A Conversation With John Birmingham, Brisbane-based author, journalist and blogger

I met with Brisbane-based author, journalist and blogger John Birmingham in late June 2010, to discuss his newest book, After America, for a story in The Big Issue. You can read that story here.

Full transcript of our conversation is below. It begins in the middle of discussing the book - which I’d only finished half an hour before we met - and ranges from discussing the characters and writing process to the merits of genre fiction, time management, and his social media usage.

Beware: for those who haven’t read After America, there are spoilers.

Andrew: I’m sure it was no coincidence that much of the descriptions [in the book] are quite cinematic. [note: John's publisher, Pan Macmillan, also commissioned a teaser trailer for After America ahead of the book's release]

John: Yeah. I mean partly, yeah – I’d like it to be a movie. There are guys in the U.S. at the moment arguing with each other over the rights to do the previous series [Axis Of Time] as a movie, but this one would be so much easier to do. Partly because I’m writing it easier, but also the more I get into the thriller headspace… It’s a cinematic form of storytelling. It’s got lots of colour, lots of movement, you’ve got that whole Bruckheimer accelerated narrative thing going - every seven minutes something has to happen! Yeah, so I guess it’s not surprising that people start seeing it in terms of movies.

One of the things I like doing when a book comes out, any book comes out like this, is I wait a couple of weeks and then I put a blog up and run a discussion on who everybody would cast in the various roles. It’s always interesting, because I have very strong ideas about who should be there. The problem is no one agrees with me.

I must admit I haven’t read any of your other fiction work. This is the first one.

That’s actually not a bad thing, because the books are all so are fucking different. It doesn’t strike me as an odd thing but it does put the zap on some peoples’ head that I’m writing something like Leviathan one year, and then I turn around and do Weapons Of Choice the next year. You’re not necessarily coming with a disadvantage for not having seen the other books.

I found myself more drawn to Miguel and Sofia’s side of the story, instead of the military stuff.

I really like Miguel’s character. I really liked his relationship with Sophia. It almost didn’t happen. In the first draft of the book, he’s alone. The deal with Miguel was to be almost a biblical burden that he had to carry, and his family… [spoilers]. In the first draft, his family wasn’t killed. They were just kicked off the farm and driven away. He decides he’s got to get to Kansas City to tell Kipper because he has this naïve faith in Kipper to save him.

I wrote the entire book where he was just travelling with his two dogs; the dogs were basically to give him something to talk to, and emote to. But it just didn’t fucking work. We just kept asking ourselves, “why is this guy off on his own when his family are travelling on their own through the badlands that he himself says are fucking badlands?” And also it didn’t emotionally justify how fucked up he was in the story.

So having sort of gone through it, we agreed in the end that the family had to die. But then of course to kill them all off, he was just going to ride down there and go out guns blazing, and so that’s why he has Sophia with him, to give him one last thing to live for.

And as a storyline, I loved this Caitlin storyline. I love just inverting all of the old action thriller tropes; you know, how the two most dangerous characters in the book are both chicks. One is not pregnant, but breastfeeding, and just recovering from pregnancy.

But I gotta say, writing the book, the most satisfying story to dwell on – and you do dwell on it, it’s so fucking long you live inside the story after a while – was the Miguel story. I’ve always liked cowboy movies, and again the nice thing about his was it’s a very traditional, a really fucking traditional cowboy story. It could be any of the Steve McQueen or John Wayne movies, you could easily lay that template over and it would match, millimetre perfect. It’s not because, of course, Miguel is a Mexican; it’s actually his ethnic background which gets him into trouble and kicks the story off.

You really did heap it upon him though, even at the end. He didn’t get a break.

No, he doesn’t. I’m not a religious person at all but I do like the idea of the story of Job where some poor average prick just gets pounded and pounded and pounded to see whether or not he’s going to break. That is Miguel’s role, to just see how much one person can take. In the third and final installation of the series, there will be the whole idea of biblical vengeance that I’m going to work through as well. I’m with you; as a storyline, it’s probably my fave, despite the fact that as a character, I think Caitlin’s my actual favourite.

This was always going to be a three book series. I wonder if your feelings toward the arc of the series have changed as you’ve been writing it.

Yeah, the first one for me worked just as a standalone book. I was very much aware and remained aware that a lot of people like the idea of a series. They like the idea of being able to go back in another book with the same characters. If they enjoyed the first one, they’ll enjoy the second one. They also hate fucking series because you have to wait a long time for the big questions to be resolved.

I agree with them. I’m a huge fan of Peter F. Hamilton’s work: he writes these huge arcing space operas that just go on and on and on. I love them, I’m addicted to them, but it just drove me nuts to have to wait 18 months to two years between each of them.

I wrote Without Warning so that you could read it, close it, and if you wanted to, you could walk away from it. It’s got a dénouement at the end where you obviously set up another story, but it didn’t have to go on. And I found After America really fucking difficult to kick off because I was really happy with the first book as a novel, as a book really. I haven’t written any others that I’ve been as happy as I was with that.

Having written what, to me, was the perfect book - although others would disagree vehemently - I just thought “Fuck, how do I top that?” And I had about six months where I just sat around. I know what I have to do in this second book because I’d already plotted it out, but it was just really difficult firing up.

And then when I finally did fire up, I broke my arm. I’d written the first draft and I was just about to sit down and edit that. That is actually where I did most of the work, in editing the first draft. I busted this arm in a training accident in Jujitsu and I had a plate inserted here [he shows me]. Although I was in plaster and then in a splint for only about seven or eight weeks, I didn’t get range of movement back in the arm for months. It threw everything out by about a year, which compounded the initial difficulties I had coming at this story because it was a perfect excuse not to engage with it. “Sorry, I have a broken arm – I’m not doing anything on this fucking book for a while now.”

The funny thing is I reckon it was, in a sense, a left-handed gift. The enforced break allowed me to sit back and actually spend about two months in my Relaxo lounge chair thinking about the characters, thinking about the stories. When I could literally lay fingers on a keyboard, I came back much more charged up. Miguel was actually part of that because I had changed his story completely. I really liked the idea of working in a very old fashioned western narrative under the guise of what’s virtually a military techno thriller. It changed a lot. Doubtless, the third one will be the same.

Did you do much storyboarding for this one?

No. I knew there were certain things I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to have a cattle drive, which is afflicted by a giant flood. Originally it was just an image I had. I saw these guys driving a big herd of cattle through a dead city and a flood comes through. So again, it was a cinematic vision - how fucking cool would that be?

When I was doing my very rough outline I just had this note, “Must have cattle drive and flood together. It will be awesome.” I also knew that, with Caitlin, I wanted her to parachute into New York at night with a battle going on. Again, I just thought that would be a great scene for her as a character, because the essence of Caitlin is isolation, and you don’t get any more isolated than freefalling through sub-freezing air into a dead city. So I knew that was coming, but in terms of structuring the entire narrative, as you do with a movie, I didn’t. I learned that lesson with Designated Targets; I did storyboard that out scene by scene.

I could tell you before I’d written the first word what this chapter would be about and what that character would be doing in that scene, hundreds of pages before they were written. And although it was a really efficient way to turn a book out, I wrote that book much more quickly than the other books I’ve done. It was also incredibly frustrating because the thing about characters is once they take off, once a character comes alive, which takes about 30 or 40 pages, they start doing their own thing and talking and speaking their own dialog. You actually don’t need to think stuff up.

Someone tweeted [at me] earlier today, they had a review copy and they said their favourite line in the book was on page 453, where Caitlin talks about the definition of disingenuous. I thought “What the fuck are you talking about?” I went and got the book, and it was really good. I had no memory of writing that at all because I really didn’t write it. That was just Caitlin speaking.

What you lose with really rigid storyboarding is that spark where the characters just do what they want to do. So although I block out the story and I know where I effectively want people to go, I don’t do it in the minute detail that I had in the past.

I follow you on Twitter, and I’ve subscribed to your blog [Cheeseburger Gothic] for a couple of years. I’m intrigued by how often you call upon your followers and your fanbase for motivation, for inspiration, for the little facts that crop up. I wonder; do you know of many other authors that are doing that? It seems really obvious.

It works for me, but I’m a bit unusual because I worked in journalism for 10 years before I wrote Felafel, for instance. I like people. I love literary festivals. I love going on tour. I just love this [gestures between us]; sitting in these bizarre, shitty little cafes in back streets, talking to people who I’ve never fucking met. I love all that stuff. Twitter is almost the perfection of that way of dealing with people. So it works for me. Other people would just die of horror.

I know publishers - all publishers, but mine in particular - are trying to get their authors to take up social media in the same way, for exactly the same reasons; to reach out and talk to their readership, to create bonds. They’re all coming at it from a commercial point of view: you create that bond and the next time you put a book out they run out and buy it. That is the core of their thinking; it’s quite cynical.

And yet, I’ve got great friendships out of Twitter. As you can see from reading the blog - when I travel now, I say I’m going to be in Melbourne next week and they all sort of gather in one spot, and we go out drinking and we have a good time. So there is a real personal bonus to doing it.

Other writers? I know Nancy Kress, who is an American sci-fi author, runs a blog. Peter Temple runs one, I think. Who else? There’s half a dozen or so, usually mid-list authors. If Stephen King or, God forbid, J.K. Rowling, was on Twitter, it simply wouldn’t work. You know exactly why it wouldn’t work.

I follow Eliza Dushku [pictured right]; me and 100,000 people follow Eliza Dushku [on Twitter], and we’re all firing our little tweets off. She was in Sydney the other week, and I just said she was shopping and I sent this tweet off to her. I said “You’re shopping around QVB, you should go to Pendalino for lunch,” because I went the other day and it was beautiful. That would have been one of maybe 600 tweets that came in the previous minute. There is no fucking way that somebody like that can afford to pay any attention at all to what’s happening in the tweet stream.

But for someone like me, who’s much more of a microcelebrity, it works really well. Having said that, most authors I know are social cripples, and they just would not have the wherewithal to pull it off.

It’s funny that you made these realisations yourself because you are a people person, whereas the publishers are looking at it from a commercial perspective. I’m not sure that Twitter would work if you had to hit them with a stick, saying “You must do this.”

No, a lot of [authors] don’t even like touring. I can think of some very big names who won’t sign books. If you’re getting that close to a reader, it’s such a horror to them that they just refuse to do it. It’s madness, but a lot of them are the same way.

