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  • A Conversation With Mikey Young, Eddy Current Suppression Ring guitarist

    Melbourne garage rock band Eddy Current Suppression RingEddy Current Suppression Ring are a Melbourne garage rock band. I spoke with their guitarist, Mikey Young [pictured right], for a story in The Big Issue (‘Keeping Current‘) that was published in late April 2010. Our conversation took place on March 17, ahead of a national tour in support of their third album, Rush To Relax. What follows is a transcript of our whole conversation.

    Andrew: Mikey, my first question is more of a statement than a question. It’s something that I’ve noticed. Eddy Current seem to be one of the best bands in Australia at deflecting any and all praise thrown your way.

    Mikey: Well I appreciate praise, but it makes me really uncomfortable. I’m glad people like us, for sure, but I’m very wary of not letting praise go to our heads or thinking about it much.

    So it’s not a matter of when you’re nominated for a new award or critical accolade, you don’t sit down together and go, “Right, what’s the best way to downplay this?”

    No, not at all. I’m usually the one doing the interviews and so it’s probably my reactions that appear [in the media]. I don’t want to come across… I’m sure that quietly in my head I’m stoked and we’re proud of ourselves, but we definitely don’t sit around and say “let’s downplay it”. And the opposite of that, we don’t sit around going “how good are we?!”, slapping ourselves on the back. Awards and stuff are funny anyway, they’re a strange concept. We try not to think about it, and just make some tunes.

    A broad question: why do you think people like your band?

    That’s another thing I’ve briefly thought about in the past and I realised the more I think about it, actually I don’t really want to think about it. I don’t really want to know why people… I don’t want to be conscious of that. I feel it might sort of affect how we make music. If I’m oblivious to it and we just do it, for ourselves, then I figure it will be easier on my head.

    I have thought about it, though. I think we’re a good live band, which helps. I think there is a fair simplicity to the music, and honesty in Brendan’s delivery and lyrics. I guess when things are really simple and honest upfront, then maybe they appeal to a larger range of people. I don’t know. I think to keep things pretty simple, then a lot of people can get into it. That’s not why we make simple music. I guess that’s just the way it turned out, but if I had to think about why people like us, hopefully it’s because we’re an okay band.

    Do you think a band’s talent is reflected in their number of fans or number of records sold?

    Are you asking whether popularity is representative of talent? Not always, I would think not. Seeing as I can barely listen to the radio these days, but that’s just my opinion. I just can’t stand a lot of popular music. That doesn’t really mean they’re talentless. I’m sure there is talent in making songs that I consider horrible to my ears; it just doesn’t work for me. I feel out of the loop when it comes to popular music at the moment. I’m probably not the best person to ask that question. Popularity and talent aren’t always on the same page.

    Reading your past interviews, I did notice that the recurring theme of refusing to self-promote…

    I have to stop doing all these interviews. I have all the same answers. [laughs]

    There’s a quote of yours that I like: “I think if you don’t shove yourself in peoples’ faces, they’ll end up liking you more in the long run.”

    I guess that was – maybe not from the start because we probably didn’t think that far ahead, but when we realised things were starting to have some sort of groundswell of popularity, that was something I was pretty aware of, just from being a music fan, reading magazines over the years, that if a band is shoved in your face publicity-wise; if they’re on the front cover and have ads everywhere and you can’t escape them, they don’t really feel like [they’re] yours. If you let someone go out and find it in their own time, it probably feels more special to them. It’s like they’ve made the groundwork, and it might feel more like their band rather than everybody’s band.

    The self-discovery aspect is always more interesting to indie music fans. Those kinds of artists don’t have a big marketing budget behind them, and it’s generally the fans and critics that propel them forward, instead of the band themselves.

    Hopefully it attracts people to your band that actually like your band for the right reasons; they like the music you do and that’s the reason they’re into your band, not for any other reason. It’s more enjoyable, rather than being told to like something.

    Reading those interviews, there are lots of mentions of ‘finding yourself in certain situations’, as if you’re indicating that your success is entirely accidental.

    It’s not entirely accidental. It’s definitely not the goal. We haven’t done anything to further our career. If we tour overseas, it’s not to ‘crack a market’ or anything like that, or if we put a record out at a certain time, or anything like that. The only thing that is on purpose in this band is the making of the records and playing of shows. I guess everything else is a by-product of that. Maybe accidental is the wrong word. There have been a lot of funny accidents, but we’ve had a ridiculously good run. I guess success has never been our goal. None of us are anti-success; if that happens, that’s awesome, but it’s all a by-product of what we want to do, which is to make the best records that we can.

    You’re heavily involved in the Melbourne indie scene with the label and your time at the vinyl pressing plant [Corduroy]. Surely you must have had some idea that the music you were making would appeal to people.

    Not really. I don’t work at the plant anymore. I’m not even involved in the label anymore. That’s only a recent development. I guess I’m involved now. When I started, I didn’t really know that many people within that scene. I knew a small group of people from the record plant, but when we had that first jam I really didn’t think that it would appeal to that many people at all. I knew we could probably press 200 7-inches and get away with it, and then our friends and family would probably buy enough of them to make our money back. Beyond that, I thought I’d have them sitting under my bed for a year, then I’ll get rid of them when we play a show, and that will be fine. That’s all we wanted to do, was usually play one show, just to show our friends, “Look what we’ve got.”

    I think after the first show I did realise people did really like this. I was sort of surprised and I could see that there were bands before that I felt didn’t really have anything special about them, and when I did play with this band I did feel like there was that special thing that I’ve been looking for in other bands. I noticed that other people noticed that too. There’s no way that I thought that many people would like us. I sort of think if I hear us on triple j or something, I think we stick out really weirdly and don’t sound like a real band or something. I’m actually slightly flummoxed that we’re as popular as we are.

    Is it uncomfortable feeling when you hear your songs on the radio?

    I don’t listen to the radio that much anymore so I don’t have to bother about it. It’s sort of nice; because I’m so heavily involved with the making of the music and the recording of the music, when I hear it accidentally on the radio or when I’m out somewhere in a shop, I can be a bit objective about it for a second. I can sort of go, “Actually, this is pretty good.” The only way I can hear it as an outsider for a brief second.

    Then you think, “Wait a second, I actually recorded and mixed that.”

    Yeah, it takes about three seconds before it processes that it’s actually me playing. In those three seconds, I can have this weird brief moment of “Ah, I like this” and sort of feel different about it.

    Melbourne garage rock band Eddy Current Suppression Ring. Photo by Ben LoveridgeI want to clarify your role within the band. You’re the guitarist, keyboardist, and you mix the albums?

    I record and mix them, yeah.

    Is the band still self-managed?

    Yes, for the first time – for our whole career I’ve just booked the shows and I guess managed the band, just out of accident. We got bigger, and someone needed to do it and I had more time on my hands, so I kept doing it. This coming album tour is the first time I’ve ever handed over any of the responsibility to an outsider; we’ve got a tour manager this time. It’s gotten to the stage where the shows, especially for the album launches, are quite big. I wanted to sit back for once and just enjoy myself and just play. Sometimes, on the bigger shows, I get a bit stressed out with the responsibility of it all, and I’m more waiting for the relief of it to be over, rather than enjoying the show. I thought I just want to go out there and relax for a tour, just let someone do all the other stuff, like booking flights and everything.

    Did you find it difficult to hand over the reins?

    Yeah. Well, it’s still happening. The tour’s about to start. I think I found it weird. In a way, it’s no less work. You’re still [included] in the same emails, there’s just a middleman now, but I do feel a distance from responsibility, like I don’t feel like, “God, it’s my fault if this tour goes wrong” or something like that. I feel like just a band member and I feel good about it. I think we have gone so far with it being totally insular and doing it all ourselves. I did feel pretty weird to sort finally let go of something. It’s been good so far.

    You might be aware that there’s a bit of a backlash about the last album, which tends to happen with almost any band who ‘outgrows their roots’.

    I read one or two reviews. I think it was a Tom Hawking review [on The Vine] and then a response to that review that someone alerted me to. To be honest, I think for a band in our position we’ve gotten amazingly far without really having a strong backlash. Even if there is a backlash on the new record, it’s sort of been pretty minute. You put out three records; someone is going to like your first record better than the new one. Plenty of people whose opinion I totally trust think this is our best record. I should just be happy that anyone likes any of our records; I don’t think the backlash is for any other reason despite the music. I don’t care. I don’t like some records. Is that all that the backlash is about? You’re probably more aware of it than I am.

    For example, there’s a topic on the Mess+Noise discussion boards called “Eddy Current Backlash” which was mostly about that Tom Hawking review. It currently has 178 responses.

    Okay. I’m probably just guilty of Googling my own band and reviews as anyone else. I do realise it’s not the healthiest of habits. [laughs]. I’m not taking it to heart anyway, but I don’t know; that’s fine. It wasn’t a bad review. It seemed pretty genuinely thought-out, smartly written and stuff. It’s just weird for me. People think more about our records than we actually do. That’s the only thing that’s weird to me: I don’t think we’re the type of band you need to dissect that much. “We wrote ten songs in the last year, and we recorded them. Here they are.” That’s sort of how much we think about it. It’s funny to see other people analyse it when there is – it’s like other people care about it more than we do.

    I read a quote about your live shows where you said the bigger the band gets, the harder it is to please everyone, and you probably took it to heart a bit at first and you’re trying to make sure everyone is having a good time.

    That could equally apply to the records we put out. There was a stage when the shows got a bit bigger and the people that were there at the start weren’t enjoying it as much as the crowds got a bit rowdier. They got pushed to the back and there were jerks there. It would really affect me to find out after the show that so-and-so had a bad time because some dude was being a wanker. Not that I really want to tolerate jerks at any of our shows, but I’ve also got to realise that I can’t control everything and have to do everything I can and then just play a show and enjoy it, rather than stress about every person in the audience. It is a bit harder to control a thousand people compared to fifty.

    Mess+Noise writer asked you in 2006 whether violence at a rock and roll show is ever justifiable. I’d like to put that question to you again, now that you’re quite a bit bigger than you were in 2006.

    I don’t think violence at shows is ever justifiable. I don’t think violence anywhere can be justified. I don’t see a place for it, for sure, and I definitely don’t see a place for it at our gigs. I’ve never really understood that kind of reaction to our kind of music. It seems to me sort of fairly good-time music in my head. Maybe I’m wrong.

    You mentioned in another interview that Eddy Current can offer support slots to bands that you really like, to help or to expose them to other people. Was this because other bands extended that same courtesy to you when you were starting out?

    Yeah definitely, and it’s just more from being a fan of records. For instance, those overseas bands that we’ve played with; I’m sure Thee Oh Sees would have done fine without us, but if we can do a couple of shows and 500 or 1,000 people seeing them that maybe hadn’t heard of them, you know, then that’s awesome. It’s good when overseas bands come out and you’re in a position where you can do that. It’s the same with local bands, friends’ bands, and stuff like that. You just want to play with bands you love and you want to expose. I guess people come to our shows, there are a lot of people now that maybe don’t go to smaller gigs and stuff like that. If we can just expose some good bands, then you feel like you’ve done a good deed.

    You’re paying forward what you felt in the past couple of years, when you were growing your fanbase.

    Totally, and also like all the bands I grew up watching when I was first turned 18, 19 – bands like The Exotics and The Breadmakers – to be able to now put them on shows in front of younger dudes who wouldn’t have seen them before. It’s repaying that favor to those bands that have entertained us a heap over the years.

    Melbourne garage rock band Eddy Current Suppression RingI want to ask you about the live music scene in Melbourne at the moment, because I saw that Eddy Current were involved with The Tote’s final show. Did you attend the SLAM rally?

    I didn’t, actually. I’m glad it went really well. I had a mixing session to help a dude finish a record that day. I thought of cancelling, but then I thought “what’s the point?”. I thought it would be more proactive to sit there and help someone finish making music than actually go protest about not being able to make music.

    I’m not trying to guilt trip you for not being there, you know.

    Not at all, I was just explaining. [laughs]

    Following The Tote’s closure, how do you feel about the live music scene in Melbourne? Do you think it’s healthier, or really struggling because of those liquor licensing laws?

    I always say the wrong answer to these kinds of questions. I don’t think I said the things that people wanted to hear when The Tote closed. But The Tote was great, The Tote was awesome to my band and it was a good place for years. In that time, I know a lot of venues have closed down, but a lot of venues are still open. It seems to me – I guess I’ve been in the city for 11 years or so – like Melbourne has more venues [now] than it did 10 years ago. There seems to be more bands.

    Shit’s gotta die off and get fresh again. I think good things will happen, and good things will continue to happen, and even though it seems sad now, it’s probably good in a way. Things might get stale and younger dudes will start new venues and we’ll all think of different ways of doing things. I think Melbourne is strong enough to survive with one less venue.

