all unfold. I had no desire to cut any of it, and I’m glad that my editor didn’t either.
The Vine interview: Regurgitator
An interview with Quan Yeomans from Regurgitator, for The Vine. Excerpt below.
Interview – Regurgitator
With the help of drummer Cameron Potts (Cuba Is Japan, Baseball), Regurgitator’s core creative duo of Quan Yeomans (guitar, vocals) and Ben Ely (bass, vocals) are back in action. Previously, the ‘shock pop’ band – stable for most of the last decade with Peter Kostic (Front End Loader, Hard-Ons) behind the kit, and up until recently, Seja Vogel (Sekiden, Seja) on keys – were responsible for some the most interesting sounds to emerge from the burgeoning Australian alternative music scene of the mid-1990s.
Now that Yeomans and Ely have left Brisbane for Melbourne, Vogel is pursuing a solo career, and Kostic is geographically removed in Sydney, Regurgitator’s music will be released in an unconventional manner for the foreseeable future: Yeomans states that the band will “eschew the stock-standard album release/record label scenario for a ‘take it as it comes’ approach more in synch with current trends of the listener”. TheVine got in touch with the singer/guitarist in late August 2010 to discuss these trends (and others) in depth.
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Before we talk about the new material, I’d like to go back a few years to talk about Love & Paranoia (2007) briefly.
Oh, do we have to?
I’d like to know what you took away from that album release. How do you feel about it now?
I don’t know. Slightly embarrassed, I guess. I don’t really feel anything for that record, to be honest. I remember all of the things we did to get through it, in Rio [de Janeiro, where the band recorded the album], which is kind of funny. And it was fun having Seja there and being in that strange apartment in the middle of Rio de Janeiro. It was kind of interesting, but musically, [blows raspberry] – it means nothing to me in particular.
You’re embarrassed by it?
Oh, well, I wouldn’t say embarrassed. I don’t think about it. No-one comes up to me and goes, “What do you think about that record?” I don’t really feel embarrassed on a regular basis, but I felt a twinge then when you asked me about it, so maybe that’s a realistic understanding.
Full interview on The Vine.
More Regurgitator on MySpace. Music video for their song ‘Bong In My Eye‘ embedded below.
The Vine interview: John Butler
An interview for The Vine. Excerpt below.
Interview – John Butler
It’s a pretty safe bet to name John Butler Trio as Australia’s biggest independent act. Since their humble beginnings with the 1998 LP John Butler, the singer/guitarist and his regularly-rotating musical partners released Three to wide acclaim in 2001 and have continued to grow in stature ever since.
Butler [pictured right] owns Jarrah Records, an independent label created to release his band and The Waifs; in 2005, he and his wife inaugurated the JB Seed grant program to support artistic expression and encourage social, cultural and artistic diversity in Australian society. In the last five years, Butler and his supporters – including Paul Kelly, Missy Higgins and Blue King Brown – have given away somewhere in the vicinity of $500,000 to Australian musicians, managers and social activists through (the recently-renamed) The Seed.
Above all else, though, John Butler is known for his music, a heady mix of blues, roots, rock, and – more recently, with the release of April Uprising – pop. When TheVine reaches John Butler, he’s on a tour bus somewhere in France, having just played at a music festival. He and his current band – drummer Nicky Bomba and bassist Byron Luiters – have spent much of 2010 overseas. The trio completed their most successful US tour thus far, which included their biggest headline show to date at the sold out, 8,500-capacity Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. Ahead of his biggest Australian tour since the release of 2004′s Sunrise Over Sea, there’s a lot of ground to be covered. Butler is up to the task; he speaks with TheVine for over 40 minutes.
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Andrew: It’s been interesting to follow you over the years, because it seems your outspoken nature and what you and your name stand for are all ideas that many Australians can identify with. Besides your music, which obviously resonates with people, I wonder if this idea, that people feel like they can identify with you, speaks to why you’ve achieved so much as a public figure. What do you think John Butler stands for in the eyes of the Australian public?
John: Wow, what an introduction. That’s great. A real journalist, this is refreshing. Well first of all, who I am and how I define myself is a work in progress. And in another way I think it would be kind of pretentious to think of what I stand for to people. It would be almost a little bit too self-concerned to presuppose what anybody thinks about me.
I think to some people I’m a loud-mouthed fringe hippie who hugs trees. I think other people think I’m a blues artist. Some people think I’m a sensitive new age guy who writes songs about his children and his family. Some people think I’m somebody who’s lived in Australia for 24 years, and is Australian, and loves Australia but still has an American accent. [laughs] I think I’m many things to many different people. I think some people hate me and some people love me and there’s probably a lot of people who don’t give a shit and that’s probably a healthy thing.
Full interview on The Vine.
More John Butler Trio on MySpace. Music video for their song ‘Revolution‘ embedded below.