I wonder if you have any thoughts on the divide between literary fiction and popular fiction.

I do. There was a very funny piece by Tony Martin on Scrivener’s Fancy. There was a panel discussion on Jennifer Byrne’s TV show with Matt Reilly, Di Morrissey, Bryce Courtney, and Lee Child, and the interviewer was asking this very question.

Lee Child [pictured left] is an interesting guy. He’s really fucking smart. But he writes thrillers. He’s not writing literature and I suspect that he decided he was going to play with this interview and so he just acted like a pompous git saying his books were every bit as good as literature. And anyway, Tony Martin wrote this fucking hilarious tear down of the interview. It’s totally worth going and Googling it up this afternoon, if only for your own benefit. Your life will improve having read it. [note: it's here]

He just pointed out there’s no way what Child’s does is literature, with this brutal demonstration. He took apart a couple of pages from one of Child’s books. I would never ever be so fucking foolish as to make that claim. I do entertainment. That’s it. Not completely low-brow, but upper middle-brow… not even that, lower middle-brow entertainment with a lot of explosions is what I do in the thrillers. And they’re great fun. They’re read by people who are not going to read literature and they’re read by people who like literature.

But [the books] aren’t literature themselves. There’s not a lot of point trying to compare and contrast because it’s like trying to compare and contrast first person shooters with traditional theatre. They’re both mediums for telling stories but they do very different things in very different ways; both are enjoyable and they both have validity.

One is not necessarily worth more than the other. They’re just very different things. I’ve had a lot of fun over the years making fun of literature, but I read it and at times I love it. I think the best writer working in Australia at the moment is Matthew Condon. Everything he’s written since The Pillow Fight has been absolutely fucking stunning, and it’s all ‘big L’ literature. Matt doesn’t do mere entertainment. He’s a really great fucking writer.

But he doesn’t sell a lot of copies at Woolworths and Kmart, and I guess the thing that energises this debate is that people, particularly literary critics and some literary authors, get themselves really worked up because they perceive, quite rightly, that literary authors are working really hard to not get the rewards they deserve.

And they do deserve the rewards, because they do work every bit as hard as the rest of us and their craft is honed to a much finer point than ours is. And yet they’re selling 1,500 and 2,000 copies of their books sometimes. Their writing is usually their second job. And their first job, if they’re lucky, is in something like journalism where it’s at least a related field. If not, some are in advertising, which is slowly losing their fucking soul from being sold day in and day out. It upsets people. There was a great review of After America in The Australian by their chief literary critic (Geordie Wilkinson) a couple of weeks ago who –

I didn’t read the review, as I didn’t want to spoil the book.

Well, you’ve read the book. Go read the review now. It’s fucking fascinating because this guy, he hates doing it but he admits the book is well written “for a thriller” - and you have to capitalise FOR A THRILLER. But he finds the politics of it, and the business of thrillers so fucking poisonous that it just fills him with hate.

I emailed one of the eds at The Oz and said “Everyone thinks I hate that review. Could you just pass on the word to Geordie, that I actually really liked it.” I enjoyed reading it as a review, and as a piece of advertising for the book… it worked. But I did enjoy it. And then the reviewer sent me an email back and said “Thank you very much”. I can’t publish it because it’s private correspondence, but one thing I can reveal is that for most of the time he was reading that book, he was seething, absolutely seething because he thinks I’m writing beneath myself. Which in one sense, I guess you could say I am. In the other sense he’s talking through his fucking arse, because thrillers are really fucking difficult to get right.

There are so many things that can go wrong and you do need to actually bring some skill and consideration for your audience to the business of putting them together.

I read an article in The Australian that was written when Without Warning came out. At the time, you said that you feel your primary audience is “security guys, military, ex-military and gun bunnies”. Do you think that’s still true?

I’m constantly surprised by my audience. Before I wrote thrillers I was surprised to discover I even had a geek audience. I was doing research for Dopeland [pictured right], where I travel around the country smoking dope and writing about it, and I ended up at a science fiction convention in Perth with these utter fucking freaks. And every one of them had read my books, every fucking one of them and most of them could quote slabs at me. It was a disturbing revelation, but a revelation nonetheless.

I try not to make suppositions about people who read my books, and it’s a good thing because I’m constantly surprised. A lot of chicks read them. They’re certainly not in the majority and they’re not half of my readers, but they’re probably about 35-40% of the readership, and they’re not the sort of chick you’d necessarily expect to read the explodey thrillers.

You do have strong female characters.

Exactly. My publisher Kate explains it that way. She says, “You write great female characters.” My old agent, Annette, who was a fiery, fiery fucking woman, emailed me about an hour or so ago to curse me because she’s supposed to be putting together a festival up in Noosa or something and she hasn’t been able to get to it because she’s been stuck in After America. And the reason is she loves the female characters; they’re tough.

I guess the sort of gun bunny thing comes from the fact that my blog regulars, there’s a preponderance of ex-military, ex-serving cops and security guys who hang out at Cheeseburger [Gothic, JB's blog]. So they set the tone of the place. Having said that, they’re a fraction of the people who pull through. I have lots and lots of lurkers… like you. You don’t strike me as a gun bunny. But they’re happy just to drop in. And some of those guys are very fucking funny. Boylan is just a comedic genius. I will scan my own blog looking for a Paul Boylan comment because I know there’s always going to be a big payoff.

I couldn’t tell you who reads them now. I know it’s 60% male, mostly over the ages of 18 which is reasonable enough. I don’t think they’re appropriate books for school kids. They’re incredibly violent. Beyond that, I couldn’t say. As an example, my friend, my blog buddy MonsterYuppie, who lives down the road here - he’s a monster yuppie. He owns his own medical technology company, he’s someone that flies all over the world first class, spends 200 days a year running it.

When Without Warning came out, I actually ran into him on his way to the airport. I had a box of Warning on me and said, “Here, take this for your flight.” “Thanks,” he said. He popped on the flight and texted me later on. He was in first class. There were five businessmen in there and three of them were reading Without Warning. [laughs] I would never have imagined that.

I’m interested to know how you balance fiction writing for this book with your regular journalistic work. I know you have two blogs [for Brisbane Times: Blunt Instrument, and The Geek].

Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I fuck up. Sometimes I take too much on and I fuck it up. Particularly with feature writing, because to do features properly, they’re hard work. And I get paid well for them, but I get paid much better for the books, and it’s always tempting to go where the money is and to just – because I’ve written so many features, it’s really tempting to me to just go “I’ll throw this together at the last moment.” Of course, you fucking can’t. So you know, I could point to half a dozen stories, cover stories for big magazines I’ve written that… they’re not shit, because I’ve had enough experience that I know how to put a feature together, but they could have been a lot fucking better than the published version, because I just wasn’t very good at juggling my time.

I try and assign different parts of the work day and the work week to different things. Blogs for instance take nothing to write. I did a blog about ninjas last week. Twelve minutes, I think it took to write. Hugely popular.

The thing with blogs, however, is the work is all at the backend. It’s in the comments, managing the comments. A lot of gallery journos, for instance: they’re not writing blogs, they’re still writing their own columns but they’ve been opened up for comments. Those guys never, ever reply. Probably a good idea, because unless you’re willing to get down to the same level as your nutty fucking blog followers, you’re on a hiding to nothing.

I got hired as a blogger by Fairfax and I work as a blogger, which means I read every comment and I reply to as many to them as I can. That can chew up a lot of fucking time. I did one, which I knew was going to go off the other day, about the World Cup. I did it purely to piss off soccer fans. It’s one of my shameful joys in life. And it did; it went off. Like, 400 comments in an afternoon or something, and I’m fuckin’ sitting there reading every one. Which would have an ego cost if I didn’t have such a massive ego, because these guys just were fucking hammering me, from one end of the day to the other.

That sort of thing can be really addictive and distracting because although it is work, I’m sort of doing my job, even though my contract at Fairfax doesn’t actually require me to do anything other than file cop, I’m compelled to. Also, I think blogs suck if you don’t get in there and engage. But it can be incredibly distracting. So once I’ve written the thing [a blog], I tend to have set times a day when I’ll go in to read comments and answer them, because otherwise I’ll sit there waiting for them to pop up, responding to each one.

With books, I try and have one book that I’m working on full-time, which means it gets four hours a day, and then I’ll have another one which I’m bringing up to speed that gets maybe an hour or so a day. And then once that one is done, it gets shunted off into production and the other one comes up. It’s a very unromantic, production line way of putting out the words, but it means I can work as a writer.

It also means you get the day-to-day interaction with people rather than being lost in your own mind.

That’s exactly right. My friend Peter Robb, who I fucking haven’t spoken to in years – he wrote Midnight in Sicily, a great book, one of the great books of the 1990s. Peter is a funny dude. He loves the fine life, he loves a meal, he loves wine, and he likes going out to lunch with friends, but he is prone to locking himself away in his apartment for years at a time. He told me once that when he was writing his biography of Caravaggio, he went so long without human contact of any kind, that the first time he stepped outside of the apartment he had a moment of panic, that he had forgotten how to speak. It’s not good.

I avoid that. [laughs] Facebook is my friend.

Even if it’s typing, it’s still interaction.

That’s right.

I’ll leave it there. Thanks, John.

After America is available now via Pan Macmillan. Follow John Birmingham on Twitter, and/or subscribe to his personal blog, Cheeseburger Gothic.

Filed under Conversations | Tags: after-america, blogging, Brisbane, conversation, dopeland, felafel, Interview, john-birmingham, Journalism, q-and-a, Social Media, the-big-issue, twitter, Writing | Comment (0)

A Conversation With Dave Miller of PVT, Sydney electronic rock band

I spoke with Dave Miller [pictured far right] - one third of the Sydney-based electronic rock act PVT - for Rolling Stone on May 11. At the time, it hadn’t yet been announced that the band were changing their name from Pivot to PVT due to legal threats. I’d been listening to an advance copy of their third album, Church With No Magic,  for a couple of weeks. Dave and I spoke about the new songs, the addition of Richard Pike’s vocals to their formerly instrumental-only approach, and the name change. (In either case, the name is still pronounced ‘pivot’.) Our conversation is below.

Andrew: I’m not sure what’s the most obvious question to begin with, Dave: the name change or the presence of vocals on your new album. Let’s go with the name change.