    To change topics entirely, I want to ask about the masks on the cover of Rush To Relax, even though probably every other music journalist you’ve spoken to has asked the same question.

    No-one has actually asked about the masks.

    What inspired you to use them?

    I don’t know. Nothing, really. I think we just had the idea for the film clip before we had the cover. We wanted the film clip to look a bit creepy. We just wanted a creepy-looking film clip and then we had the idea of shooting the cover on the same day because we didn’t want to hire a plane twice. Maybe we were just scared of our own faces on the covers, but there is no symbolic meaning behind the masks. They were cool, so we put them on.

    It’s the first release of yours where the band actually appear on the cover.

    I know, I think people were getting a bit sick of our other covers. [laughs]

    So the masks weren’t a matter of trying to protect your anonymity?

    Melbourne garage rock band Eddy Current Suppression Ring, from the cover of their 'Rush To Relax' albumNot really. We’re pretty conscious of never wanting to be the ‘four dudes in leather jackets down an alleyway’ type of band. It happened because of the film clip. We had an idea for the film clip and we didn’t really want to – we wanted a different look for the film clip. That shot [the album cover] just happened to be a shot from the day of the film clip. That’s all there is to the masks.

    How much attention to you guys pay to the band’s image?

    Not much. There’s not really much difference between the way we look or act on stage or in the band than how we do in normal life. I guess the only attention we’re paying is just giving accurate representation of ourselves. That’s about it.

    You actually hired a plane for the album shot and the video clip?

    Yes.

    Which company did you go with? Did they dig the concept of what you were doing?

    It was pretty hard to find a company that still does those old plane banners. I think it was a guy called Sky Surfers down in some town in country Victoria. I always used to like those banners as a kid and I always wanted one. Our album cost nothin’, and our friends film our videos, and I guess we won some money last year [the AMP] and I felt like we should show that we spent it on something. So we might as well get a stupid big plane. When it came flying over, while were waiting to film the clip, it was seriously the most exciting event. We were just jumping up and down going “yes!”

    “We’ve made it. We have a banner!”

    Totally, man! It was like “box ticked – I can retire now”.

    Do you still have the banner?

    Unfortunately, they just recycle the letters and you can’t keep the banner.

    Drag.

    It would have been excellent to put it up at the back of our gigs or something.

    It would. With each album you’ve kind of gone backwards. I read that Rush To Relax was recorded even cheaper and more quickly than the last one. Do you see a logical conclusion to this pattern? Will you end up recording an hour-long album in an hour?

    Mike Young of Melbourne garage rock band Eddy Current Suppression Ring. Photo by Sarah McEvoyI always thought about it but I think probably not. I can’t see how we can do it much more quickly and cheaper than this one. Definitely not any cheaper. Too much attention is paid to how long it takes for us to record albums. It’s not like we’re trying to prove a point. I have the recording gear so it doesn’t cost us anything. We’re comfortable with doing it that way, and that it sounds okay for what we’re trying to do. Unlike some bands maybe, who go into a recording session to write songs or something, we have 12 – 15 songs written and ready to go. It’s basically just setting up.

    The album is only 40 minutes of music, so I always thought if you can’t play the songs you’re trying to record well after three takes, you shouldn’t be recording it. We try a song a couple of times and hopefully it’s done. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Brendan always seems to be quirky and out of time, and there’s plenty of room for bum notes and stuff like that. I like that kind of thing about this kind of music. We’re not trying to achieve any kind of perfection. Six hours [to record an album] is plenty of time.

    On the other end of the spectrum, do you ever see yourselves being victims or locking yourselves in the studio for a week to really nail it out properly, with a big name producer and all that sort of music industry bullshit?

    I’m not against that kind of thing. I don’t think it suits our band. I just don’t think it would work. I’m pretty sure that this way is the correct way for this band. It’s not necessarily how I’d do it for any other band or any other band I’d record. I don’t think it’s definitely the way to do it, I just think that it works for this band.

    Having said that, I don’t walk out at the end of the day with a finished product. I still bring it home and mix it, and spend some time making it sound okay. There is other time beyond those 6 hours, but I just guess we have the luxury of having our own gear and I relatively know what I’m doing. I can just mix the record in my bedroom. It’s nice to be in the position where you don’t have to rely on producers and studios.

    Are you happy to keep doing that for the next few Eddy Current releases?

    Yeah, I think so. For a new song we just wrote, I’ve got a very different idea that I wouldn’t mind trying a different way. I think I’m happy with, if anything, I can see us doing it sort of rougher. Like, I think we can experiment with some 4-track cassette recordings rather than 8-track, and I think I’d really like the drum sound we’re getting on that, so if we do some more stuff I wouldn’t be surprised if we regress even further.

    That sounds like the ultimate way to make money: to be completely DIY indie, to release the album for nothing, and just to tour on the back of it and make money.

    I guess it’s a way of keeping costs down, that’s for sure.

    Eddy Current are credited with having a large impact on the Australian punk and garage revival scene. What are your thoughts on that?

    I think there have actually been a couple of bands that have sprung up since that I feel some sort of kinship with, but I think if it wasn’t us that did that, it would have been someone else. I think it was one of those things that were going to happen anyway. We just happened to get in first.

    I read that you’re fond of playing house parties and small gigs to ‘keep it real’ for the old fans.

    I think it’s mainly for our sanity. If we play the big shows in Perth all the time, we just go nuts. I guess just to do an occasional really small show and house party is just really to keep us sane and to remember that type of show and enjoy the show. I guess it keeps things as diverse as possible.

    The upcoming tour you’re playing mid-sized kind of venues. In Brisbane, you’re playing The Zoo.

    Which is pretty big for us. I think we’ve only played The Step Inn in Brisbane, so I guess The Zoo seems like the logical step up, up there.  Brisbane hasn’t got a lot of options.

    No, it really doesn’t. Between The Zoo, which is 450, I think the next step up is the Hi-Fi, which is 1,000+.

    I don’t think we’re ready to go to that, not in Brisbane anyway. I don’t think our following is that strong up there.

    I read a quote where you said you’ve done a good job with distancing yourself from the music biz. I saw that you turned down SXSW, which a lot of other Australian bands probably wouldn’t do. They’d probably view that as a massive opportunity.

    It was probably bad timing, but I’d just rather go over there and play a lot of shows and not really worry about that kind of stuff. I think SXSW is probably really enjoyable for a local because you get to see a lot of bands, but unless you’re going there for a reason and trying to become something, it’s probably not the best time to play a show. I’d rather wait until things die down and do a normal tour.

    Considering there are 1,500 or 1,800 bands playing in a week or something.

    Totally. It almost sounds like it’s working against its purpose.

    I’ve read that you’ve got quite a broad taste in music, Mikey. I want to know what inspired you to play guitar in that Eddy Current style.

    I don’t know; I’m sure it’s a bunch of things. Definitely my time at Corduroy [Records, a vinyl pressing plant], being surrounded by those type of bands and musicians and stuff, had an influence on the type of music I play and how I play. I spent three years listening to teenage garage records from the ‘60s or something, and I realised that that’s the sound of guitar I like and I’m going to try my best to rip it off.

    I have one last question. It’s about the Australian Music Prize. It’s gone from Eddy Current’s indie garage sound to the current winner, which is a major label-distributed album by a former Australian Idol contestant.

    This is a loaded question, isn’t it? [laughs]

    I just want to gauge your take on that.

    That’s fine. I think it’s definitely reactionary. I think it was pretty obvious the day after we won it that they were going to give it to a chick this year. I haven’t heard Lisa Mitchell’s records so I’m not in a position to say if it’s a good record or bad record. I think I heard one of the songs on the radio and quite liked it. I guess if they’re doing it for why I say they’re doing it, it shouldn’t really matter if it’s on a major or indie or if it’s an Australian Idol winner or not. If they honestly think it’s the best record then so be it.

    That’s a very diplomatic response.

    I’m so out of the loop that I probably haven’t heard any of the records on the damn thing anyway. I don’t think I’m really the best person qualified. I have no ill feeling towards that.

    That’s all I’ve got for you, Mikey.

    Hopefully there’s something there. I rambled.

    ++

    Check out Eddy Current Suppression Ring on MySpace, and view the video for ‘Rush To Relax’ below.

  • A Conversation With Faux Pas, Melbourne electronic artist

    An interview that I’ve published at Waycooljnr.

    Melbourne electronic artist Faux Pas a.k.a. Tim ShielLast week I wrote a feature article for Australian music website Mess+Noise about Faux Pas, a Melbourne-based electronic artist whose ‘digital DIY’ approach has intrigued me since Waycooljnr founder Nick Crocker pointed me in his direction.

    I’ve since found Tim Shiel – the man behind the Faux Pas moniker, pictured right – to be a great example of an artist willing to invest time in developing his online presence. Besides using his computer to write and record his art, Shiel offers his music openly and honestly with bloggers, and allows fans to buy and share his material with minimal fuss. Below is the unedited interview that I used as the basis for my Mess+Noise feature ahead of the April 2010 release of his new album, Noiseworks.

    Full interview with Tim at Waycooljnr.

  • A Conversation With Damian Kulash, OK Go singer/guitarist

    OK Go singer/guitarist Damian KulashOK Go are an American pop band. I don’t want to cheapen their career by naming just its apex, but it’s the easiest way to refresh your memory: they’re the band behind ‘Here It Goes Again‘, better known as ‘the treadmill video‘.

    On February 13 2010, I spoke to OK Go’s singer/guitarist Damian Kulash [pictured right] on behalf of Rolling Stone Australia. He’d been up all night shooting a second music video for their song ‘This Too Shall Pass’. The first video couldn’t be embedded anywhere outside of YouTube because of the restrictions put in place by their parent label, Capitol Records, which is owned by EMI Music. The band’s response was to upload an embeddable version to Vimeo, write an open letter to their fans explaining the situation, and seek outside funding to conceptualise and film an entirely different music video. [You should click the above links to watch the videos, if you haven’t already seen them.]

    Shortly before Rolling Stone’s May issue went to print at the end of February – confusing, right? – OK Go left Capitol Records, effectively undermining my story’s relevance. [More on that experience here.]

    Below is the full conversation I had with Damian, which is one of the last interviews the band gave while still signed to a major label.

    Andrew: Before we start, are you totally sick of talking about this whole issue?

    Damian: The politics of the music industry are… tiresome. I’ll put it that way. It’s important to me and I’m fascinated by it, but I’d much rather be thinking about making things, than how to distribute them.

    What kind of response have you seen from your fans in regard to your letter?

    It’s been pretty positive. My letter has been received by some people as a polemic, or as a big screed, but truly, the letter was just an explanation to our fans about why certain things weren’t available to them, because I think people really didn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t see it as a big political move; it was just an explanation to our fans, and we’ve gotten very good response from them. I think they’re just happy that we treat them like adults.

    What kind of response have you seen from the record label? I read your interview on New TeeVee where you said your main contact at the label wants as badly as you do for the video to be embeddable.

    I think most folks at the label probably share our opinion that things should be easily distributed. There are a lot of competing agendas within the record label, so I’ve gotten a wide range of responses. The digital department of EMI France actually tweeted the letter and was distributing it because they felt it was a defense of their position. Other people felt like it was an attack. It’s a big company, so there’s been a wide range of responses.

    Beyond your fan base and record label industry people, the general public has also paid attention to the letter. I refer to your quote in Time about how you think there is a quiet majority who are just interested in seeing how the music industry works these days, and seeing your explanation from the inside.

    That’s definitely been the basic response that I’ve felt. I obviously can’t quantify it, but the loudest comments in the music industry in general are mostly from people who hate labels and who hate major labels and feel the industry is set up to screw musicians. I don’t feel like that’s generally representative. I think it’s easy to hate the machine. You really get those comments from people that actually try to make a living making music. It’s mostly people who have this purist idea of what music should be to them; give up their day jobs because they want their musicians to be absolutely conceptually totally pure and not ever have to worry about money for them.

    I read your Mashable interview where you said that a year or two ago, EMI switched the embedding stuff on all of your videos, but you didn’t pay much attention as you were making your new record at the time. Looking back, do you wish that you had paid attention? Would you have done anything differently back then?

    OK Go singer/guitarist Damian KulashWe have to pay attention to how our records and our videos and everything is distributed because we make ‘em and we care about how they get out there, but I wouldn’t be a student of the music industry’s technicalities if I wasn’t convinced that the animating passion in my life is making things, and how the distribution of them affects that. I know it sounds incredibly circular, but I don’t particularly care if the music industry works until I make something and it fucks up the way I want that thing to be shared with the world.

    I’m glad that when I’m writing music and recording music, in between records, I’m not spending my time trying to figure out the solution to the logistical problems of the music industry. Those are some things that we have to pay attention to out of necessity, not because we like paying attention to them.