Dave: We got issued a cease and desist letter by a band in America, and it was just one of those things where we could have been clubbed. It was probably going to be extremely costly, and the potential of losing a court battle was not really worth the money and also it would have just held the album back a year or something while we had to do this. We figured we’d kind of do a cut and dry type thing.

It’s just one of those things, where if we want to keep this name so badly, it could cost us loads of money and we would have to put the album back a year because of some righteous American emos who think they deserve the name more. That was just one of those things, so in some ways we kind of saw it as a positive thing, and kind of shedding some old baggage and moving onto new things. That’s how I’ve eventually thought about it.

Do you think that thing’s been a long time coming? I’m sure you guys were aware that there were other bands called Pivot?

Yeah, we kind of thought they’d go away and the one band that was issued the court stuff was – they’ve never played outside their hometown. They’ve never put out a record on a label. We’ve played 10 times more places than they had in their own country, yet they still wanted to hold onto their dream of making it big time or something, I don’t know. We kind of gave up on guessing what the reasoning for it was. It could have been money or whatever, but regardless we’ve let the babies have their bottle.

When you put it like that, it’s a drag, man.

Yeah, it was a drag and we found out when we arrived in America, for SXSW, which was really bad timing. But as I say, we’re kind of seeing it as a step forward for our band, rather than a step back.

Do you think your fans will understand the change?

I don’t know. As far as liking the new name or something, I hope that they’ve all realised that sometimes these things happen. It’s happened before, loads of times before. There’s sometimes stuff like that happens, and on the Internet everyone in this sort of Internet world, everyone is just as important as each other, or seemingly as important as each other.

I saw that the name has been changed briefly on your Facebook page, and a couple of fans picked up on it.

I didn’t see that. Did they like it?

Yeah, the comment was “Good work on the name change PVT. It’s way more efficient now.”

Okay, yeah it’s more efficient, like Kraftwerk. [laughs]

Moving on to discussing the addition of vocals. Who argued loudest to include them?

It was just a thing that when we first started jamming our stuff and recording in studio, a lot of the ideas were vocal ideas rather than guitar or keyboard or something. We just rolled with that. Richard’s always been able to sing and it was just one of those things where we thought, “Well, why don’t we do this? We can do this.” It was a challenge and we could’ve quite easily done another instrumental album like the last one – O Soundtrack My Heart II, or something - but that would’ve been done in 3 months. It was a sort of challenge and we kind of realised, being in a touring band for 18 months altogether, we realised we don’t really listen to much instrumental rock music at all, and a couple of times we were like “If we don’t listen to it, why are we making it?” That was just an aside. It was more about the fact that we wanted to progress, I guess.

Is it just Richard singing on the album?

Yeah, it’s all Richard.

His vocals in ‘Crimson Swan’ are excellent.

Yeah, thanks [laughs] I’ll pass it on to Richard. That was one of the songs where we sort of wrote and recorded it in the same room in a couple of days. It was one of those things that was really organic and felt right straight away. We didn’t really work on it a great deal. It was just like “okay, we’re done. Let’s move on.” We don’t want to add to it too much and we don’t want to over think it.

Is there a particular track on the new album you’re most fond of?

Probably ‘Crimson Swan’ the most at the moment. It will probably change. I like playing ‘Timeless’ live, that’s really fun at the moment, when we’ve been playing it at the shows. But I guess it varies, as what happened with O Soundtrack. Those changed throughout the time. Sometimes you get bored playing certain songs or whatever, but I think ‘Crimson Swan’ has been a favourite of mine for a while.

The album is a bit of a brief affair. It’s 10 minutes shorter than O Soundtrack. Do you have many outtakes and B sides from that recording session?

Yeah, we’ve got loads. [laughs] We have about almost another album actually, but there’s just some songs that didn’t fit in with the [hearing] of it and other songs that were better – fit the general overall feeling of the record, that it just didn’t feel right. Like I said, there was maybe one song that might have gone in or might not, so we just decided to leave it out, as far as the continuity goes, and flow of the record.

Is the album’s title of particular significance?

It’s just a phrase I had. I kind of caught an idea that Laurence and I recorded, ‘Church With No Magic’ and I liked the symbolism of it. Richard decided to use the phrase in the chorus of the song and then it turned out to be the title of the record. It was just one of those things. But it was just something that I picked up.

When recording O Soundtrack you were in London and the Pikes were still in Sydney, most of the time. Did the process differ this time around?

Yes, it was entirely different. We recorded almost everything in the same room, and it was recorded and edited everywhere. It was recorded mostly in Sydney but some parts in London, and edited when we had some time off on tour [laughs] in London, and France, and Sydney, and it kind of was a moving project as we were touring around the world. Any time we had a small chunk of time off we’d start working on it again. I guess that’s one of the reasons why it has a real live feeling about it; it sounds like 3 guys in a room, and I like to think it sounds like all our live shows have over the past year. There’s mistakes, and there’s bombastic drums and lots of air in the room. That was my thing, we kind of wanted the record to sound a bit more – not “garagey”, but like 3 guys playing in a room.

I was re-reading the interview with Richard Ayoade from a couple of years ago. During that discussion you were talking about the advantages and disadvantages of using digital gear. One of the quotes was “Inconsistencies are great. Mistakes are good, and to have rough edges is kind of important.”

That’s what we made sure, that we… we didn’t focus on it, but that was another thing that we kind of made a point of in this record, to not sand off the edges and to keep it a bit more live and raw.

So it’s less reliant on the cut-and-paste style of digital recording?

It was recorded digitally, but not anything like chopping up drums and guitars so that everything fits perfectly, and sounds like fucking U2 or something. We didn’t want to do that. We just wanted to leave it as we played it. That’s basically it.

From that same interview there’s another quote one of you said, “we’ve seen a lot of live electronic music and been very bored, so that’s something we wanted to avoid – we don’t want to be cold and faceless.” Have you got anything special in mind for the next album tour?

I don’t know. I’m not sure if we’ve thought that far ahead, but one thing that we have realised makes a big difference is lighting. I know that’s not a new thing but it makes a difference as far as the audience’s interaction with the show. I think when we’ve had good lighting, it seems like it’s given us a far bigger boost. It’s like the comparison between having bad sound and good sound, having no lighting versus lighting makes a massive difference. If we can find the man who’ll make us light up well, we’ll take him on tour.

But I don’t think as far as live or electronic music, I think there’s probably a big difference between solo electronic stuff that I’ve seen, and what we do. Just because there’s a guy that plays electronics doesn’t mean that he’s an electronic act. There’s always exceptions to the rules as well; Jamie Liddell’s solo live act is absolutely amazing.

As a musician, do you find that an album release is less exciting in 2010 than it was a few years ago, given how easily accessible and traded music is these days?

People don’t really know when release dates are, do they? And they don’t really care for them. They just kind of want it as soon as it’s available, which is kind of… that’s the ‘me’ generation, which is not really my feeling but I understand it. Life moves on and society moves on, but I’m still totally excited about the record gig. I kind of wish that that particular date was a big deal. I remember when I was much younger, waiting for the date that the new Nine Inch Nails record would come out and go to the record store, and buy it that day. I wonder how many people do that anymore. [laughs]

But I’m excited, and I know Richard and Laurence are. It’s just a matter of… I’m more excited about people hearing this record than the last one, mainly because it’s a bigger progression, maybe, for us.

I’m interested to know how many labels these days have contingency plans in place for if an album leaks, or more accurately when it leaks?

Yeah, I don’t know; I think it depends on the band and the manager and the label and everyone else. It’s not just the label I don’t think. Everyone kind of has a say in it. You’re right, it makes a big difference as to when it happens and stuff. I can’t answer that question.

As I understand it, you’ve been a part of Pivot for 5 years now, Dave, is that right?

Maybe a bit less than that, 3 or 4 years probably. I’d probably played the first gig with them in 2006, so 4 years now.

At this stage, is there a particular band leader or do you all have equal input into what goes on?

[laughs] I think it’s pretty democratic. Any sort of ideas, being musical or otherwise, anyone can kind of shut down and anyone can get a ‘thumbs up’ too. Yeah, it’s good having a 3-piece group. There’s always a majority.

From what I’ve seen of you playing live in Brisbane over the last few years, the audiences keep growing and growing. I’m curious to know how you feel about where the band fit into the Australian musical landscape.

I don’t know, to be honest.

I find that at festivals, people know the Pivot name by now and they know you’re pretty different to everything else that appears on festival line-ups. They’re drawn to that.

Yeah, if people are open-minded like that, that’s great. [laughs] It’s just a matter of getting the gigs in the first place. That’s probably the main problem.

Was making a living from touring outside of Australia always the goal for the band?

Making a living any which way we can as far as the band goes, whether it’s playing in Europe, Australia, or America, or whatever. It’s not really – like lots of territories and lots of places you don’t really make any money. It’s more about the fact that you’re playing to a new audience and they’ll get excited and next time you might make money. It’s a slow process, but we played loads and loads in Europe over the past 2 years and I’m hoping it’ll come out to something next time we tour there as well.

I gather from your mailing list that the live video for ‘O Soundtrack My Heart‘ [embedded below] was recorded for a French TV show. Is there any chance it’ll be released as a whole performance on DVD or something eventually?

Yeah, when we got sent the DVD of the show, it was actually the first time we’d ever seen us videoed before, in decent quality, rather than just off our phones or something. It couldn’t have been a better situation and it was like an amazing lighting show and playing in front of 5,000-10,000 people in an outdoor festival with night time in France. It was pretty amazing. [laughs] Everything kind of fell into place.

I don’t know; it’s been a while since I looked at the video. I guess eventually maybe. I can remember there being a few duff notes that Richard was blushing about. But other than that I think we’ve got the whole concert. It’s just the matter of whether.. I guess it’s all in good time.

Final question, Dave. You’re a professional touring musician in a band that’s appreciated in indie circles throughout the world. What would you be doing if you weren’t a musician? Was there ever a plan B for you?

I used to do programming for websites and stuff. I’d probably be pretty bored of that by now and would’ve turned to something else. I don’t know, it’s never bothered me before, but maybe I’d be a florist or something, I’m not sure. [laughter] It’s best not to think of at the moment!

++

PVT’s third album, Church With No Magic, is released July 16 2010 (today!) via Warp/Inertia. For more information - including links to buy the album - visit their website. Video for the first single, ‘Window‘, is embedded below. You can read my album review for Mess+Noise here.

Filed under Conversations | Tags: australia, church-with-no-magic, conversation, dave-miller, electronic, electronica, Interview, mess-and-noise, o-soundtrack-my-heart, pivot, pvt, Rock, rolling stone, sydney, warp | Comments (2)

A Conversation With Get Busy Committee, Los Angeles hip-hop group

Koalas, uzis, and ‘Heartbeats’: Los Angeles-based hip-hop group Get Busy Committee (GBC) don’t mess around. Their 100% self-funded, self-released debut album Uzi Does It was released on their own label, Tokyo Sex Whale, and declared 2009’s ‘hip hop album of the year’ by Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park/Fort Minor off the back of their lead single ‘My Little Razorblade’ [audio embedded below], which sampled the rhythmic pulse of Swedish electronic act The Knife’s distinctive track ‘Heartbeats’.

Consisting of underground rapper Apathy, Styles of Beyond’s Ryu, and producer Scoop DeVille, GBC took the unlikely step of releasing the album in a USB uzi format that won them coverage on Wired, thereby reaching a tech-mad fanbase and creating buzz ahead of a digital album launch that saw Uzi Does It offered in mp3 form for just $1 via MySpace Music. Confused? Get busy. Below is an email conversation with the group, which was answered for the most part by Apathy.

Andrew: Hey GBC. I follow music industry news, I heard about you through guys like Bob Lefsetz (music industry commentator) and Ian Rogers (CEO of online music marketing company Topspin Media). Is it true that all publicity is good publicity, or were you weirded out by having a mid-50 year old guy like Bob write about you?

No way! Bob Lefsetz has been around long enough to have a good idea of what he likes, and I hope we’re on his good side! GBC does not age-discriminate, and we are definitely NOT for the kids!

Ian’s involvement and enthusiasm seems to have boosted your profile to a level that other acts might spend months or years developing. How important is his guidance and experience to the group?

In all honesty, Ian Rogers and the folks at Topspin have been the best thing to ever happen to our career. When in the past we would have a crazy idea, it would just stay a crazy idea. Ian is able to take a crazy idea, add sweet peppers and Giardiniera on top of a paper thin cut of beef, throw it in a French roll, and make a Chicago-style Italian beef sandwich out of it. (Sorry… Man V. Food is on in the background as I write this.)

We also have to thank our good friend Mike Shinoda [Linkin Park/Fort Minor] for linking us up with Ian!

“This is a marathon, not a sprint. Get Busy Committee hasn’t even played a live show since the record came out yet,” wrote Ian on his blog. Do you have an interest in the marketing and promotion side of things, or are you happy to let others take care of it while you work on the music?

Ryu: Yes, we are heavily involved with the marketing of the group. From the conception, it was very important to me that every detail of the group was carefully thought out. From the way we comb our hair, to the stylish clothes we wear. [A reference to their song 'Stylish Clothes']

I also have a background in marketing/PR with the clothing brand True Love & False Idols. With GBC I wanted our image, logo (koala with uzi), website, and merchandise to be an extension of the brand. Everything is designed by our good friend and owner of TLFI (and sometimes GBC collaborator) Alex (2tone) Erdman. The marketing for this album has been a fun experience for us.

“Financially we’re doing slightly better than break-even at the moment, which means no one is making a bunch of money but we aren’t losing money, either,” wrote Ian in the same blog post. I take it that - having been in other groups - GBC have been realistic about the financial situations for musicians since you formed a couple of months ago?

We were very realistic financially with this album. The point was never to become rich off of the album; we just wanted to generate enough money to continue to raise awareness.

Hypothetically, what would it take for an independent hip-hop act like yourselves to be able to live off your music - touring, merch, record sales, etc? Is this even possible in 2010?

An artist being able to live off of [recorded] music, touring, merch, etc is a very real possibility in 2010, provided that the artist is patient, and the margin of profit works in the artists’ favour. It’s also important that you offer a product that people can’t live without. Everyone can live without a CD, but nobody can live without an uzi-shaped USB, with a free album included!

In the end, the funds you take is equal to the guns you make!

From an interview here: you said “‘My Little Razorblade’ is probably the worst recording ever. The vocals are all blown out.” What? Are you serious? Fuck pristine, I love the edge this track has. It’s the first thing I heard from you guys, and still my favourite. Was it difficult to clear the ‘Heartbeats’ sample? Have you heard any feedback from The Knife’s camp?

Thanks! Razorblade is one of our faves as well. We like the blown out vocals as well!

As for the sample? The Knife have been really cool for not suing the shit out of us. We assume they are familiar with the track, I think one of the band members follow us on Twitter! @GetbusycommittE

In that same interview, Ian stated that the album is “something that you guys have been working on for over a year; in your spare time, and across the country, and for essentially no money”. You later said “Don’t make a record, it’s the worst way to try to make a living.” What are your day jobs? Do they have any relation to your music?

We have been fortunate enough in this business to sustain us through the years: Styles Of Beyond, Fort Minor, Demigodz, as well as producing for outside artists have paid the bills for years. Some years are better than others, but we have been very fortunate thus far. Some of the things we do to earn money are:

Scoop DeVille: His production credits include Snoop Dogg’s ‘Life Of  Da Party‘ and ‘I Wanna Rock‘, Fat Joe and Young Jeezy ‘Ha Ha‘, as well as upcoming tracks on albums from Busta Rhymes, The Clipse, Bishop Lamont, and of course the Get Busy Committee. Safe to say, the kid don’t need a day job.

Apathy: Shitloads of solo records including the recently released Wanna Snuggle? as well as upcoming albums with Army Of The Pharaohs, and the Demigodz. Production for Cypress Hill, Busta Rhymes and more. Your boy is good!

Ryu: Get Busy Committee, and PR/Marketing for True Love & False Idols.

You’ve all been part of the hip-hop scene for over a decade. You knew the music business pre-internet. It must be quite a change to work as GBC, whose marketing and promotional output is almost entirely online.

Yeah the marketing and promo has changed a lot, but we’ve been in the business long enough and have worked albums in just about every climate of the ever-changing music business, so the new way of doing things hasn’t come as a shock to us. It’s actually a welcome change after spending so much time on major labels. The new style of marketing is much better suited to a group like us. We love it.

Scoop, have you shown GBC material to Snoop or The Game? What kind of feedback have you been getting?

Scoop: Yeah I was just out in Miami recently with Fat Joe, DJ Khaled, Cool and Dre, and they loved the USB uzi! I should have brought more with me, everyone was taking pictures with them and shit! The industry is definitely taking notice of the moves we’re making. We’re actually working on a Get Busy Committee and Busta Rhymes song tonight! Shit is gonna be nuts!

Learn more about Get Busy Committee on their website. Follow them on Twitter at @GetbusycommittE, and watch their bittersweet debut video for ‘I Don’t Care About You’ below.

Filed under Conversations | Tags: apathy, conversation, get-busy-committee, heartbeats, hip-hop, ian-rogers, Interview, Media, Music, ryu, scoop-deville, the-knife, topspin, usb, uzi, uzi-does-it | Comment (0)

Mess+Noise Q+A: BAM! Festival founder Sarita Beavis

A Q+A for Mess+Noise about a new Queensland festival, BAM!

BAM!: ‘We Don’t Want To Rip Off Bands’

BAM! Festival founder and creative director Sarita Beavis sits down with ANDREW MCMILLEN in a Brisbane cafe to set the record straight about her fledgling event.

After a week of “malicious and nasty gossip, untruths, half-truths and fear mongering”, I had every reason to suspect that BAM! Festival founder Sarita Beavis would have sharpened her knives ahead of speaking to M+N. Our insider report, which detailed a compulsory artists’ meeting, articulated many of the concerns felt within the Brisbane music scene and beyond, namely that Beavis and fellow organisers were out of their depths.

However, over a Diet Coke in a West End cafe, Beavis emerges admirably. She answers questions candidly and is willing to admit mistakes. As a first-time event promoter, she’s learning – and fast.

Full interview at Mess+Noise.

This one was a bit funny to research and plan for. The festival had become a bit of a joke among Brisbane’s independent music scene since the first line-up announcement. It was greatly misunderstood by most people I know, who thought that they were trying to become a massive festival with a line-up that consists of dozens of little-known Brisbane bands… priced at $200 for a 3 day, round-the-clock camping event.

I thought that, too. Turns out they’re starting (reasonably) small this year, with hopes to attract 1,500 payers. And the people behind it are serious about trying to make this work on a pretty small budget. So it was cool to approach this hot topic - the ‘insider report’ on M+N attracted over 700 comments in just a few days - with an open mind, to allow my subject to speak her mind and set the record straight. Which she did, to her credit.

Filed under Conversations, Published Writing | Tags: bam-festival, Brisbane, Interview, mess-and-noise, Music, music industry, q+a, sarita-beavis | Comment (0)

A Conversation With The Gin Club, Brisbane rock band

This is the full transcript of the conversation I used as the basis of my feature article on Brisbane rock band The Gin Club for Mess+Noise. Tim Byron from The Vine said some nice things about my article in his June 30 ‘music dump‘ column:

Band profiles are a dime a dozen, but this is a good one, whether or not you even know who the Gin Club are. This is partly because the Gin Club’s leader Ben Salter is an articulate and unpretentious fellow – most indie bands are going to be all “this was influenced by Suicide and the Scientists” where Salter just says self-deprecatingly that “we’re MOR pop” and that he likes La Roux. But also because McMillen, in a way, gets to the heart of the band and how they go about doing things, where they record, and that they’re willing to let a Salter’s farmer brother-in-law join the band simply because he’s written a good song.

Thanks very much, Tim.

This interview took place at The Fox in South Brisbane, on May 20 2010. I spoke with The Gin Club’s cellist/singer Bridget Lewis and guitarist/bassist/singer Conor Macdonald; after a couple of minutes we were joined by singer/guitarist/leader Ben Salter. They were heading to QPAC afterwards, to watch a performance of King Lear. We spoke for just over an hour; this is what we said.

Andrew: This interview is for Mess+Noise. Their audience isn’t too familiar with you guys; this is one of the first times you’ve been mentioned on the site. If it’s not too lame, I thought I’d get you guys to give some background information on how you came to be The Gin Club, and how long you’ve been involved.

Bridget: We all joined at the same time, Conor and me, Ben [Salter], Adrian [Stoyles], Scotty [Regan], Brad [Pickersgill], Ola [Karlsson], and Ben Tuite. That was us beginning in about 2003. That morphed out of a group of people playing at an open mic night. That’s where we met and then we sort of started messing around; we probably met Ola and then had our first gig with him the next week. It happened very quickly.