    There is a quote from you in the letter where you say, “Unbelievably, we’re stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of sharing videos. It’s like the world has gone backwards.” As musicians, you must feel that having these kinds of conversations about the business side of music drains your creativity or your time that could be better spent creating music.

    It seems to me like there are a couple of things. One, the music industry is very clearly in an incredible crisis and that’s what makes this story complex. There is a lot to talk about because we’re up against what appears to be a sort of unresolvable problem. People want to talk about it. Two, I think a lot of us feel incredibly passionate about music and by its nature – almost by its definition – the important part of music kind of defies words. To me, what makes music sort of magical – what makes music the thing that I live for – is that you can communicate things like music’s four-dimensional emotions instantaneously. It’s like emotional ESP.

    I think when something comes along, something to talk about in music, something very rational or logistical and sort of left-linear logical, that’s attached to the distribution of music or to the manufacturing or production of music, then at least there is something to sink our rational brains into and some people really want to talk about it. Maybe this is something of a stretch as an argument, but we do a lot of interviews and it’s impossible to answer substantive questions about music because music is a feeling, not an argument. Whereas, everything that surrounds music – how it’s distributed, the politics, and the money behind it – gives you something hard and logical to talk about. I think that’s sort of why there is so much fascination on these things.

    Bob Lefsetz wrote in response to this situation that “if the labels want to maintain control, they have to first get the hearts and minds of the artists.” As an artist who deals with labels on a regular basis, do you share his view?

    OK Go singer/guitarist Damian KulashYes, in essence they do. I think that the value in music from which we derive the money in music can no longer be generated by limiting access. The way you assess value in most commodities is related to supply, the whole supply and demand curve. The reason you have to pay to have most things is because someone else restricts your access to them or you have to pay for the access to them. There are certain things that don’t follow that model and music has sort of jumped the barrier, I think.

    Twenty, fifteen, or even ten years ago, music was a physical thing that could be bought and sold. Even if conceptually the music wasn’t, there was a way of controlling access to it: you either owned a CD or you didn’t. Either you had access to it or your friend did, or you got it from a library. More likely, you bought it and had access to music.

    Now that has sort of broken down and the music industry is not going to be able to get that genie back in the bottle. You have to find a different level to work with, and I think that – whatever the financing situation is, no matter which body is financing the logistical mechanics of music – that body will have to have a better relationship with musicians and record labels. Record labels deal in very black-and-white terms with this restricted access thing, and now everyone is going to have to believe in a new model simultaneously, otherwise money won’t be generated for music.

    By now you’re all too familiar with the arguments surrounding this YouTube issue, having lived them out and told the world about it. If you can comment on it, I’d like to know how EMI rationalise the ‘disable embedding’ decision to the average web consumer – the one who just wants to share their cool videos with their friends?

    There has been a conceptual shift between videos being advertisement and videos being product. They’re sort of ‘on the fence’ still. All labels still want their videos to be seen far and wide, but they also want to be paid for them to be seen far and wide. Whereas once upon a time it was just amazing that there was a website out there [YouTube] that would actually help you distribute your advertising. Now, there is a website out there that is actually distributing your product without paying you for it. I think that’s how they justify it. They want people to see it like: “we paid for that thing, how come you won’t pay us for it?”

    Do you think that the thought of the average web user even comes into their equation, or is it all just discussed in terms of profit and shareholders, as you alluded to in your letter?

    They’re not such morons that they can’t take into account what people want. Labels don’t have a singular mind. It’s not like one big beast with one agenda. I think a lot of people at labels understand what people want and are frustrated with the way things are working. I think there hasn’t been a very clear-eyed assessment of that shift in music videos from advertisement to product, or in general, of the attempt to blur promotion and monetization. There used to be an obvious revenue stream, and that was selling records [CDs]. Since that is shrinking so incredibly fast, now all the things that you essentially pay for to promote that revenue stream are now things that they’re trying to turn the tables on and get money for actually having done.

    I don’t think they’re incapable of thinking about what people want. I think everybody suddenly is trying to eat the hamburger at the same time that they’re still milking the cow. You can’t have it both ways.

    Final question Damian, and it’s a bit of a philosophical one, so take a deep breath. If labels continue to herd viewers into absorbing their artists’ content in specific web destinations like on YouTube, what are the wider ramifications for the nature of sharing content online?

    American pop/rock band OK GoFirst of all, I’ve been talking this whole time as if I have a kind of answer, like I know exactly what’s going on and there is an obvious path forward. I don’t know what the ramifications will be. The first step that seems obvious to me is we do need something like record labels to perform some of the functions record labels traditionally have. This is what I think the critics of major labels often miss, is that for all of their exploitative, greedy, and short-sighted policies, they did provide a risk aggregation for the world of music making. They invest in however many young bands a year and most of them fail. Those bands go back to their jobs at the local coffee houses without having to be in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal debt for having gone for it.

    If we don’t want to be just a domain of the independently wealthy and people who can take time off from their jobs for a couple of years to see what happens, or finance their own world tour while they figure out exactly how to make the number at the end of the column black, then somebody has to be doing this risk aggregation.

    Historically, when a band did well, or an artist did well, the profits could be so substantial that they would cover the other nineteen losses that the failed bands meant for a record label. A label could take the very extreme numbers of the music industry: you might have a less than 1% chance of success, but if you do succeed there is a massive reward, and it sort of evens them out over dozens or hundreds of artists a year.

    Something sort of needs to be doing that unless we want music only to be the domain of the independently wealthy. I think then you have to figure out what that means for content distribution. Somehow, some sector of the business has to be able to make a significant reward off of the success of that one-in-twenty, or that one-in-fifty, or that one-in-one hundred in order to keep the system running.

    At the same time, we all want this magical, wonderful, instantaneous global distribution – via the internet – to make music ever easier to get to and to make it more universal and more accessible. We have to figure out how to get the money that people are willing to spend on music into the hands of musicians, and into the hands of those risk aggregation bodies.

    Right now, it seems people are willing to spend money pretty freely on music. They just tend to do it more on hardware or on their broadband connection. People are willing to pay for extremely fast connection to the internet so they can download big files. They just don’t particularly care for paying for the file themselves, or see that as something they should be doing. People will pay a lot for an mp3 player. They don’t expect that part to be free, so to get people to value their music in that way, then we should figure out how to look at the system from a macro perspective and figure out a reasonable way forward.

    Thanks Damian. I admire your ability to speak coherently about the music industry, especially after an all-nighter. [The band had been up working on the second video for ‘This Too Shall Pass‘, which is embedded below.]

    I don’t know how coherent I’ve been, but if you can whip that into shape and make me sound like I was, then more power to you. I appreciate it.

    [You can read more about this story for Rolling Stone Australia here.]

  • The Vine interview: Die! Die! Die!

    Technically, this is my first video interview for The Vine. You wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t told you; although it took place via a Skype video call, it’s still published in plain text.

    New Zealand indie punk band Die! Die! Die!Andrew Wilson of Die! Die! Die!

    Indie punk band Die! Die! Die! burst forth from Dunedin, New Zealand in 2005 with a hard-edged debut album that favoured abrasive noise over melody or song longevity. Their second release, 2007’s Promises, Promises doubled that album’s duration to 40 minutes, and saw the band exploring a more restrained style of songwriting without losing their characteristic urgency and impact.

    Three years later, their third full-length is due. To whet our appetites, they’ve released a new video [for ‘We Built Our Own Oppressors’, see below] and are touring Australia throughout April. The Vine’s Andrew McMillen video called Die! Die! Die! singer/guitarist Andrew Wilson [pictured left in the above image] in Auckland, to discuss outsider perceptions of New Zealand, supporting Marilyn Manson, history’s great Kiwi bands, and turning down European tours with Brian Jonestown Massacre.

    Full interview over at The Vine.

    Skype video calls are a wonderful interview tool, though my connection did drop out midway through. We hastily reconnected and pretended that nothing happened. How marvelous that we can speak to one another from our respective bedrooms in Brisbane and Auckland. I should have taken a screenshot. Next time…

    Die! Die! Die! are an excellent band and you should give them a try. Thanks to Joe Segreto @ IMC for hooking this up.

  • The Vine interview: Gareth Liddiard of The Drones, April 2010

    An interview for The Vine. (The full interview appears below, since the original publication has been removed from the web.)

    Gareth Liddiard of The DronesGareth Liddiard of The Drones

    As frontman of The Drones, Gareth Liddiard has cultivated a reputation that approaches reverence among Australia’s independent music community. His band were winners of the inaugural Australian Music Prize in 2005, were awarded 2009’s ‘Best Live Act’ by Rolling Stone, and Liddiard’s song ‘Shark Fin Blues’ was voted as the ‘greatest Australian song of all time’ in jmag late last year by his peers. The band have managed to drag this local reverence overseas, garnering ciritcal praise from both sides of the Atlantic while being regular visitors to the US and Europe, most notably as a semi-regular fixture at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festivals.

    Between recording and touring with The Drones, Liddiard is set to release his debut solo album later this year. Ahead of a solo tour at three east coast venues in mid-April, Andrew McMillen spoke to Gareth Liddiard at length about the pros and cons of performing acoustically, playing Halo 2 while on the dole, ‘sub-par teen angst’, and reading one’s own reviews.

    Andrew: I understand this is the third or fourth time you’ve gone out on a solo tour, Gareth, ahead of a new album. What do you like about previewing these songs in acoustic form?

    Gareth: The chance to get to play them, not necessarily acoustically, but just to get to play them at all, that’s a cool thing. You do your first record where you get to play all the songs live, and then you record it, but after that it goes the other way around where you record then you play live. It’s a bit shit because the songs get better the more you play them live.

    Do you feel a bit nervous bringing them out for the first time in these kinds of circumstances?

    Yeah a little bit, especially when you play solo, you can stuff up. When you’re doing it with a band you can step on the distortion pedal. Acoustic is a bit weirder. I do a few songs I’ve been working on for this tour but it’s kind of more written for the acoustic guitar so I’m not sure if that’s going to make it harder or easier than doing something like previewing Havilah stuff.

    One thing I like about your solo shows is the emphasis it places on your lyrics. Without the external noise of a Drones show, we’re left to concentrate on your stories. Is that your intention?

    Yeah that’s a part of it, one of the reasons. I’m a mumbler anyway, so it’s hard enough with an acoustic guitar, let alone noise from the band. I like to be able to hear what people are singing when they’re singing.

    A downside of acoustic shows is that sometimes you’re not loud enough to overpower those who choose to talk while you play, and that seemed to annoy you at the Troubadour show that you played here in February last year.

    Yeah, I’m not alone on that one. You have to deal with it when it happens. Some people are always going to talk, but it can be irritating.

    I find it interesting that people do that, they pay $15-20 to come see you play and then they talk through the main act.

    A lot of people go up to The Troubadour just to drink, though. There’s nowhere else to drink unless you want to go across the road to that big joint on the corner. Not everyone is there to see the band. Some people have been dragged along by friends and they’re just looking for a beer in a place that isn’t full of women with boob tubes.

    Is there a style of performance that you find more enjoyable as a performer?

    I find if I’m doing electric a lot, I’ll yearn for a bit of acoustic action. If I do acoustic enough I’ll look forward to playing with the band. The grass is always greener. The older I get, the nicer it is to sit down and not have to scream your guts out, you know what I mean? That’s a plus.

    When is the solo album due?

    I think September, maybe. That seems like what the music industry is saying. I’m not going to put it out if it’s crap. I haven’t recorded it yet. If all goes well, I reckon September. I hope.

    Who produced it?

    I don’t know. Production – I don’t believe in that word. I think that word is kind of had its day. It’s too vague. Burke Reid, who did our last record, is going to record it. It seems like everyone how is involved in the recording process has a say. If our neighbour pops over and hears a song we’ve just done and has something to say, then we’ll listen to him. Do I give him production credit? I don’t know. I just think I believe people make records together, rather than one guy produces. It’s such a vague term these days. But, Burke will be recording it.

    I know what you mean – I get some amusement out of reading the music press that places a huge emphasis on the producer behind certain records.

    [Journalists] do that because it just gives them something to understand, that they can understand, but they don’t because it’s not anything that’s easy to understand.

    How much material from that new album are you planning to debut at the upcoming solo shows?

    It depends on what’s ready to go at that point and what I feel I’m capable of that night. I reckon about three tunes, maybe more.

    You write your set lists on the night?

    Yeah, I do them on the night. Some songs, if I was doing a really quiet song, if I hear people talking or something like that, or if it’s just not happening, then there’s no point in doing it. You kind of check the temperature of the room before you make a set list.

    I want to touch briefly on the Kev Carmody tribute show you did in Brisbane in August last year. The Drones only did one song (‘River Of Tears’), and your performance was by far the loudest and most confronting. I think that’s a pretty fair thing to say that the show also exposed you to a crowd more accustomed to Missy Higgins and Bernard Fanning than The Drones. Was that an enjoyable show for you to play – all six minutes of it?