Conor: We did our first album pretty quick. We did it in a day, and then played more. In the first year, we played so many shows. We had residences at Ric’s and The Bowery, and Ben had solo residencies at Ric’s as well, so at one point we were playing three gigs a week, just through residencies, and then plus supports and stuff, so we played a couple of hundred shows at least in the first year that we were together and sort of slowed down since then.

Bridget: We all lost our jobs, and had nervous breakdowns. [laughs]

Before we talk about Deathwish, I wanted to return to [previous album] Junk briefly. What did you learn from recording and releasing a double album, the pros and cons associated with it?

Bridget: A lot of people said “you shouldn’t do it” and a lot of people said “it’s too long; we won’t play it on the radio”.

Conor: But it reinforced to me that most people don’t know what they’re talking about [laughs]. It’s not worth worrying at all what people think that it’s going to mean for your career. I didn’t listen to it [Junk] for a long time. Last night was the first time in ages I listened to it and it sounds really good. The songs are really strong, it’s good the whole way through, and I think that should be enough.

Bridget: I don’t think there was anything meaningful about it being a double album. People will always bring that up; it just is what it is. I know that sounds a bit glib, but we sort of made it as a snap decision to put it out as a double album. It wasn’t a tough decision.

Conor: [Second album] Fear of the Sea came out in 2005 and we recorded Junk in 2007 and 2008. So that’s three years and it’s only five songs each, so we had plenty of songs and thought, “why not?” We had the opportunity to do a double album, so we did.

Bridget: I guess we probably weren’t going to do another one this time around, but that was as much because of the number of songs we had ready to go as anything else. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision to cut back, because we thought we’d gone overboard the time before. We don’t have any real illusions about people wanting to buy the albums anyway, [laughs] we just do what we do. You can download the three songs you like and be done with it.

Doesn’t that run against the whole idea of what you guys do though, to put your best songs out there?

Bridget: We do do that. For Junk we whittled down to 26, but we still had 26 we were really happy with and couldn’t see any point in ‘sitting on them’. They were all songs that we wanted to release at some point in time, so you either put them out then or you hold them back and you’re in the same position in 12 months’ time, when the new songs get piled on top.

Conor: Then you’re doubling up your manufacturing costs and promotion. There’s two ways to look at putting out albums. I’m a fan of putting things out every year, but at the same time, if you work it as a cycle or something where you’ve got to get the most out of each album that you can before you can do another one, I understand that as well. But if we put out a single album, of half the Junk songs and then 12 months later put out another one, it’d just be expensive.
Bridget: We’re just cheapskates. [laughs] That’s why we put out a double album and then we didn’t do anything for three years.

I just want to clarify how I think your songwriting process works. Is it a matter of you guys getting together, putting all your songs out there, and then voting the best of them to record?

Bridget: It’s probably most often a case of us all getting together and just recording whatever people have and having a go at it. Quite a lot of the stuff that people bring us hasn’t been demoed, and is still very rough. So for Deathwish we recorded 30 songs, and some of them were going to be more appropriate than others.

Conor: Of those 16 or 17 were ones that we sort of considered seriously. We just picked 13 out of that.

When viewed against Junk, it does seem more streamlined because it’s one disc. And maybe that was the intention: to have 26 on one album and then cut it down to half again, to reel everyone back in.

Conor: One of the overriding things we were going for this time was to fit the album onto vinyl. We wanted to have it go under 45 minutes just for that reason.

Ben: It was pretty convenient too. 45 minutes is as good a length as any. Otherwise you start umming and ahhing about putting this one on. Even though it was the length of the vinyl, it kind of seemed like a good spot to go, to make it 45. We didn’t pick a number of songs. It just happened to be 13 that fit on there.

How did you guys become involved with Mick Thomas?

Ben: Gus Agar’s band The Vandas were on Mick’s label. Gus knew Mick, and Mick was really interested in what we were doing, and we’re obviously big fans of Mick’s. So he kind of expressed an interest to Gus and coming up to the property and Gus said to him, “You should come up” and I said “That’d be awesome,” obviously. So he came up and it was pretty amazing. He’s a very nice fellow.

What about Jacob [S. Harris]?

Conor: We’ve been friends with him for years.

Ben: He’s got a song on the second album. He’s been a ‘kind of’ member of The Gin Club.

Conor: Yeah, probably not long after we first got together, maybe within a year or so of the band starting we met Jacob and were friends with him. When it came to the second album, it seemed natural to get one of his songs on it because we’d been hanging out and playing shows with him.

Ben: When we went to go to the property, which was two years ago almost to the day, he’d just got back from being in Canada for a year.

Bridget: He’d been gone for ages, and hadn’t found a job yet, so he had nothing better to do.

Ben: He bumped into Bridget somewhere and said, “Are you going out to Prior Park? Could I come?” We were like “yeah, why not; the more the merrier”.

Bridget: “We’re leaving tomorrow!”

Ben: He recorded about five or six songs, but none of them are on the album. It kind of seemed unfair to put one of Jake’s on when the rest of us are all vying to get songs on it. Jake’s got his own outlet. He released his own album, so it’s not so much a big deal for him to have a song on the album. But we’ve got six or so songs [with him].

I saw that Jacob co-wrote ‘Say You Will’; how did Mick Thomas contribute to the record?

Ben: He didn’t end up getting anything on the record, but one of his songs is on the b-side of ‘Rain’ on the vinyl. We were kind of umming and ahhing once again, the same kind of thing as with Jake. Whilst there’s a certain amount of prestige to be gained from putting Mick Thomas on your record, it’s a bit unfair to the rest of the members of The Gin Club to go “We’re just going to bump you off because we’ve got this famous guy…” and Mick’s not the kind of guy that’s going to get upset about that. Although, actually, one of his songs was going to go on the record.

Conor: Sara Storer vetoed it.

Ben: It wasn’t her; quite reasonably, it was her label. Mick wrote that song with Sara Storer and other guy at one of those Mushroom songwriting camp things that they do. Then he came and recorded it with us. We didn’t know that he’d co-written it at the time. He just said “Here’s one of my songs” [laughs]. I think the lyrics must be pretty much all Mick’s, but I’m not sure. Anyway, we were umming and ahhing about whether to put it on and we finally decided we were going to, and I rang him up and we were mastering it, and I was like “Mick, I need to find out if it’s going to be okay with the publishing because Sara Storer’s album is actually called Calling Me Home and it’s the title track.” And that was coming out in two weeks, so I rang him and it was pretty much if I didn’t hear back from him I was just going to do it and put it on the album. Then I got a phone call and he’s like “Oh, have you done it yet?” And I’m like “No,” and he’s like “Oh, bugger, I was hoping you were going to say that you had and I wouldn’t have any choice.”

That would have created a shitstorm, though.

Ben: Yeah, that’s why he didn’t do it, because he said “My publishers have been really good to me and I wouldn’t want to piss them off.” But I’m sure Sara Storer sells a lot more albums than we do.

Bridget: I’d like to hear the version so you can see how different it is.

There was a quote from Dan [Mansfield] on the press release where he said you’ve always done things your way, and you trust your instincts. Has that feeling intensified as the band progresses? Are there moments of self-doubt?

Ben: Has it intensified? [laughs] There are definitely moments of self doubt, all the time.

Bridget: We’re probably cockier than we used to be. [laughs] Is that fair?

Ben: That’s at both ends of the spectrum. One minute, one day –speaking for myself – I’ll be like, “We’re the best band in the whole world, and everyone else can get fucked.” Then the next day it’s “Oh my God, what are we doing?”

Bridget: I’ve got a theory.

Ben: What’s that?

Bridget: Maybe what we have now is because we’ve been doing this stuff for seven years; maybe we feel like we still think we’re the best band in the world, and everyone else can get fucked. But, we have this feeling that we have to give ourselves the best opportunities to do things, so sometimes that makes us think harder about stuff. When we started, everyday it was just awesome to be in a band. Now the business side of it makes us think more carefully about strategy. Not much – but certainly more than it used to.

Ben: It’s basic stuff. It’s not like self-doubt on an artistic level because we’ve got absolutely no –

Bridget: We’re definitely cocky.

Ben: We’re very cocky about that. Conor and I listened to Junk last night and I was going “This is amazing.” But you definitely get self doubt; there are so many people that are fantastic. But only some of them manage to be successful. For us, it’s just a daily struggle to keep your head above water financially. That’s the stuff that creates all the doubt. We’re wasting our time – but then when you listen to the stuff I get all like, “This is great. Who would want to be doing anything else?”

On that note, how often do you allow external factors to influence your decisions as artists?

Ben: When we had management, we started to, because I started to think maybe we don’t know what’s best, maybe we should just write the songs. We never let external factors determine the music, ever. That’s the great thing. There’d be no point in being an independent band on an independent label making no money, and then having someone else tell you what you can do and can’t do. It’d just be completely… If someone’s giving me heaps of money, then maybe they can have an opinion about what goes on. But until then, they don’t get…

Bridget: [laughs] Not while we’re still starving.

Ben: Exactly. But when we had management we kind of took a bit of a back seat and said “maybe we’d let someone else see if they know best”. We let them do little things. We’re such control freaks though, so every single press release has to be a certain way. I can’t abide punctuation mistakes and stylistic stuff, so when we had management we thought “this is the whole point of having management; we’ll let them do it”. And it wasn’t really working. If someone was giving us lots of money or we had all these reasons to be cheerful about our position, then I’d be willing to let go of a bit of control, but as it is we just go “this is our pet project and we care very deeply about it and why would we possibly want someone else to influence our decisions?”

So you’re saying you don’t have anything to be cheerful about?

Ben: No, we do! Not at all; I didn’t mean it like that. I guess I just mean in financial terms. That’s what it comes down to. You’ve got to make concessions when there’s money involved… That’s when the question could seriously be asked, because [right now] we don’t really make any money. It’s not even a question of us compromising. I don’t see the point, anyway.

Conor: Even if we were to compromise what we’re doing, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to bring us any more success or anything either. We’d just be unhappy and stupid.

Ben: And feel like idiots and poor. [laughs] We’d be better off feeling self-righteous and poor.

Bridget: Self-righteous and poor. [laughs] That’s definitely preferred.