    Yeah, it was. We’ve done two of them in Sydney and for each show we do a bunch of rehearsals, so everyone was already really friendly. It was cool. It’s really fun to be around other musicians, it’s like a big barbeque or something. The day starts, Paul [Kelly] gets money off everyone and goes and gets beer and we drink that during rehearsals. Then it runs out, so Tex [Perkins] ends up doing a beer run. It’s that sort of stuff, like a big house party. Then you get to put the show together which is something you don’t usually do, like a theatre production. I really liked it. Everyone was really cool. But you’re right; it’s weird, coming from where we come from, to then be with Bernard [Fanning] and John [Butler], it’s kind of… We come from a different part of the music industry, if you can call it an industry. Like, Detroit has an industry. [laughs]

    It’s cool that you’re friendly with those people, that you can hang out with them even though sonically, you’re quite removed from pop artists.

    Oh, yeah, no one pretends. I’m not a fan of everyone’s music and vice versa. It’d be a problem if we were all 18 – none of us could talk to each other – but we’re not.

    You’re all mature adults.

    Yeah and we all like a drink, and an obnoxious joke, and stuff like that.

    I find the band’s treatment of ‘River Of Tears’ to be one of the most powerful songs in your repertoire these days.

    The good thing about the Kev Carmody gig was we only did one song, so you can kind of give it everything in one go, whereas if you’re doing a whole live show you have to pace yourself. You just run out of steam otherwise, but when we do it in a set I don’t think it’s as good as when we do it at the Kev Carmody shows.

    I see where you’re coming from, but I disagree. I’ve seen you perform it mid-set a couple of times, and it just floors me every time. It’s so powerful.

    It’s a cool song. It’s one of those songs that just works for us. It ticks all the boxes. That was Paul Kelly’s choice. He’s pretty good at curating, and farming out work to the right people. Whether it’s The Drones, if it works for us, or Glenn Richards [of Augie March]. Paul’s had so many different musicians in his band and stuff; he’s got a really good sense of who will make the most of what.

    More recently, I saw The Drones play All Tomorrow’s Parties, at Minehead (UK) in December. It was a bit bizarre to see you open the set to a pretty sparse crowd, having seen you play to full crowds here in Australia for the last couple of years. The Drones are a fixture at these ATP events – do you find them enjoyable?

    Yeah I do, they’re cool. A lot of it depends on your timeslots and shit too. Last time we played to a lot more people. That was a bummer, but the whole general experience is cool. It’s an awesome place.

    I went to the Mt. Buller event a year ago, and Butlins was the first time I’d been to the UK one. It was an awesome experience as a music fan. From what I gather, the musicians seemed to enjoy it just as much as the punters.

    Yeah, they do. Everyone loves it; a lot of the time, it’s a lot of the same bands, so the more you do it the more everyone gets friendly and it’s funny; you bump into each other there or in New York. They also have an ATP stage at a festival in Barcelona, which was a good time. It’s good socially, as well as everything else.

    Given your affiliation with the label ATP Recordings, I would have thought the Drones would have been one of the acts Barry Hogan is considering to curate the next installment of ATP Australia, whenever that happens.

    If it’s going to happen. I think Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds [who curated the first one in January 2009] were a good choice – they’re always going to pull more people than us. I think there is a bit of that, if they were considering getting us, they’d have to consider the possibility to get someone from overseas that Australians are going to tend to prefer that to their own. I don’t know. Maybe if they do it again. Either way, I was happy to go as a punter last time and not do anything.
    Returning to Australia to discuss more recent events, can you describe what you felt when covering [the GOD song] ‘My Pal’ at The Tote?

    I felt hot, and a bit drunk. [laughs] Actually it was a fun song to play. We played it at ATP with Joel [Silbersher] a few years before, too. Me and Mikey got up with Joel at an ATP at Butlins. That was a good one – we played to about 5,000 people. You should have seen that one!

    Most of them probably had no idea what that song was?

    A few people did, ex-pats and that. It’s a fun song to play. It’s just straight-up kind of three chord punk song. It kind of plays itself. No matter how much you fuck it up, it sounds good to them. But I tell you, the Tote thing was really bizarre being the last band to play there, and that was the last song. That was a strange experience, going “Wow, this is it.” We played there more than we’ve played anywhere else in the world, so it was very odd.

    I have no connection to The Tote. I had never been there, and yet reading the coverage and checking out the YouTube video of you playing, it was extremely moving that ‘My Pal’ was the last song. It obviously meant a lot to people.

    Yeah, it’s a bit of a crowd favourite down there, the favourite on the jukebox. That pub had been around since the last ’70s, early ’80’s or something? That’s where The Scientists played the bulk of their shows. It’s been around; it’s been a huge incubator for years.

    To change topics entirely, are you becoming more comfortable with your position as something of a celebrity among the Australian indie music scene?

    No, if anything I just get more uncomfortable saying I’m a celebrity. I’m the sort of guy… To be famous is good, because it means that more people are giving me money. I always felt that success was being able to do this for a living. That’s how I see it. I don’t make very much money at all. I get a little bit more than the dole, contrary to popular belief. That to me is fine, because I can just play music and make a living. So the more the merrier as far as fans go. You do get anxious about – this is Australia, sooner or later they’re going to go, “The Drones suck.”

    The backlash.

    The more people who know who you are… It’s just weird. I’m not a social animal, anyway.

    Do people you meet in the street feel like they can relate to you through your songs?

    I guess. They seem like they do. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell when you meet someone for 30 seconds.

    Does it bother you that people have an image of you that’s cultivated by what they see on stage and what you write about in your songs?

    No, because that’s the way I saw the people I liked when I grew up. I’ve had plenty of people who I’ve formed an opinion of them through whatever they’ve done musically, which is probably way off the mark. I’m not going to blame anyone for being off the mark.

    Is there a particular song among your catalogue that you’re most proud of?

    I don’t know. I have favourites on each record.

    Do you want to list them?

    Okay. The first one [Here Comes The Lies] would be ‘I Walked Across The Dam’. That’s a good song. I think it’s just too long and too psychopathic for most people. I think it’s good. The band sounds good. ‘I’m Here Now’, on Gala Mill, that’s a good one. That’s just a well-written tune. It sort of plays itself; it does what it’s meant to do. Wait Long By The River, I dunno. ‘Freedom In The Loot’? I like that. It’s kind of got a really fucked up Tony Iommi-type riff, and the lyrics are completely stupid. It’s just about getting laid, but I’ve made it sort of sound really intellectual and ridiculous. [laughs] That’s got a huge guitar solo at the end, which is fun. And Havilah, what would it be on Havilah? I like ‘The Drifting Housewife’, I think that’s kind of cool. It feels good to play it. It just plays itself and it’s a really weird song about not very much at all, really, just about a guy whose got a messy divorce out of the way.

    Thank you for listing those. What did you make of the jmag award late last year?

    I can’t remember it. What was it?

    Well, your musician peers voted ‘Shark Fin Blues’ as the best Australian song ever written.

    Oh yeah yeah, I remember that. I thought that was pretty weird. We beat those fuckin’ shitty Easybeats! [laughs] I thought that was pretty funny. We beat ‘Friday on My Mind’, thank God! [mutters indecipherable expletives] You know what I make of it? I think I would say that most of the people who voted for that [poll] were probably 5-6 years younger than us, and hence more likely to hear “Shark Fin Blues” than “Friday on My Mind” or The Loved Ones doing whatever hits they had, or fuckin’ X or fuckin’ Saints. You know what I mean? They weren’t asking Paul Kelly. They weren’t asking Warren Ellis . They were asking people who were… I’d say Sarah Blasko, but she wouldn’t have voted for us.

    Are you more comfortable with praise from musician peers than from critics and journalists you’ve never met?

    I don’t know. It’s all the same. I’m sort of ambivalent about it because it’s like, “wow, this is amazing, it’s incredible that anyone would think that,” but at the same time it’s not really a good barometer of your sense of worth anyway. It’s a hard one.

    Are you comfortable with praise at all, with regard to your music? You mentioned earlier that you think particular songs are well-written, or that they’re good songs, but are you comfortable with people praising what you create?

    Yeah, because if they want to do it they can, like the way if I want to do it I can if I say to someone, “That’s amazing what you did there. That song is something else.” I’m comfortable, but I don’t take it on board that much. It’s like, “Wow, that’s nice,” but I don’t know. There are plenty of people doing all sorts of shit that impresses me, too.

    Do you ever wish you could escape your back catalogue? Do you get tired of playing ‘the hits’ in every set?

    Oh yeah. Fuck yeah. There’s one song – guess what that one is. I’m sick to fuckin’ death of it.

    ‘Shark Fin Blues’?

    Yeah. [laughs] But at the same time, it’s only because I’ve heard it too many times. I don’t think it’s shit. It’s alright. But I wouldn’t go changing the back catalogue. It’s fine. If anything, it’s a back catalogue for a 25-year old with more stamina than a 34-year old. [laughs] I wish that would change.

    For example, that jmag award has set the expectation that you’ll be playing ‘Shark Fin Blues’ at every Drones show, forever. ‘I Don’t Ever Want to Change’ and ‘The Minotaur’ seem to be fixtures among your set lists too.
    Yeah, you get them. You get those songs that are gonna stick. Everyone has that. There’s nothing you can do about that, really. I’m always saying, “Let’s fuck ‘Shark Fin’ off, we don’t have to do it!”, but it’s the band who probably want to hear it more than anyone else. I don’t know why.

    You get outvoted?

    Yeah, I guess. Vetoed!

    Democracy within The Drones.

    Yeah. It was a bad idea!

    Are there certain songs that are more enjoyable than others for you to revisit?

    Yeah, the ones you do less than others. Keep them fresh. That’s the main thing; you get sick of repetition and when you drag something out from the vault that you haven’t played for a while, then it’s great. You look forward to them in the set. It depends what that song is at that time.

    I want to ask you about ‘The City’ which appeared as the last song on The Miller’s Daughter. Have you ever played that live?

    Yeah, we used to play that all the time, back before people came to our shows.

    I think that’s a killer track.

    Yeah, it’s a good song. I forgot about that one. That’s probably on that record, that’s about the favourite on there, too. The recording is live in the studio 100%. That’s what we used to do on stage because most of The Miller’s Daughter, Wait Long and Here Come The Lies is just 100% [recorded] live.

    Is there anything among your catalogue that you’ll never play live again?

    Yeah, there are tons of songs that are just too hard. Some of them are really, really fucking hard. I’m trying to remember which ones. Actually there are not that many. ‘Are You Leaving For The Country’, that song from Gala Mill. It’s never worked live, people just go “Yeah, whatever”. We liked it, the crowd didn’t. I’d say something like ‘I Walked Across The Dam’, which I mentioned before. You’ll probably never hear that one; when we’re in the rehearsal room, me and Fi are like “Let’s play that!”. Dan and Mike – because they didn’t play on that record – they’d be like, “Fuck that!” I think that song uses every root note. That’s a record. How many are there? [counts to self] It uses all 12. That’s a record.

    Congratulations.

    Thank you!

    I’d like to refer to your comments that you made in Ampersand in 2008, that “blogging has cut the balls off music criticism”. Do you read reviews written about your music and your performances?

    Fuck yeah, of course.

    Always?

    Always.

    Do you seek them out?

    Yeah, like not every day, but I particularly like the bad ones. I found a good one the other night. Pretty awful.

    Who wrote it?

    I can’t remember. It was in the States or something like that. Hang on, I’ll have a look in the history. Anyway, of course I read my reviews. Everyone does. Any musician who says, “Nah, I don’t,” is just being a fuckwit. Or they’re not doing it, like an alcoholic doesn’t drink, you know what I mean. Here it is – Prefixmag.

    What did they say, that you’re a shit songwriter?

    Oh fuck yeah! [laughs] “Opaque and impenetrable listening.” This is my favourite – “sub-par teen angst. Torturously slow-paced.” [laughs] Which sounds great! If I was reading the review I’d go, “That sounds awesome. That sounds like good music!” Anyway, I dunno, I don’t really care what this guy thinks. It’s pretty funny. But yeah, everyone reads their reviews.

    As a journalist, I can tell you that most fellow writers that I know hold The Drones in high regard. It’s like writing about your songs and your music is somehow more enjoyable than nearly every artist I can think of. I think it’s something to do with the dark lyrical content, the confronting music, and also the anti-image that you guys have created over the last few years.

    Yeah look, I can see how that works. Things like, if we go to a mill in Tasmania [as they did when recording Gala Mill], that makes your job easier than if we don’t. It gives you an angle. I can see how that works. Clever marketing on our behalf. [laughs]

    Part of the marketing strategy.

    Yeah, totally! That one came from management.

    Have you ever considered writing a tour diary around your solo tour, like Dan [Luscombe] did for your 2007 Europe tour?