On the artistic side, it was interesting to note that Gordon [Stunzner, Ben Salter’s brother-in-law] has a song on this album; someone outside the collective. Although I understand he taught you guitar.

Ben: Yeah, and he kind of encouraged me. I always had this thing – he lets us use that place [Prior Park] for free and I always said to Gordon that when he turned 40, I’d take him on tour. He’s a farmer, but he’s pretty rock and roll; I’m in a band but I really think that being a farmer’s amazing. So it’s this thing; I kind of grew up a lot there and learned ‘how to be a man’ and all that crap at the property, and so I always said to him “We’ll take you on tour when you turn 40, and you have to write a song.” There was absolutely no expectation that it would be any good or that it would go on the album or anything like that. I just thought, “we’ll force him to do one” but it just came out really beautiful. The more I listened to it the more I thought this was so –

Bridget: He’s got such a great voice.

Ben: I kind of fought for it from the beginning and then I understood that everyone else in the band would not necessarily have the same kind of attachment to it. But even the people who were against it to start with are now like, “It’s really good”, because when we were putting the album together, because Mick’s song wasn’t going on, it was like “what are we going to put on?” I just said “No, we’ll put Gordon’s on. It brings a certain balance to the album,” and I think that’s true. It goes to prove that everyone has a song in them. Everyone’s got at least one good song. Gordon’s written a few more now and so he’s going to come down and play the songs at the launches.

Oh, awesome. It’s given him confidence to take it to another level.

Ben: I hope so. At least – even if it’s not another level, it’s just so satisfying to write a song and record it and release it. He came up to me after he finished recording it, and he was just beaming. He was like “Oh, I understand now why you do it. I understand.”

Bridget: It’s a huge buzz, especially when you’ve been reluctant about doing it and someone bullies you into it. I know this. And you never thought that it was good enough or whatever, and that’s really exciting.

Conor: With the band behind you… We’re all friends and everything, so I’ll be playing my song and Gordon playing ‘Book Of Poison’ or something and we’ve got half a dozen awesome guys behind us backing us up, who know what they’re doing. They bring the best out in you.

Ben: When you’re first starting to write songs, generally you don’t listen back to yourself, so that’s the first step: to record it and listen back to it, because when you’re playing it yourself you just don’t have any idea. So then you listen back to it and then you go “that’s shit; it’s just me and the guitar, and it sounds awful”, but I think – myself, at least - but as a band we’re getting a lot better at hearing, when you hear a rough version of a song, hearing what it could be, hearing how it will sound once everyone adds their little bit to it. With that song we must have done about 20 takes or something. We just kept doing it and doing it, and it just sounds beautiful.

At what age did he teach you guitar, and when did you start writing your own songs?

Ben: I had guitar lessons when I was in high school, but then I really wasn’t interested in playing guitar. I was just going through the motions, but then because I really looked up to him – he’s a bit older than my sister, and he was this cool, handsome dude. He could play guitar and had long hair and an earring and stuff.

Conor: He was very handsome. Still very handsome.

Ben: Yeah, and so he really encouraged me with everything I did. I guess because he was trying to crack onto my sister, so he had to impress the little brother, but he didn’t really have to. [laughs] But he taught me how to play – there was always “The One I Love” by R.E.M., for example – and just a couple of songs, and he kind of made me excited. He took me to my first ever Big Day Out in 1994, which is when I actually decided I wanted to be in a band. Before then, I liked music, but I went to the Big Day Out and it was like “Oh my God”. That would have been in… they got married in ’92 so like ’93 or when I was in high school and stuff. My first Big Day Out was in ’94, when I was in year 12.

How long after that did you start sharing your songs with others?

Ben: Pretty soon, because I’d already been playing in bands when I was in high school, so we’d already written songs when we were in year 11 and 12, so it’s only now that I’ve got older that I realised how – it’s the ‘young man’s thing to do’, a young person’s thing to do. When you’re really young, you’re too stupid to be scared. That’s why when people are young they do all this stuff like get blind drunk and go swimming, and when you’re a little kid and you go swimming in the ocean, you don’t think about anything that’s dangerous in there. You do all this stuff when you’re young but you just don’t even think twice about it.

I was playing all these songs and singing; now when I think about it I’m just horrified. Like when Gordon was 40, writing his first song, playing, he was so terrified about people hearing what he really thought about something. The older I get, I realise it’s only because I’ve been doing it so long, it’s just a habit. But for someone, the older you get, the idea of actually singing songs you’ve written is just terrifying. I started so early that I was too stupid to know how bad it was.

The same question to you, Bridget and Conor; when did you start writing songs and when did you start sharing them?

Bridget: I wrote my first song in 2005, when I was living in England and I recorded it on a webcam camera and I sent it to Conor, and I’ve written like two or three since then. I’m far from prolific. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
Conor: I think I learned to play guitar when I was 15 or so. I would’ve started writing songs shortly after that, playing solo shows when I was 16 in Hervey Bay. There’s not a lot else to do in Hervey Bay.

Ben: It’s the same as Townsville.

Conor: Yeah, so the city council had a youth committee and they would put on gigs and stuff and get bands like Nancy Vandal and Sunk Loto to come and play. I’d play solo shows. Women In Docs played as well, when I was 15 or 16, and I played with them.

Ben: Oh wow. My sister went to school with Roz Pappalardo [of Women In Docs], and then she was a student teacher at my school. When we were in year 10 we got roped into supervising the year 8 blue light disco or whatever, and Roz was a student teacher and we were in year 10 and we used to think Roz was super cool because she played music and stuff. [laughter] So, we all know each other now.

This is a really straightforward question, but what compels each of you to write and share songs? What makes you do it?

Bridget: [to Ben] You wouldn’t have anything else to do.

Ben: I just love it. Since I’ve first done it, I love the attention, I love being on stage and people acknowledging you. It’s like a craft because it’s something that you’ve made, on par with a poem, but then it’s also poetry mixed with a technical ability, or efficiency. So it’s good to be acknowledged by your peers for being able to produce [music], and then the courage and confidence to get up [in front of a crowd] is attractive to people.

I’m always saying this, but if you ask most people what their biggest fear is, I think the biggest percentage is public speaking. People are terrified of it. It gives you so much confidence to get on a stage, but then I love the writing part, too. I love words and I love music, so why not do it myself? I just love it. I love lots of things, but it’s the thing that I’ve been doing the longest, and that I’ve had a chance to develop. I think I want to be a chef now. [laughter]

What about you, Conor? What compels you?

Conor: I just feel like I have to. I’m not as fussed on the performance side of things. I write songs and I play them. I pretty much write them for myself and sort stuff out in my head, or express things or something. And so even if people weren’t listening, or if I wasn’t in a band, I’d probably still be writing songs. I’ve got songs that I’ve written that I don’t play live when I do solo shows or anything, just silly, short little songs that I play for myself now and then. So it’s just something that I feel like I have to do to help me get by.

A coping mechanism.

Conor: Yeah, to an extent, and then it’s fun as well. When you feel like you’ve written a song that you like then it’s great. You feel quite pleased.

And to take it from the process of just you and guitar to the whole band must be gratifying.

Conor: Yeah, mostly; it’s funny because I always feel like I write two kinds of songs, and I just write them over and over again. And thankfully with The Gin Club, they don’t always sound the same. They certainly don’t sound the way – they don’t turn out the way I wrote them. ‘An Horse’ on Junk has got brass [instruments], and the arrangement and the feel to it is mostly Ben. Otherwise it was just another Will Oldham rip-off. [laughter] So it’s good like that, seeing it fully realised and fleshed out. That can be good.

Same question to you, finally, Bridget.

Bridget: Look, I don’t feel compelled at all. I feel bullied occasionally, reluctant always. It’s not something that comes naturally to me, I don’t think, and sometimes when I’ve got nothing better to do I’ll tinker around and occasionally something will come out of that that might have potential, but I don’t consider myself to be a songwriter. So I don’t really know how to answer that question.

Ben: You’ve written songs.

Bridget: Yeah, but –

Ben: They’re good too. You’ve written four. Bridget wrote two for Deathwish that we didn’t use although they were quite good. She insisted that she’d written a new one that was better, and she was right.

Bridget: So four. Actually I wrote a song when I was about grade 6 or 7, called ‘Heatseeker’, and then I found out that AC/DC has a song by the same name, so I scrapped it. It wasn’t quite as good.

Ben: Was yours similar to the AD/DC one?

Bridget: [laughter] No.

Returning to your comment about confidence earlier, Ben. I’m interested to know when it turns from confidence to cockiness that you mentioned earlier.

Ben: They balance each other out. Every person that you see, the more cocky they appear, the more insecure they are within their heads, and I think it’s really wrong to assume that anyone who’s really arrogant really isn’t just totally insecure. It’s obvious so we’re never cocky… Well, that’s not true; we are cocky. We do think we’re good, but that comes from a sense of camaraderie more than anything else.

If we really thought we were better than anyone else, that would be cocky, but we still love music and we’re just totally in awe of [other] people. We’re very selective about the people that we do like, and we do think a lot of music is shit, which it’s true of just about anything that you know. There’s a lot of mediocrity, but I’m so competitive and I see bands all the time that just make me go “God I wish I was in that band,” even though I’m in the best band in the world. But I still want to be in everyone else’s band because I get so excited about other musicians and other songs, and think “God, I wish I’d have written that” So I think that pretty much prevents you from being cocky.

I can’t listen to my own songs, generally. Unless it’s with [one of his other bands] The Young Liberals, in which case I listen to that all the time. Generally, because that’s done so off-the-cuff, it’s so refreshing to listen to because it’s so bad, in a way. But with anything that I’ve put a lot of my time into, it’s really difficult to listen because I just feel so awkward and embarrassed by it.

Bridget: We’re very lucky that whatever we do, we know that we have nine of us to back it up, so it either gets filtered out really early or you can rely on the fact that at least everyone else in the band’s going to think it’s great, and it’s a bit of a buffer zone between… You don’t feel quite so exposed because you have everyone else supporting.

I think one of the nicest things I like about watching you play, Ben, is that you have a confidence – I don’t know if this works – a confidence that allows you to actually be really humble about the way you do it, and that’s stuff you say to us all the time about “if people pay their money then they’re entitled to talk,” and I think that’s really meaningful. It shows that you don’t have an attitude that “everyone in the world should shut up and listen to me”.

Ben: If you want to teach someone a bit of humility and about what the entertainment business is really about, then make them go and busk for five years, because it just takes your ego and just destroys it. You’re just there to entertain people. They don’t want to hear your songs. And that’s such an awesome thing because for every time that you just go “Oh my God, I just want to kill myself,” there’s a thousand other times when people just come up to you and go “Oh my God, I was having such a bad day and you played that song and it made me so happy”. And that sounds so trite but it’s not. It’s really awesome.

That’s what we are. We’re entertainers. We’re artists as well, and the art always comes first, but I also want to entertain people, so it’s a delicate balance. I know we’re kind of off the point here, but the busking thing is so true because you just realise that making people happy is not the worst thing in the world. It’s a really cool thing and if you can make people happy through your own expressions of your own songs, then that’s even more amazing. We’re very privileged.
I just can’t stand it when there’s a sense of entitlement from bands or from people towards being in a band, where it’s like “the government owes me a living because I make songs”. It’s like – get fucked. Go get a real job. No one is entitled to make a living from being in a band. No one’s entitled to make a living out of doing something they love. It’s a privilege, not a right. We’re just very lucky that we’re able to do it. Everyone has to work. We all have to.

Before we move on, returning to your comments about favourite bands: Ben, I remember standing behind you while Spiritualized played at the Riverstage [in January 2009 as part of the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival].

Ben: Oh, I love that band. I saw them the first time they came to Australia, I went and saw them. We were mixing the first Giants album. We drove up specially and saw them at The Arena, and it was just amazing. They’re such a good band. Definitely that band. [laughs]

I saw them at Mt Buller as well, with ATP, and went to England in December to see them play [the album] Ladies And Gentlemen [We Are Floating In Space] in full.

Ben: Was it amazing?

It was amazing.

Ben: I was this far away from going and seeing them do it at ATP with The Drones, and then I had this car accident and realised that I was going to have to pay for someone’s insurance. The Drones basically said “you can come sleep on the floor and roadie for us”, and I had some other friends that were going… and then I didn’t go. I hope they do it again because I still haven’t seen that. So it was really good?

They had a 21-piece band, full string section, full brass… just fucking sensational.

Ben: When they did ‘Electricity’ and they get to the end and just do this meltdown, that trick you hear them do on the Albert Hall live disc as well. I read a quote from Jason Pierce [of Spiritualized], and he said “We never really made much money from touring because every time, it’d be like ‘we’ve got some more money, could we get some more strobes?’” [laughter] I could see now why, because the end of ‘Electricity’, the strobes just build up until you think “this is fucked; my brain’s going to melt” and then they just get louder and louder and the strobes get stronger, and then without any cue at all they just go into ‘Home Of The Brave’ and that first slide line starts, and it’s like “Oh my God, that’s unbelievable”.

You guys spent two weeks at Prior Park again for this album. What’s an average day at Prior Park like?

Bridget: Awesome. You get up, put the kettle on.

Ben: Some people get up earlier than others and go and potter around, but generally everyone’s up and about by about 11. When we had [Junk producer] Magoo, he was very good at telling us not to drink, at least for the first couple of days. He taught us so much in that, he kind of said at the start “I’m not going to produce you…” Anyway – We’d wake up about 11 and eat; someone makes breakfast, bacon and eggs.

Conor: Ham and cheese on toast. Beans.

Bridget: We’re usually pretty good at sending somebody in to do some work pretty early on.

Ben: Then Murray [Paas, The Gin Club’s recording engineer] will go down and fire everything up. I’ve just come back from doing the same thing with Giants Of Science [one of Salter’s other bands]. That was the first time I’d been there with a different band, so it was pretty much the same ritual. But some differences in that with The Gin Club, one person can go down and have a song and just go and start working on it with Murray, and the rest of us are just happy to just read or wander around, play cricket or something. Then someone will come play some bass or something.

It’s pretty much like, “Who wants to play?” You’ll be like “Okay, I’ll pay bass”, or “I’ll play drums”, so someone’ll come up. We’ll work all the way through ‘till the sun starts to go down and then in winter, this time of year, as it gets to dusk it’s just spectacular; the whole countryside turns all these different shades of purple. It’s a really cold light. When the sun starts to go down everyone goes and gets firewood, because you always run out of firewood. All the while, people are still recording.

Bridget: Then somebody puts dinner on.

Conor: It’s usually like four people, maybe five people recording at any one time.

Ben: There’s at least one person there just to have an opinion because Murray’s not much of a one for having an opinion. He just kind of engineers. So you need someone there. There’s no dearth of producers, ever.

Conor: When we were doing this stuff for Deathwish, there were those days when we brought a bunch of girlfriends up.
Ben: Yeah, we had like three days with girlfriends or something. [laughter] We did the girlfriend thing so all the girlfriends came up, which was really quite nice actually. They were pretty good, mostly.

Conor: They were pretty good at getting stuff ready in the kitchen. [laughter] Keeping me out of the way.

Bridget: It’s good, it kept the pressure off me!

Ben: I did all the cooking for Giants [Of Science, one of Ben's other bands], pretty much.

Anyway, we try not to start drinking before the sun goes down because it’s very easy with so many friends, at a campfire… Magoo was really good at teaching me the practicalities of productive work. He was like “You can keep recording stuff well into the night [while drinking], but you’re going to wake up the next morning and listen to it and it’ll just be shit and you’ll have to do it all again. When you start to get sloppy, you’ll do take after take and it’ll just get worse.” Then we’ll stop at around 10 or 11. If you get excited you can do overdubs until three in the morning.

Bridget: If you decide you want to re-record the whole of The White Album, then you can be there all night.

Ben: We did that, and we recorded a couple of rap tracks. [laughter] That’ll be on the next Hissy Fit [a collection of The Gin Club’s outtakes, b-sides and live recordings]. There’s a great one about the Canberra Raiders in there.

I cannot describe to you how much fun it is. There’s really no mobile phone reception, so once a day someone drives the car down to the grid. You only have to drive about 50 meters to get reception, so someone bunks all the mobile phones into a car once a day, drives down to the grid, and get all the messages for all the people at once, and then drives back and everyone checks.

There’s TV and stuff, but you’re just so focused. The beauty of it is that as soon as you get bored, or you’re sick of hearing stuff, or you’re sick of recording, in The Gin Club you can pretty much take a day off because there’s so many other people. I remember listening to all the other songs we’d done and going, “What’s this song? I’ve never heard it before.”

Bridget: When you get home after two weeks, and there’s stuff that you just didn’t notice was going on.

So there’s a dedicated studio there?

Ben: No. I’ve had my eye on a worker’s cottage there [at Prior Park]. It was built at the turn of the century, so over 100 years old. It’s all falling down, but it’s very sturdy in its basic construction. I always had my eye on it as a potential studio, so I finally mentioned it to Murray. So we went and did an initial test run for Junk, so we pretty much recorded all of Junk and then we went back and recorded it all again. I think we only kept one song, ‘Abigail’.

We just take everything. We hire a three-ton truck, load it full of gear, and Murray doesn’t charge us too much. We bought Magoo for Junk, but this last one was just Murray and Dan [Mansfield]. It really doesn’t cost that much. The main expense is the three-ton truck and we’re trying to get around that because Anne and Gordon, my sister and my brother-in-law are keen for us to keep doing it, and they’re prepared to if we invest in a certain amount of infrastructure. It doesn’t really need soundproofing, unless you’re worried about the sounds from outside coming in. There’s no real concern about the sound from inside going out. But we get a lot of bird noises and stuff. All it would take is just a desk to do headphones, mic stands, and then we just take everything else there. Murray pretty much deconstructs all of [his studio] The Foundry and puts it in the truck. We’ve got so good at it that we can disassemble it, drive it and assemble it in a day and we’re ready to go.

Did you set yourself to a deadline, or did you happen to decide you were finished after two weeks?

Ben: We only had two weeks; everyone’s got to work and stuff. When we did these sessions, the same as with the Giants, we just see what happens.

Bridget: We did do quite a bit after we got back.

Ben: We got shitloads done. We did 13 songs in two weeks, which is – but we did a heap when we got back. We re-recorded whole songs, but the guts of the album…

Bridget: It’s all linked back to that stuff.

Ben: There are songs on there, about three or four songs that we demoed that I’ll probably do on a solo album or save for the next Gin Club album, and songs that Jake did – we didn’t use any of his, but we enjoyed recording them. He can use them for whatever. But we really didn’t have any set goal. The main reason we wanted to go was because Ula had to go back to Sweden and we wanted to get his songs down before he left, so that if we did have another album coming out we’d at least have his component before he went to Sweden. So we did that and the rest of it was just there.

So Ula’s back in Sweden for good?

Ben: Well. Every time he says that he is, he comes back. So I don’t know exactly what’s going on with the visa, but he reckons he’s coming back again later on this year. Hopefully the next tour we do, he’ll be back again. Brad’s back at the moment as well, from Canada, so that’s exciting, although I haven’t seen him yet. He’s a very busy man.

It’s time for me to ask you about ‘Milli Vanilli’, Bridget. [A song from Deathwish - you can stream the song via my Mess+Noise album review] Is the story real or fiction?

Bridget: Real, not me personally but the neighbours at… I won’t tell you where I live. No, neighbours of mine across on the other side of the creek where I used to live, whose house got badly damaged in the first of those bad storms we had in November 2008, and then again in March 2009, those bad storms that hit The Gap. They lived right by the creek, and they had to move out of their house. They gradually rebuilt it and about a week after they moved back into it, the second lot of storms came and knocked the whole thing down. I wrote pretty much all of the lyrics while walking back from the bus on Waterworks Road, back down to my house, as I walked past where they were cleaning out their pool again for the second time. [laughs] I shouldn’t laugh. It’s not funny at all. It’s based on fact, inspired by truth. And I love Milli Vanilli, they’re awesome.

Ben: She does not, that’s bullshit. [laughter]

Conor: She’s actually a massive No Doubt fan. [laughter]

Like Ben said earlier, it’s a fucking great song.

Bridget: [laughs] Thank you.

I was listening to the album while I was on the internet, as background music. The song went through and it was ticking through my head, then I was like “I have to hear that again” so I sat back and listened to it that song. It blew me away.

Bridget: I’m glad you like it.