    Not really. Dan really lucked out that one because it was a fucking schmozzle. On the next European tour, he tried to do it again and the tour went reasonably well and it was the shittest, most tedious read. He just lucked out on getting the fuckin’ worst tour ever undertaken by anyone. You don’t really get horrible tours like that in Australia. It just isn’t like doing 50 or 60 shows in a row in fucking Europe. So yeah, a tour diary here wouldn’t be entertaining.

    An Australian tour for most artists seems to just involve visiting the same five or six cities, anyway.

    Yeah, well that’s it. It’s not like going to France. If you go to France five times, you play a lot of different cities. The route is different every time and sometimes you hardly ever go back to the same place twice. Whereas here, it’s just bizarre. I should have been born in America, I’d be rich.

    In preparation for this conversation I’ve revisited some of your past interviews, including one with Mess+Noise writer Andrew Ramadge in 2005. In that story you related a story where John Scott from [Adelaide hard rock band] The Mark of Cain gave some advice for young bands. Do you remember that?

    Yeah, he said that in an interview. He said “get a fucking job”.

    I believe you’re at the point now where music is your full-time pursuit, is that correct?
    Yeah it is, but that’s good advice from John. I think he said something like “get a trade,” like what he was saying is – you’re in Australia, mate. This is going to be hard going to make a living so you have to have a backup plan. Which is perfectly sensible.

    Do you know The Mark of Cain guys?

    I’ve met them, but I don’t really know them.

    I’ve read their blog a bit and from what I gather, one of them works for Australian defence security or something.

    Yeah, Kim [Scott], the bass player, work on missile guidance systems.

    Yeah, that sounds like the most interesting job for a musician to have.

    That’s why they don’t put out records every year, which is good. It’s a good way to do it, like Eddy Current or someone like that. It’s a very wise job. Looking back, if I could change anything, I’d probably get a trade. Then I wouldn’t have to do this fucking… all the time.

    You said in that same interview with Ramadge that “You’d have to be a music geek to appreciate our music.” Do you think this still holds true, given the band’s increasing popularity?

    Yeah, to a point, I guess. There’s a lot in it. We sort of somehow pack a lot in to a small amount of space. If you’ve got your music history, you’ll realise that we rip off everything.

    Have you still held true to the touring motto you told Ramadge, that “if there’s no skyscrapers, we don’t play.”

    Fuck yeah, yeah, which is another fucker because that means we can only play in five cities. Everyone else, be it The Gin Club or Grinspoon, everyone else can play in a lot more places than us. We’d have to learn fuckin’ martial arts to play in rural areas.

    This is based on personal experience, I take it – you have tried to tour regional areas.
    Yeah, everyone gives it a shot. If you want to open up more places to play, there are more places to play. But it just does not work for us. Either people don’t show or they think we’re all homosexual. It’s weird. I mean, it’s not weird at all. I can totally understand that a farmer isn’t going to get what we’re on about.

    It’s interesting the contrast between city and country mentalities then, if city people can accept you and country people can’t.

    Yeah, but that’s just what you’re exposed to. People out in the sticks aren’t exposed to much. They’re not going to know who fucking [French singer-songwriter] Serge Gainsbourg is because there’s just no-one down the pub getting into Serge Gainsbourg. That’s all it is.

    Central to your discussion with Andrew Ramadge was the notion that contemporary Australian society undervalues creative ventures like writing songs and like touring as a band. From your perspective, has this perception changed?

    No, no, and it never will. That’s us from here on in. It’s cultural cringe; it just is what it is. There’s one way to stop that, and we’re never going to do that.

    Which is?

    Boot the English out in a fuckin’ extremely nasty way. That’s where all that shit comes from. America is a colony that doesn’t have cultural cringe because it is one of the only colonies that doesn’t have cultural cringe because it’s one of the only colonies that had a very traumatic uprising against its coloniser, who happens to be England. Now America, after the fucking trauma that was, it must have been a hideous time and then once they booted the Poms out, they didn’t feel English anymore. To them, the English are now an ‘other’. We’ve never done that. We’d have to fight to become a republic. Otherwise, we don’t want to be America or England, and we don’t want to be them forever. It’s cultural cringe. Google it!

    To change topics, your comment in Ampersand that music critics should “do something useful” struck me as a bit hypocritical in light of what you’re saying about society undervaluing creativity. I mean, like songwriting and playing music, writing – whether about music or otherwise – is a creative endeavour. Is it fair to say that you value writing music in higher regard than writing about music?

    That Ampersand thing is pretty blown out of proportion. [laughs] It was meant to be a lot funnier than the way music journalists took it. The editor said, “do this, but go to town”. She wanted a full-on thing, so you know, I gave it to her. Not that music journos don’t annoy me sometimes, but I don’t write them all off. I wouldn’t take [my comments] literally, as ‘the last word’. If I said that to you in a pub, face-to-face, you wouldn’t take it on board, you know.

    I’m not taking it seriously. I’m just curious. It amused the shit out of me when I read it when it first came out. I could tell you were taking the piss, but some other people I showed it to were like, “Oh, that’s bullshit. What a hypocrite.”

    Look, in that thing as well, didn’t I say also that rock and roll is a dumb thing to do?

    Yeah, you said it’s “retarded“, actually.

    Well, there you go. It’s all retarded. Rock and roll seems like a fairly immature pursuit. And everything surrounding it, be that journalism or the business… Anyone who sort of takes it seriously seems a bit absurd. Like, fuck, there’s more than this to life.

    And yet it’s your life, Gareth; you’re living it.

    Yeah I know! [laughs] That’s why I write about it. I can totally see your point of view. I do understand that one needs the other. It’s symbiotic; it goes both ways. We both make a living from doing this.

    Are you aware of the music journalist Craig Mathieson?

    Yeah, from Mess+Noise?

    Have you seen his latest book Playlisted, which has a photo of you on the cover?
    I have, yeah.

    Did you read it?

    Yeah I did, because they sent me a copy.

    He said of the Drones’ last three albums, that “there is no better sequence of albums from an Australian artist of this decade,” which is pretty damn high praise.

    Yeah, it’s great. He likes us, even when I say he’s useless in my Ampersand thing! [laughs] He’s a nice guy. He’s come to my house a few times. And he put me on the cover of his book as well, which is a very nice thing to do.

    Yes, okay before we end I have to ask you about the line in ‘The Minotaur’ [“He spends all day looking at porn or playing fuckin’ Halo 2″] Are you any good at Halo 2?

    I did have a go at it. I’m aware that it’s now hopelessly out of date. What are we, like Halo 4, 5, or 6 now?
    Three-and-a-half, or something like that.

    Is that all? That’s good, so the song’s still half-relevant. I did a work for the dole thing years ago and I came in a week after this course had started. The guy went, “Oh, fuck, you’ve come in too late, so you can’t catch up this week’s work. There’s a computer, it’s online: go and play Halo 2.” I went in a couple of times and did that all day, during office hours, and played Halo 2. I had a great time! [laughs] Then one morning I woke up and went, “I’m not fucking going in to play that game all day,” and they never kicked me off the dole. The guy was obviously understanding enough not to strike me off the list. Why – are you a fan?

    Yeah, I enjoy it, it’s a good game. I’ve been amused to watch people sing that line – and that line only – when you play the song live.

    Yeah I know, and it’s a certain age group that does it.

    It seems to resonate with overlapping communities of indie rock fans and gamers.

    Yeah, totally, though there are a lot of gamers these days. It’s crazy. I do occasionally open my eyes and look down at that point. People love it. I love the porn bit, too. But then, [the blokes] are giving themselves up, they should keep it down. There’s women in the room.

    Alright Gareth, final question; is there any music lately you’ve been enjoying that you’d like to recommend?

    Yeah. How’s this – you know The Wipers? I only heard them the other day.

    ‘Return of the Rat’.

    Yeah, a friend of mine showed me that, I was like, “Fuck, why didn’t you show me that in high school?” I’ve been enjoying them, Toumani Diabaté, the Kora player. I listen to a lot of that. There is a guy called Abdel Hadi Halo, who’s a North African singer with a huge orchestra, so it’s got these Moorish rhythm crazy scales and shit like that. It’s really mean music. I don’t know how devout they all are, but it’s interesting. It’s kind of really sexy. I don’t think that’s what they’re trying to do. What else? I can’t think of anything else, but it’s stuff like that. Stuff that’s not rock and roll, apart from The Wipers, obviously, which is very rock and roll.

    You tend to keep a distance from rock and roll when you’re not playing it?

    Yeah, because you get sick of it because you do it all the time. And I’ve heard The Stooges and I’ve heard Black Flag and I’ve heard MC5 and I’ve heard Led Zeppelin, I’ve heard Hendrix. It’s like – beat that. If you can suggest anything or if you’re a band who can do anything [better than that], I don’t know. Why should I listen to anything that’s ‘sub-par’, as they say. I can just stick Raw Power on. If someone’s like, “come and see this band!”, it’s like, “Nah, I’ve got Raw Power at home,” and very powerful speakers. Is that wrong?

    You’re obviously a bit tied to the past there, Gareth. You’re not keeping with the times.

    Yeah but – come on. Who is? Apart from someone like Deerhoof or Lightning Bolt, I haven’t heard much very ‘new-sounding’ stuff for a while.

    Well, we’ve spoken for 48 minutes. Thanks for your time, Gareth.

    Oh yeah, no worries. Thanks for talking.

    (Note: This interview was first published at The Vine, but as of 2016 much of the original site content has been deleted, so I’m publishing it here instead.)

    To my knowledge, this was the most comprehensive interview with Gareth published at the time (2010). I researched extensively in preparation, and I think that comes across in both my questioning and his responses. Moreover, because The Drones are my favourite Australian band, it was an absolute pleasure to engage with their key songwriter for most of an hour. It’s one of those occasions where I truly love what I do.

  • A Conversation With Blair Hughes, Brisbane Sounds founder

    Blair Hughes, Brisbane Sounds founder. Photo by Elleni ToumpasI first met Blair Hughes when he began working the door at The Zoo, one of my favourite live music venues, sometime in 2008. We’ve since struck up a friendship around Brisbane Sounds, an annual compilation CD he started producing in 2007 to promote the city’s independent music scene.

    This year I helped Blair out by MCing the Brisbane Sounds 2010 media launch at The Zoo, and writing about the project in my first story for The Big Issue. What follows is the email interview I used as the basis for that story. [The first two photos are via Elleni Toumpas.]

    Andrew: As you see it, what’s your role among the Brisbane music scene?

    Blair: I view myself and the role which I have created with Brisbane Sounds as an educator or ambassador for Brisbane music. That obviously comes from my previous role working as a middle year’s school teacher and the fact that I’m very passionate about the Brisbane music scene and the diversity of genres and talent in Brisbane and want other people to hear that message. At another level I also see myself as an emerging music promoter that has created something important for Brisbane but knows that I still have a lot to learn in the music industry.

    Was starting Brisbane Sounds one of those ‘ no-one else is doing it, so I’ll give it a shot’-type situations?

    To an extent it was very much like that and it really just started out as a hobby. When I get behind an idea, I see it through to the end and I really had no idea at the start where this was going to lead. Brisbane music has been a part of my life since adolescence but I never imagined that I would end up becoming a promoter, let alone producing a compilation album.

    Brisbane Sounds started in October 2006 when I was finishing up a degree in Education and Behavioural Studies at UQ and I had decided to head off to England to commence the first year of my teaching career. I produced Brisbane Sounds 2007 as a way to showcase Brisbane music to new people on the road and had a little success throughout the year, but on a coach trip from Cambridge to London towards the end of 2007, I wrote inside the cover of the book “How to succeed in the music business” a few goals for the following year. Those goals were to find a job in a music venue in Australia, promote a gig, make a professional CD release with Brisbane Sounds, and work at a music venue in England. A week later back in Australia I got a job at The Zoo nightclub in Brisbane, put on the first Brisbane Sounds gig in February 2008, have since produced three professional releases in Brisbane sounds 2008-2010 and worked at the Hammersmith Apollo in London.

    How did your previous career in education help your work with this initiative?

    I have always wanted to work with young people and after high school, education was an obvious choice but I also did a degree in Behavioural Studies which was also useful for understanding human behaviour. In the future I would like to find a positive way that I can combine both Brisbane Sounds and working with at-risk young people to improve their lives.

    I was bullied every day throughout primary school and that made me want to become a teacher and never see the stuff that happened to me, happen to any of the students under my care. When I was transitioning from the school setting to the music setting, I found the transition quite easy to be honest as there were a lot of elements in the music industry that I found I was already skilled in from working with school students, such as planning, time and behaviour management.

    From my experience, the parallels between working with children and working with musicians are that they both need guidance and counselling from time to time, they need a leader or role model with the knowledge and expertise in their area to then guide them forward, they need a lot of help getting organised and management of their behaviour and they also need someone who will help them harness their creative and hungry minds.

    Blair Hughes speaking at the Brisbane Sounds 2010 media launch. Photo by Elleni ToumpasSixfthick, The Gin Club, Hungry Kids of Hungary, DZ and one to watch, The Honey Month.

    Of the 24 acts on this year’s compilation, which single band or artist would you recommend to the head of a major label?

    If I only had time to name one band from the Brisbane Sounds 2010 compilation, I would probably go with Hungry Kids of Hungary who have a good management team, have a sound that would work for both the US and the UK music scenes and have the work ethic to make it happen. Apart from that, they have a handsome lead singer and girls just love that and it brings them to the gigs!

    Is ‘getting signed’ at the top of the list of goals you’d like for Brisbane Sounds-associated acts to achieve? If it’s not, what is at the top?

    No certainly not, the idea of an artist getting ‘signed’ is probably more like second or third down the batting order because Brisbane Sounds is more about promoting the Brisbane music scene as a whole and creating a movement to draw awareness to the quality and diversity of artists in Brisbane. It’s not just about promoting the artists on the compilation as Brisbane Sounds is inclusive for every band in Brisbane. The main goal is to actively promote how good the Brisbane music scene is and that more people of all ages should be coming out to gigs, purchasing local music and really supporting the artists that are part of their own backyard. I just feel that in Australia, people view ‘local music’ as being substandard and unprofessional when in fact our country has thriving local music scenes with artists creating quality music.

    You’ve created this compilation to promote Brisbane music. Which is more important: the industry introduction aspect, where you’re trying to put the disc into the hands of labels, agents etc. Or is it aimed more at music fans, those who might find some new bands they love, and show all their friends?

    Overall, the compilation is about putting together an item which serves three purposes. The first being that it can be used as a marketing tool for the promotion of Brisbane, the second that it can get into the hands of A&R and radio reps and the third and best point is that anyone can purchase Brisbane Sounds 2010 and play it front to back because there is something there for everyone. The way I structure the Brisbane Sounds compilations enables me to tap into those three groups by producing a CD that has all of them in mind. For example, Brisbane Marketing have been right behind the project since last year and have been distributing copies to international delegates to Brisbane, I’ve had meetings with A&R reps from Sony and Live Nation in London and the CD has been selling well through independent record stores across Australia. Red Eye Records in Sydney even sold out of stock before Rockinghorse Records in Brisbane did!

    Are you able to comment on the factors that, in your mind, have contributed to Brisbane bands like Powderfinger, The Grates, Regurgitator, and more recently Yves Klein Blue and The John Steel Singers attracting attention from outside Queensland?

    Overall it’s that they have hard working management and creative marketing systems and teams in place. I also believe that if an artist is to be successful then they have to have something that people want and will go out of their way to get. Ultimately the music has to stand out and be above average, but at the end of the day, it is great management and hard working people which get those artists to higher levels in the music world. There are very passionate and intelligent people who are behind the artists you have mentioned.

    Brisbane Sounds 2010 posterHave you approached triple j with the compilation? What kind of response have you seen from them?

    Triple J has played the compilation which is great, but I’ve never had any direct contact or support from them as such. On the other hand, Brisbane independent radio station 4ZzZ has gone out of their way to support Brisbane Sounds. I hope that down the track Triple J becomes like the BBC in England where there are a few Triple J stations and perhaps a Triple J2 or something like that which has a main focus on local artists throughout Australia. In saying that I’m open to talks with the Jay’s so maybe Richard Kingsmill needs to give me a call.

    How did the partnership with Bandtag come about?

    I first heard about Bandtag through my boss at The Zoo in Brisbane. I was looking at creative and interesting ways to use new forms of technology to promote Brisbane Sounds and Bandtag was one of those exciting new opportunities. I contacted Erin who runs Bandtag on the Gold Coast and we struck up a partnership to take Bandtag to the QLD music conference Big Sound where we could promote both of our businesses at the same time. The benefits of Bandtag are that you can have the artist’s music tracks and artwork on a glossy card which has a code on the back that you enter into the Bandtag website. It means that for touring or going to conferences, it becomes a lot easier to carry and hand out then a CD. The ones which I have got for SXSW and Great Escape serve as a business card as well with my details on the back, artwork on the front and 15 tracks from the compilation embedded into the card.

    What are your plans to promote the compilation in Brisbane throughout 2010?

    There are many new elements that will form part of Brisbane Sounds over the next few months and leading into 2011. I’m organising a number of Brisbane Sounds spin-off gigs this year such as “Brisbane Sounds Presents….Hip-hop, Alt-Country, Rock, Indie” etc which will use artists from Brisbane Sounds 2010 as well as other Brisbane artists to create a night of that genre of music. I’ve set myself the goal of 20 gigs this year and I’m working hard to achieve that. I also now run a Brisbane Sounds stall at the West End markets focusing on what’s happening in the Brisbane music scene.

    I’m also looking at starting a management side to Brisbane Sounds and down the track I would also like to develop Brisbane Sounds into an outside festival.

    What about on a national level?

    At the national level I want to continue to network with people in the music industry and increase the profile of Brisbane Sounds across Australia. I want to form more business partnerships and solidify my place as a promoter and producer in Australia. I’d like to do some interstate tours or rural tours with Brisbane artists as well as apply for a few national grants such as the JB Seed because like anyone in the arts, I could use a bit of extra funding. I also set myself the goal of meeting and getting some advice from all seven music industry leaders from Christie Eliezer’s book “High Voltage Rock ‘N’ Roll: The Movers and Shakers in the Australian Rock Industry” in 2010.

    On an international level?

    The next few months are pretty crazy with international travel to music conferences in Austin, Texas and Brighton, England for South By South West (SXSW) and The Great Escape respectively. I’m focused on networking and meeting people who work in the music industry outside of Australia to be able to increase their knowledge and educate them more about Brisbane music. I always envisaged going to these conferences as a punter, but it’s very exciting and rewarding to be able to take my business to them.

    Brisbane Sounds 2010 album coverWho do you plan to meet while at these conferences, and why? What’s your networking plan of attack?

    I have two goals for the music conferences that I will attend this year. The first goal is that I plan to meet radio and A&R reps as well as music supervisors who place music in films and advertisements. I have already started making contact with some of these people for both SXSW and The Great Escape in order to have meetings while I’m in the US and England.

    The second goal is that I want to meet promoters, managers and artists to continue to get more skills and improve my professional development in the music industry. Overall, my plan of attack is to talk to everyone. I’m taking 500 of the Brisbane Sounds bandtags to these conferences and I’m going to try my hardest to meet music supervisors and promoters down to volunteers and local people. I’m very much the type of person who likes to talk and has the time to listen to anyone. You never know who you could be talking too and at these types of conferences that’s very exciting.

    Alright then, what’s your elevator pitch at those kind of events?

    G’day, I’m Blair and I work as a music promoter and cultural producer in Brisbane, Australia. I promote gigs involving Brisbane artists and produce the only annual compilation CD featuring a diverse selection of Brisbane bands called Brisbane Sounds the aim of which is to increase the visibility of the Brisbane music scene in Brisbane, Australia and across the globe.

    Cheers Blair. Visit brisbanesounds.com for more information on the Brisbane Sounds compilations. Check out my related story for The Big Issue here.

  • A Conversation With Claes Loberg, CEO of Australian music service Guvera

    An interview originally conducted for The Vine that I published in full at Waycooljnr, the Australian music and marketing blog which I recently began editing in place of founder Nick Crocker:

    A Guvera advertisement suggesting intercourse with piratesQ+A with Claes Loberg, CEO of Australian music service Guvera

    Australia-based online service Guvera (http://guvera.com) has been making waves among the music industry recently. It offers free high quality (256kbps) downloads to consumers, which are paid for by advertisers who can match particular artists to their brand’s ‘personality’. As you can see by the image to the right, Guvera is not particularly subtle when it comes to marketing.

    Waycooljnr editor Andrew McMillen spoke with Guvera CEO Claes Loberg a few days ahead of its worldwide public launch on March 30, 2010.

    Andrew: Hey Claes. Can you summarise what Guvera’s all about?

    Claes: Here’s the gist of it: advertisers paying for downloads. There’s nothing new about the idea of advertisers actually paying for content. That’s how we’ve been receiving TV for free for all these years. What’s wrong with television at the moment, is that advertising is actually starting to lose value year, on year. People have got the power to click past it, sort of get around the advertising. That’s a reflection of all advertising across the board.

    Now that the people are in control, Guvera’s business model is a reversal of the advertising process. Instead of advertisers being the annoying thing they used to be years ago, now they can be a channel that people will want to go to, to get content. It’s trying to change the value proposition away from ads-as-disruptors. It actually pays the artists for the content it’s created, and the people still get it for free.

    Full interview over at Waycooljnr.

  • A Conversation With Barry Hogan, All Tomorrow’s Parties founder

    All Tomorrow's Parties founder Barry HoganIn late 2009, my girlfriend and I went to England for three weeks. All Tomorrow’s Parties was the main reason. It’s an independently-operated festival that celebrated its 10th anniversary with a weekend-long concert series held at Butlins holiday camp, in the town of Minehead near England’s west coast. We stayed on-site for 10 days all up – including the Nightmare Before Christmas weekend curated by My Bloody Valentine, the ‘in between days‘ series of weeknight shows, and the 10 Years Of ATP weekend – and saw a ridiculous amount of good music. Which was the intended outcome.

    While on-site, I interviewed ATP founder Barry Hogan [pictured right] for a Rolling Stone story. [I also reviewed Dirty Three playing ‘Horse Stories’ to around 100 people, for Mess+Noise.] Late on the Sunday night of the 10 Years event – after sacrificing my barrier spot for The Mars Volta – we sat down in the production office to discuss the festival’s history and his motivations for creating what has become an internationally successful event.

    Andrew: Barry, broadly speaking, what do you think has contributed to ATP’s success as a festival?

    Barry: When ATP started 10 years ago, there weren’t any alternative festivals. It was only big corporate festivals and I think a lot of people who are into bands like Low, Will Oldham, and so on, the only place you could see them was at Reading Festival and that sort of thing, and they’d be kind of sandwiched in with piles of shit like Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine and fuckin’ Chumbawumba. It just felt like you paid whatever it was at the time, £80-90 to go for the day, but you’d have to wait all day to see something [worthwhile].

    I just thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could design something where you could have constant bands, all day long, you’re wanting to go and see things, like killing yourself that you’re missing something because something else is on that the same time,” and just do it in a more intimate environment. Glastonbury, for example, was one of the reasons why we wanted to hold it here in the [Butlins] holiday camp, because of the conditions there. I think the toilets in Guantanamo Bay are probably healthier than there. Glastonbury is an abomination. It’s like the way it’s designed is for too many people in too small a space, and I thought, “this isn’t fun”. But here, people have got their own apartments, their own space. Going back to your question; what’s contributed to it, is we’ve designed it so we want to treat people like we want to be treated, and we want people to be into really good music, have a good time, enjoy themselves, and feel like they got value for money.

    I feel that because we’ve been true to the concept of keeping it sponsorship-free, and also keeping the idea of the curator and being sort of focused on that, I think that’s definitely one of the reasons why it’s remained as strong as it has over the years. We’ve just got a loyal fan base that continually comes back. It’s good.

    Is it difficult to stay true to the concept, to keep focused?

    It is if the curator doesn’t go mental with trying to suggest stupid bands. The thing is; it’s hard; it gets harder as you go on, to kind of get curators to make you kind of fresh each time. I think because it’s a different curator each time, in a way, it’s a different person’s interpretation of a mixtape. If you get similar artists doing it, then you’re going to get the same sort of bands. We’re always striving to look for new and different ways to present it, to get different curators. It does get harder as you go on, but we’ve been pretty fortunate to be able to present some great things over the last 10 years.

    Did you expect to reach your 10th birthday?

    No. I’ve been waiting for the call to get a real job for quite a while now. When we did Bowlie Weekender with Belle & Sebastian [in 1999], they called it the first annual Bowlie Weekender and the idea was to do it year in, and year out. I don’t know why but they felt they wanted to keep the event unique and I said with their blessing, could I continue it and rename it, All Tomorrow’s Parties. I never thought it would go this long.

    I think we’ve been fortunate that it is still strong and people still want to go to it, but I think we spend so much time laboring over things like artwork design, the programs to present, and the lineup and where bands play. We’re conscious of what the fans want, as well. We’re trying to make people happy so that they keep coming back. So far, I think we’re doing a good job.

    I saw in an interview you said, “The way forward for festivals is to keep it boutique.”

    Yeah, totally. You get some festivals like Bestival and they have the audacity to call themselves boutique when they started at 10,000 [capacity]. That’s not boutique for starters, and also I don’t understand why Rob Da Bank puts “Curated by” on each event. If it’s the same person doing it, surely, isn’t he the festival booker and that’s his job? You don’t need to wear a badge and put it on the top of the poster.