Ben: Told you! It’s not just us. [laughter] And it’s got such a sting in its tail, and it’s such a great song in that it can be – you can apply it as a metaphor for so many things. You can use it as a relationship metaphor, because it’s like a sonnet or something. It’s got the whole bulk of it within that last line of “if you live beside the bank, guess you’ve got yourselves to thank”. It’s such a… all the way through, you’re feeling really sorry for these people, but then you’re going – not quite “it’s not your own fault” – but it’s kind of like, “you reap what you sow”.

It’s deep.

Ben: It’s mega deep.

Bridget: So was the water. [laughter] It really did carry a Falcon down into the creek. It was pretty intense.

Ben: There’s lots of storm metaphors in King Lear, which we’re about to go and see, as well.

Conor, I want to ask you about ‘I Am My Own Partner’. It seems to come from a deeply personal place. Is there hesitation before sharing that kind of thing?

Conor: Oh no, not really. I don’t think about…

Ben: Conor’s so emo, he loves it.

Conor: That’s awful. I have my songs and I sing them, but I don’t really think about people listening to them when I write them, or when I sing them. ‘I Am My Own Partner’ is fairly straight forward. I think it’s kind of funny as well.
Ben: It’s pretty emo though. [laughter]

Bridget: I love the way it’s got lots of animals in it.

Conor: A lot of my songs have lots of animals in them, so it’s the same as before. I feel like I write two kinds of songs, and try to get better at writing them. I think ‘I Am My Own Partner’ is probably the best song I’ve written of that type.

Is it a matter of creating a positive thing out of a negative experience?

Conor: Not especially, but having said that it is kind of positive, I think. It’s not just a miserable song. I like being fairly self-reliant so it’s fairly important to me to be able to look after myself.

Ben: I think it’s magnificent. I don’t think it’s entirely sad, but it’s a real ‘me against the universe’ kind of sadness, that desolation of going, “There’s nothing else”. I find that honesty so amazing, in songs like that. There’s just this real existential – not dread, but affirmation almost – of all around there’s darkness and all around the edges fall away to infinity or whatever, and you’ve just got to go on. That’s the image it conjures up to me.

Conor: I did have a cat that I loved very much and she disappeared, and I was pretty devo about that. Still am. [laughter]

Okay, moving on. I want to talk about the notion of making a career as musicians. In each of your minds, what makes successful independent musician?

Ben: It depends on what you mean by success. To my mind, we’re a successful independent band in that we have – the most important thing to us is the respect of our peers, and mostly our peers are each other and we all seem to like what we do. And then we have people like The Drones and Tim Rogers and Mick Thomas, to name just three, who all think our band is really good and I constantly scratch my head and go, “They don’t really like it, they like it because of some other reason.”

People go “What is that reason?” and I go “I don’t know, but there’s some other reason. They think that they’ll appear cool if they like us, but they don’t really like us.” And I have to constantly be reminded and told they actually like our band because we’re good at what we do. In that respect I think we’re very successful, but to be self-sufficient and to make a living, I guess that’s the aim of every musician, independent or otherwise.

I just think those days of – it’s one thing, everyone goes “Oh, back in the ‘80s, everyone went to see bands…”. Back in the ‘60s, as someone else pointed out to Conor and I the other day, and something that I know anyway, even in the ‘80s or early ‘90s a band like us would have got a major label deal fairly quickly. But then maybe not, because logistically it’s a bit tricky, but the quality of the music, I think, is really high, but those days are gone. There’s no use getting nostalgic; things need to change and it comes back to that thing, in my opinion, that no one owes us a living.
We make music. We are privileged to live in a society where we can make music and even make money out of it, and have a job, and say what we want, and play what we want, and go where we want. It’s a privilege, not a right and it’s something that even though I bitch and moan all the time about it, I’m able to pretty much support myself through the generosity and patronage, a lot of the time ,of the people around me who are very tolerant.

I’m pretty much the only person in the band apart from Gus, sometimes, who makes their living out of doing music all the time. I’ve got to be in like four bands or something and play all sorts of other gigs to do it, but I just feel that’s an absolute privilege. So I feel that we really are successful. We release albums, they’re good, I think, and people come to our shows. Most of all, we have the respect of our peers.

Bridget: From a purely financial perspective, we do well enough to keep doing what we’re doing without us all having to chip in all the time and pay for everything ourselves. We have some debts, but…

Ben: They’re not like major label debts.

Bridget: Largely, we can keep doing what we’re doing and it’s self sufficient. I think that’s terrific.

Ben: My biggest regret is that we’re not able to travel more. I would really love for us to be able to go to Europe or America, because I want to travel. That’s one of the reasons I love being in a band, because we get to travel around Australia so much and we’ve been to Canada and we’ve been to the States, and we’ve been to New Zealand. That’s one of the main things I think is great about being a musician and being an entertainer, and it’s upsetting to me that we aren’t able to do that more.

At the same time, we get to go to America and New Zealand and Canada. We really can’t complain. If I did complain – I just can’t stand that. I think you can have the artistic integrity and I’m all for that; I’m deeply passionate about artistic integrity and about art and about abstractness and I’m constantly defending stuff that’s crappy, or perceived to be crappy, because I think the intent is there. But I think that it has to be separated from the sense of privilege or expectation or entitlement, this sense that ‘just because I care deeply about art that everyone should give me money’. Those two don’t necessarily go together, I don’t think.

Picking up on your comment about music that’s perceived to be crappy, can that be applied to La Roux’s ‘In For The Kill’, which you throw into ‘Drugflowers’ live?

Ben: I don’t know if that many people think that’s crappy. This is one of the many things I’m always raving about: people seem to think that because a lot of people like something, it must be bad. Which is just such bullshit. The only difference between popular music and indie music is a production aesthetic and a name.

If you’re talking about avant garde metal or experimental noise music, that’s different because it’s challenging peoples’ perceptions of what a hook is, or what an aesthetic experience is, but all [The Gin Club] do is really pop music. People call us indie but what we do is kind of, MOR-y pop. It might be delivered with a certain honesty of intent, or honesty of conviction, but really it’s not that different from what La Roux is doing except that she like synthesisers. That chord progression is beautiful. I guess that’s what I’m kind of talking about, but that’s just within this band that I was talking about, not in general. [laughter] We all have our arguments about what’s crappy and what’s not.

I want to ask about the three album launch shows at The Troubadour [July 2-4, 2010]. Why is The Troubadour your favourite venue in Brisbane?

Bridget: It was the first place we ever had a show, in those early days where we pretty much had all our shows, The Troubadour, Ric’s, and the Bowery. As Conor said before, it’s kind of where we cut our teeth. We’ve become good friends with Jamie, who runs The Troubadour, and Cory and all the staff there.

Ben: They gave us our name.

Bridget: They named us. We didn’t have a name, and we drank a lot of gin.

Ben: Conor, myself, and Adrian were playing at Ric’s - or maybe it was just Conor and I playing at Ric’s - and these two guys in the crowd came up afterwards and said, “We’re starting a new venue over the road.” We were like [sarcastically] “Oh yeah,” because venues generally start and then they disappear. Then they said “Would you like to come and play on the opening night?” And we were like “Sure, that’d be great.”

We went up there and it was like “wow, this place is awesome”. Three of The Gin Club played the opening; we don’t go there as much as we used to. We just love it and we love the intimacy. That’s the reason why we wanted to limit the numbers because I can’t stand going to The Troubadour when it’s full, because you can’t see and you’re stepping on peoples’ toes.

Conor: You can’t get to the bar and you can’t get to the toilet.

Ben: We thought if we could do 100 people a night there’d be enough room for people to move and see, and it’d maintain all those things we love about the Troubadour without having heaps of people clogging up the place.
Conor: It’s the best sounding room in Brisbane. I’d rather play to 100 people a night for three nights than 300 people at The Zoo for one night, just because we get to play more songs. [laughter] It’s nicer for the crowd.
Bridget: We’ve done the last three or four launch type things in a room like The Zoo.

Ben: The Zoo is great, don’t get me wrong.

Bridget: But it’s nice to try something different.

Ben: It is, and once again, it’s coming down to this thing about there’s no money really playing in music anymore. So one of the things you have to do – and Brad would be so proud of me – you have to add value to stuff [laughter]. People want a unique experience, like this whole idea getting a live CD of a show after you’ve just seen it.

People want something that they saw, that no one else did. And this is getting beyond the whole [matter of] everyone taking video footage of everything. I’m not even going to get started on that. It just defeats the purpose. You want a unique experience that not everyone has on their mobile phone, and by limiting it and having 100 people per show, that’s our way of making it unique, and having a different setlist. The people that were there can say “I was one of only 100 people that saw that show.” That might not be a big deal, but for me it’s a way of giving the audience a bit more, something a bit special and unique.

My final question is about the quote “Someday this war’s going to end,” which appears in the album liner notes and on your MySpace. How does that relate to The Gin Club?

Ben: That’s my fault really.

Bridget: You brought this on us.

Ben: It’s from Apocalypse Now. I just loved it. I don’t necessarily love that movie, but I love that speech because it’s the ultimate nihilistic speech. I’m a big fan of – not so much nihilism, but –

Conor: I’m a pretty big fan of nihilism. [laughter]

Ben: I just think the ambiguity of that statement is because you can’t tell whether he’s happy or sad about it. That’s the thing that I love about it, when he just relates that “smell of napalm” and all, relating this horrific thing about something that’s happened in the war. My father and all my grandparents were soldiers, so I guess I have a certain affinity with that kind of shit. But then afterwards he says “Someday this war’s going to end” and it’s just so… you just don’t know whether he’s happy or sad.

Still to this day, I can’t figure it out, and it’s a bit of both. I think that’s what’s great about it. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. It can be a bit of both. You can be happy about something, and sad about it at the same time.
Something about when you’re in an intense situation, or a situation where your life is on the line and your whole existence is challenged, somehow everything is brought into perspective. You’re still in a horrible, life-threatening situation, so I guess it’s him saying “one day all this will be over, and I can’t decide whether I’m happy about that or not”.

Conor: I’ve always just figured it was about the war of life; the war against yourself.

Ben: Life is the war in a lot of ways. “This whole thing is hell, where we are now” [in reference to that scene in Apocalypse Now]. So we’re going to go watch King Lear and sort it all out. [laughter]

I’ll leave it there, guys.

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Hear more Gin Club on MySpace, or visit their website. Their latest album, Deathwish, is outstanding. Go buy it. My Mess+Noise profile of the band is here. View the video for ‘Rain‘ below.

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