    You’re talking about British festivals here, which I’m not too familiar with…

    Oh, sorry – okay. Talking about boutique festivals, there’s one here called Bestival. It’s run by a [BBC] Radio 1 DJ called Rob Da Bank. The thing is, a lot of these festivals start at 3,000-4,000 capacity and then they start expanding. Because it’s only one event, they get bigger and bigger. Most of them have gone from 5,000 up to 45,000 or 50,000. It loses its intimacy and it loses track of where it started and why it started.

    I think with us, it’s that we are keeping it sort of personal to people. It’s not overcrowded and you can walk around between stages and see lots of really great bands. I’d rather do more ATPs and keep it small, than do one big one and do it once a year because I just feel like it will lose its charm.

    So the events here at Butlins are capped?

    Yeah, the place only holds just over 6,000 so we sell 5,500 and the rest is made up of guests and production. It’s capped because that’s the legal capacity.

    Nick Cave and ATP founder Barry HoganI see. As I mentioned earlier, I also went to the Mount Buller event [the first Australian ATP event, curated by Nick Cave (pictured left) & The Bad Seeds].

    That was really great. There was some view up there, wasn’t it?

    Yeah. And I went to the Riverstage one in Brisbane, which is where I live, as well as one of the Brisbane Powerhouse shows.

    Okay. Those were good events, Buller especially. In hindsight I think I would love to have just done Buller. Those other events that we did… They were All Tomorrow’s Parties in the mindset but they weren’t like the All Tomorrow’s Parties because it wasn’t like a residential thing where people stayed, hanging out like they did at Buller. They were good, but I think it was a bit misrepresented in a way.

    Now that you mention it, it’s quite odd that you did those Sydney and Brisbane events because like you mentioned, there was no accommodation. Do you put on many of those here in Britain?

    No, to be honest; we’ve talked about doing a sister event called ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, which is the b-side to The Velvet Undergrounds single ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’. The idea is that it’s like a sister event to ATP. It has the concept of the curator and stuff, but it doesn’t have the holiday camp. The idea of it is that it’s not trying to compete with ATP, it’s kind of designed for people to see great music but at a lower price because they don’t have to pay for their accommodation. There are a lot of people that would love to come to this but can’t necessarily afford it. It’s not that we’re too expensive; we’re providing value for money, but it’s a rising cost because Butlins is not a cheap place to hire.

    I can imagine. As well as the festival aspect of ATP, it’s also a label. Again, what factors do you think have contributed to the success of ATP as a brand?

    Someone said to me the other day, “oh, Fuck Buttons must be doing really well because the festival is doing well”. It’s not like that. There are a lot of records that we put out, and they’re releases that don’t necessarily sell a great deal. They’re great records, but the festival helps in the way that we can showcase the bands as another outlet for people to discover them. But bands like Fuck Buttons have done really well because they’ve made great records. Whether it’s on ATP or another label, I don’t think it makes any difference.

    We’ve got a brand, not in the sense of Coca Cola or McDonalds, but I think a kind of brand of quality. I wanted it to be where you used to buy Sub Pop singles and you didn’t know some of the bands but you bought them because – I’m not saying you, here – but when Sub Pop was in its Nirvana and Mudhoney heyday – not that it doesn’t put great records out now – but there was a period when Sub Pop was releasing something you’d buy it because it’s like “Fuck, it’s on Sub Pop.”

    Or Def Jam [Recordings] There were all those great early hip hop records like LL Cool J and Public Enemy, and Beastie Boys, and Run DMC. You knew that Def Jam and Sub Pop put out great things so you kind of bought into that. I feel like ATP is getting a bit like that in a way that people are sort of willing to take a chance because they know we’re not going to put out Coldplay or Miley Cyrus records.

    You like ripping on Coldplay.

    There are worse bands than Coldplay. [laughs] They’ve got a couple of good songs. I don’t think they’re for me.

    Neither me. An aspect of the festival that I really liked, and I’m sure you do too, is the discovery aspect. As you say, it’s associated with quality. You walk into a room and at least respect a band, if not find it really damn good and want to go and buy all their shit.

    Yeah. The reason we say it’s like a mix tape is you know, if you’ve got a friend and – I don’t know if you’ve ever had friends who give you mixtapes – but you put it on and you’re like, “Jesus, what’s this? This is great.” You have to look up the track list and you go, “This is amazing” but because you’re here at the festival and you’ve bought your ticket for the weekend, you can go in and out of rooms; there’s going to be something on you’ve never heard of, or you’ve been curious to know what it’s about.

    It forces you to go and check stuff out, and it opens you up to loads of stuff. I think bands like Deerhoof, their success in Europe has benefited from playing at ATP. They said this themselves; they’ve been playing at an event and people have never heard of them before just a few years ago, and then they’ll see them and go, “My God, they’re great.” They’ll want to keep going back and seeing them. They’ve discovered it in that mixtape fashion, where it’s like a pleasant surprise.

    Kevin Shields of My Bloody ValentineI saw in an interview that you mentioned Kevin Shields [of My Bloody Valentine, pictured right] is fond of ATP because you kind of sidestep the whole music industry game.

    Kevin’s been very supportive of us, and I think it would be fair to say we’ve done things in a different way. It’s good having a curator because it means we have to pick the bands the curator wants instead of agents, magazines, and labels all going, “You must put this band on because they’re the hot new thing”. It bypasses all that and we’ve just done things on our own terms.

    To have a festival with no sponsorship, there is another promoter who asked me about doing an event in a holiday camp, and he said, “How the fuck do you do it without sponsorship?” We know how to do it because we’ve fine-tuned it over the years. We know how much it costs, how much we spend on bands, and it does make money but probably not the sort of money that some of the people out there think it does. Anything we have done goes back into the business.

    I just feel like I want to keep doing this sort of thing until we lose interest in it. When we do lose interest, I think that’s the time to stop and end it on a high rather than fizzle out. The music industry is changing constantly, and I think it would be fair to say we never really played the games that a lot of people do. I’m not into that, so we just do our own thing, really. I guess we have sidestepped a lot of it, which is good.

    You began as a promoter at Dingwalls [in Camden], and you got tired of having to play the game. Did you find it difficult to step outside of that and say, “Fuck it, I’ll do my own thing”?

    Yeah, it was really hard because in those days, if a band like Tortoise came along, it was once every 6 months or something and it was a real big deal. Nowadays, if you open up Time Out in London or anything else, it’s like there are 100 bands on par with Tortoise that are playing constantly. There wasn’t really an outlet for that type of music I wanted to work with.

    I found it was really hard because you would take punts on shows and the attendance would be down. You’d lose money and then it would be ages before another band that was worth doing comes through. It was difficult and also, it was tempting to try and go outside of that and start playing the game, but we rode out the rough times and kept it true to the original thing.

    I’m supposing a big part of that is having the connections you made through ATP, such as Sonic Youth and the credibility that having guys like that playing in your festival lends you as a promoter.

    That’s definitely helped, but the thing with us is that the roster of bands that we do outside of the festival are all bands that we actually like. I’ve been offered some bands that are huge and I’m like “I can’t do that.” I got begged to do Snow Patrol in 2003, and I remember their agent at the time was like, “I really want you to do it. They’re going to be great. They’re going to be massive.” I was like, “There is no way they’re going to be massive,” but the thing is; I didn’t know they changed their sound from sounding like Sebadoh to Coldplay. I think it’s good that we haven’t sold out in that way.

    How do you go about goal setting for ATP? When you began, did you imagine 5 years down the track, 10 years down the track?

    No, I have to be honest with you; every time I do the next one, I’m thinking about how it has to be better than the last one. We have to finally think of a curator that no one else is going for, and I want each one to be better than the last one. Some of them are fantastic and some aren’t as good as the others and it can be a bit disappointing, but I think we’re always striving.

    Someone said to me today, “Do you think you’ll get to 20 years?” I’m like, “I don’t know, maybe.” I don’t know if I can think that far ahead, but as I said to you; I want to keep doing this as long as it’s still fresh and exciting, and the minute it stops being that, that’s the time to pull the plug.

    When’s the next Australian ATP event planned?

    Main stage at ATP Mt Buller, January 2009That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer to that. To be honest with you; I really loved the Mt. Buller event [pictured left]. It was really special, really great. The lineup that was up there and that setting, especially that second stage where you could see all the mountains behind it, through the stage. That was amazing, but it was just the spirit of people that were up there because I think a lot of people have gone to things like Big Day Out and Homebake and that. Those things are good for what they’re designed for. They seem like a breath of fresh air for a lot of people. That’s how ATP was when it started in England 10 years ago. People were like, “Fuck, great, we can go see 20 bands all at one weekend instead of having to wait all day for someone to come on at Reading, or something like that.”

    ATP Australia – would it happen again? Yeah, we’d like to think so. We’re taking a step back because we’ve just got some venue issues and stuff. Once we resolve them we’d definitely like to pursue Buller again if we could.

    Everyone I spoke to at Buller was just having a great time. Everything I read about it afterwards was extremely positive. Do you ever receive bad reports about ATP?

    Yeah, for example I know some people came last weekend. We had My Bloody Valentine curating. Some people thought it was great but some felt the people there, the atmosphere wasn’t like it was at this one. I think each one changes by the crowd. There seemed to be quite a lot of middle-aged men last weekend, but there are lots of young girls at this one, which is always definitely more encouraging.

    We do get some people who don’t think it’s – they’re not into it, but I think ATP – it’s what you make of it as well. You can be into the media but you’ve got to go there with a right mindset. You have to go there and want to enjoy yourself and let go and jump away from your job for 3 days and just embrace all the music and film, and the art, and hanging out with friends. It can be a really great thing to go to. Someone said to me, “Would you go to it yourself if you weren’t putting it on?” I’m like, “Yeah, I probably would.”

    Probably?

    Yeah, well I would, of course I would. I would. Sorry!

    You mentioned events like Glastonbury and Reading and so forth, when comparing ATP. When was the last time you went to Reading and Glastonbury? Do you ever go to those events just to remind yourself?

    I don’t compare ourselves. I use that as a reason why I started this. I went to Glastonbury in 2002. I will never go back to that thing. I just don’t understand how people could enjoy being there with too many people, too short of a space of time, and I’ve seen people – we were talking to Keith Cameron just now from Mojo. He was saying he saw someone get their head kicked in, in broad daylight there. There is a horrible vibe there, really.

    It’s been a while since I’ve been to those; too busy running this. That was the only thing you could go to if you wanted to go see some of the bands. If the Pixies were over [playing shows], if you couldn’t see them in shows you went and saw them in Reading or Glastonbury and it was kind of like that was where you could see some of the rare bands you wanted to check out. It was more a case of using that as an example of where you would see that music and why we started this.

    You mentioned that self control is important when booking bands, or when the curator asks to book bands. I’m taking it since the capacity is capped here, so is the budget for booking bands?

    Yeah.

    Is it difficult to manage?

    If you gave me a wish list and you put AC/DC, Leonard Cohen, and Motorhead on there, then if you took one of those bands, it would just wipe out the budget. You need to kind of tailor the lineup to the size of the event. It’s always good to have a couple of big names and stuff, but I think the real beauty of ATP is having all those kind of midrange bands, the sort of ones that would fill up Center Stage and have – it’s better to have more of those midrange than all big hitters.

    There have been a couple of events where we’ve had some really big names, and then it’s all been small bands, and it hasn’t felt balanced. You get lots of people at one show and then it’s kind of half empty at other ones. With the curators, I have to kind of say as much as we’d love to have Neil Young, as much as we’d love to have Bob Dylan, it’s probably unrealistic that we could afford it. We just kind of need to guide them, really. I try to give everyone as much freedom as possible. I’m just hoping no one puts Blur on their list. [laughs]

    Is your favourite ATP still the Dirty Three-curated one?

    Yes, definitely.

    Warren Ellis of Dirty Three, by Justin EdwardsDo you thank [Dirty Three frontman, pictured right] Warren Ellis often for that?

    All the time. He’s just been so amazing to work with over the years, so supportive. There are other curators as well. There are so many of them I think of that was as well, but their whole take on it and the way they approached it and the actual weekend itself was just magical; it really was. I just was walking around and everyone was having the time of their life. I also thought that ATP that Nick Cave did in Mt. Buller was one of my favorite ones as well. Definitely, that was a highlight.

    This one might be difficult to answer, but when you think of the average ATP fan or concertgoer, what image do you have in mind?

    Someone who is into music, who probably is the sort of person that when they buy records, they want to know where the band recorded it, what studio, and stuff like that. Someone said to me, “record nerd” but I think it’s people who actually give a shit about music. They don’t buy their CDs or vinyl in supermarkets, which seems to be one of the few places you can buy music these days like that. Most of the record shops are closing.

    So you’d say it’s for the more discerning music enthusiast?

    Definitely. It’s for people who went to see bands that blew their mind and wanted to even start a band or get into music, where music is really special to them and they listen to it all the time, checking out new stuff and they’ve got memories of old things. I think ATP appeals to them because it crosses a lot of those things, really.

    Do you try to avoid associating ATP with indie rock, in particular?

    I guess I’m an indie kid at heart. I guess we’ve been described as an indie festival, but indie is a bit of a weird term these days. You get some people who are on indie labels but they have the mindset of a corporate sort of thing. We have had a lot of indie guitar stuff over the course of time, but the curators we pick, it’s the music they’re into. Each one is different.

    For example, that Mike Patton one we did with The Melvins, that was pretty eclectic because it had Taraf de Haidouks and then you had White Noise and Stockhausen and those sort of things, but you also had Mastodon and The Melvins. It was very different. I guess most of the best music around is coming from indie labels. That’s why we focus on it really, but we get criticized for having too many American bands. Someone said that but I just think a lot of the bands that come right out of England aren’t very good. There are some good ones, but on the whole, I think a lot of the best stuff around has been coming out of the States for a while.

    What’s your favorite ATP festival moment, ever, stepping outside of the office and just walking around, watching the bands?

    There are way too many to remember…

    Lightning Bolt live. Mayhem.I know you’re a big fan of Lightning Bolt [pictured left].

    I remember the first time that Lightning Bolt came and played ATP. There were a lot of people that didn’t know who they were and then when they played on the floor and the actual great thing was seeing the reaction on peoples’ faces. They were like, “What the fuck is this?” That was really good. There are so many.

    I think some of the best things I’ve seen, music wise, is Sleep performed ‘Holy Mountain’ earlier this year. The Boredoms did ‘Boardrum’ in New York. That’s some of the best things I’ve ever seen at the festival but I think highlights for me are things like Slint, because ‘Spiderland’ is probably one of my favorite records of all time. Getting to see them perform that live was… I had to move a few mountains to get those guys back together.

    I was saying to David Pajo today that when I met them, Slint had never been in a room together, the 4 of them, for 13 years. I’m a huge Slint fan and I said to them – we went to Britt [Walford]’s house for this meeting. I was so excited I was there and I said to them, “Can I go to the toilet?” They were like, “Yeah” and I was in there – I didn’t actually need to go to the toilet. I was in behind the toilet door going like this, “Yes!!!” just freaking out. I told David today and he’s like, “Really?” and I’m like “Yeah!” [laughs]

    It meant the world to me. As I’ve said to some people, it’s like – the way [music magazine] Mojo think about The Beatles, I think about Slint. It was really special to see that and to see them perform because they were someone I always wanted to see and never thought I would because they weren’t together. That always sticks in my mind as a real special thing. I feel proud that we’ve done them, really.

    The same kind of thing with My Bloody Valentine, too. You were kind of one of the forces behind them getting back together.

    Yeah, they hadn’t been together for 16 years and the thing is; a lot of people have made them offers over the years, but it’s like trying to lift an old truck from a swamp, trying to get it back into motion. It was possible but it needed help. I think we were able to present them the setup they needed to do it. Kevin was really kind to trust us to do that. We did it. The shows were fantastic and it worked really well.

    I just think we look at things in a different way. Some people promote like, “You’ll make this much money,” but you need to sort of show the artist what they’re going to get from it, not just the money. It’s got to be the actual performance and what benefit they get from it too. I think that’s important and that gets overlooked by some people. That’s probably why we’ve got to work with so many great artists over the years because of our attention to detail. We put care into it.

    I saw them all three nights, last weekend. I’m so glad I did. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve seen.

    Had you seen them before?

    No. It was cool to see ‘You Made Me Realise‘ three times. [Notably, because the band end the song with a 15ish minute noise jam known as the ‘holocaust section’. It’s fucking intense.]

    Did you have ear plugs in?

    Of course.

    I don’t know how they felt about the first show they did for us as warm-up show, at the ICA. I don’t think they were too into it, but the first time seeing those tracks being played live for a long time was like, “Whoa, this is going to be a joke.” When they went into a bigger room like the Round House and had the full PA, it was like a jet plane taking off.

    What’s next for ATP? How do you go about planning for the next couple of years?

    All Tomorrow's Parties founder Barry HoganI’m in the process, I’m still booking Pavement, which is next year, and [The Simpsons creator] Matt Groening in May. Then I’m pursuing two curators for Christmas next year. I can’t say who they are just yet, but once I get them in place I’ve kind of got an idea of – we’ve had at least talks and I’ve got an idea of who they would want. I think it will surprise people because if both of them come off it will be things that people won’t be expecting. Again, we want to make is special because it’s the 10th year and we want to do the year-long celebrations and stuff.

    You had the ATP film for the 10th anniversary, which I saw in my chalet the other day. Any plans for a book?

    There has been talk of it. We were talking about maybe doing a kind of book, incorporating the artwork and stuff. Yeah, we’ve been approached by people to do it, so you never know… “You bought the t-shirt, you watched the film, now read the book!”

    I’m sure there’s a market for it. ATP fans are pretty hardcore.

    They are, but the thing is they’re not stupid. I couldn’t just put on a crap lineup because then people won’t come. It needs to be quality and people actually sit on the fence saying, “I’m thinking of going to this one but if they announce a couple of more bands” and then they do, but my favorite thing is watching kids on message boards, and I’ll be looking at various things because it’s always good to see what people are up to or saying. They’re always like, “Why the fuck did they get them to curate? They’re going to pick a load of shit!” and I remember when they did that with Mars Volta and Explosions In The Sky and then the same people 6 months later were going, “This is the best lineup ever. I’m totally going.” During all this time it was like, have patience. You need to see it unravel itself and I think it’s kind of good doing that because we know what’s coming and seeing the reaction from people is good.

    Do you keep an eye on the feedback and reviews from attendees afterwards?

    We do, we take things on board. If someone says I had a really shit time in this venue because of something like the lights might be wrong or the PA was in the wrong place, we don’t ignore that sort of thing. We take it on board and try and make each one better than the last one, like a new and improved formula each time we do it.

    There are a few people here that haven’t been here since 2007 and the Pavilion Stage, which is the big room, we didn’t have those drapes down the side, and we didn’t have the star cloth. They make a massive difference to that room. We also changed the PA in the Center Stage where you were for My Bloody Valentine. Just lighting configurations and things like that but it’s all – we use feedback and we exploit it and make put it to use in a beneficial sense so that each time someone comes back they go, “Oh, this is fixed up.”

    Better and better.

    Yeah, if you rest on your laurels and go, “Oh yeah, we’ve got this great thing now and got the curator in, that’s it. You’ll fucking like it or lump it” then it won’t last another 10 years. Whether I’m still doing it in 10 years is another thing but I only want to keep doing it until I lose the fire inside me that started it. Ten Years of All Tomorrow's Parties Rolling Stone story, by Andrew McMillenThere are times when it goes out, but this weekend has definitely been a great one for us, just so many bands – they’re all old curators and people who have recorded for us, but also friends. Every time you walk around it’s like, “Hey, how are you doing?” The spirit here has been really good.

    You went to last weekend. I didn’t feel that same atmosphere last weekend as I did at this one. Again, it’s like a different mix tape and a different interpretation. It was quite abrasive last weekend, the music and stuff. It was all that heavy guitar stuff. It was good, and it worked really well, but I think this one seemed to be a bit more eclectic.

    Thanks for your time, Barry.

    This interview was conducted for a story on behalf of Rolling Stone Australia, pictured left. Read that story here.

  • A Conversation With Steve Milbourne and Phil Clandillon, Creative Directors of Sony Music London

    This is the full transcript of the December 2009 conversation I had with Steve Milbourne and Phil Clandillon, Creative Directors of Sony Music London, in their Kensington office. I interviewed them on behalf of The Music Network; you can read the published story here. [Note: if you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, the video embeds might not work. I don’t know why. Click through and view it on my blog.]

    Andrew: The main reason I’m aware of your work is because of the few campaigns you’ve been behind in the last year, like AC/DC, Kasabian, Editors, and Calvin Harris. Those are the ones I’m aware of, but before we go into those, I thought I’d ask you how you got into the music industry, and why.

    Steve Milbourne, Creative Director at Sony Music LondonSteve [pictured right]: The reason I got into the music industry is because I’ve always loved music. From my early twenties, what I wanted was to get into the business side of it. Then I kind of got into the whole creative thing. I went to work at an indie label after graduating from uni, called Kitchenware Records, which is based up in Newcastle. They’re sort of big old indie from the ‘80s. I had lots of success in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, and then they sort of reformed the label. It was a new entity in 2003.

    I went to work for them in 2004 at the exact same time they signed a band called Editors, which you know of. I got interested in their situation of not having any money to do anything with, so it was like I was given a band to work with and then I’d have to do the artwork, make a music video, do stuff online, make websites, and all that sorts of stuff with zero pounds to work with, which is quite good. I might have spent a few years just sort of honing all these skills that crossed a wide range of areas, from web programming to production and film, so it all kind of came in handy when I came to Sony about two and a half years ago, and then Phil came in. They brought us in separately but then we got put together as a creative team and that’s it.

    Phil [pictured below left]: I’ve basically spent the last ten years doing half my work in the music industry and half in advertising, in sort of digital agencies. I started off doing digital work around TV and then interactive TV. Then the dot-com crash happened and there weren’t any jobs, so I came to London. I got heavily into the club scene at the time, and met some people that were running nights and things like that. I ended up getting an office in an online radio station, which is in the Truman Brewery, and basically electronic artists were coming in to do shows and DJ on the station. I just ended up getting freelance work through that and I worked for years for an outfit called Sancho Panza, who are most famous for Notting Hill Carnival, for doing a big stage at Notting Hill Carnival. They also did warehouse parties and things like that.

    Phil Clandillon, Creative Director at Sony Music LondonFrom there I got offered a job at a record label, Sanctuary Records, which is now part of Universal. I started doing web stuff for them and after about three years there I got kind of fed up with the record industry as it was then and went back to advertising stuff. I worked at a digital ad agency and then a larger advertising group after that.

    About two years ago I decided it was a good time to go back to music. Sony came knocking so I came and met Steve and decided I could probably work with him, and that’s that. We kind of kicked it off from there, essentially.

    Is Creative Director a very common role within labels? I’ve not really heard of it before.

    Steve: Not particularly. We’re quite unique in what we do, with regard to the type of work that we do in the music industry, I guess. Essentially we run almost a boutique agency in-house and our clients are with various labels within the Sony umbrella. I don’t think the other labels do that.

    What it means is we essentially take on various groups from the big labels in here, which are Epic, Columbia, RCA, Syco, which is Simon Cowell’s label, and then some smaller labels, as well – Jive, and Deconstruction. What we do is get a brief of a band that Sony Music want to promote this band or this artist, then we come up with the creative and sort of service them as our clients.

    Phil: We sort of created the advertising creative time type model inside of the record label, which is kind of unique. There really isn’t anyone else doing that. The reason we can do it is because we’ve spent years gaining these skills of design, programming, video production, music skills in Steve’s case as well. We don’t do tons and tons of that stuff, hands on, but if we have to we can. When we’re commissioning the work we know what to go and get. It makes it easier for us to run a complex project because we’ve done it all in the past and we know how to do it, essentially.

    Steve: A lot of that stuff gets really complex at times. It’s quite weird; the sort of stuff we do is often experimental. You’re kind of always sitting on the edge; “is this going to work or not? Am I going to waste loads of money?”

    Phil: We’re always sticking our necks out, I guess, and one of the reasons we can do that is because what we do is very cost effective. It’s not as expensive as traditional advertising so it means we can do things that reach more people without spending as much money. That gives us a little bit of freedom to experiment and do more exciting things. To be honest, it generally goes fairly well, but if you do make mistakes it’s not the end of the world because you’re only talking about relatively small amounts of money.

    Steve: Yeah, we haven’t had any that haven’t worked out, yet.

    Phil: We presented all our work at a creative review conference, last week. A lot of questions we had from the audience were all about “This seems very risky. How could I sell this to the client if I was at an agency?” On the one hand our answer was you need the experience to be able to pull stuff like this off. If you don’t have the experience it will go wrong. The other thing is a lot of the stuff we do is designed to be shared. We don’t buy media. We don’t pay for advertising space, and in a way, as long as you’re doing something with good intentions, the worst thing that’s going to happen is it’s going to languish in the corner of the Internet somewhere and no one is going to see it. It’s not like putting a really inappropriate advertising campaign across London on billboards or whatever. It’s a totally different proposition. That allows us to take a few more risks, I guess.

    Steve: Going back to your question about our job title; I guess it depends on what you term as Creative Director. I think that’s slightly misleading. That’s what our titles are, and it’s in the context of what we do. I guess other labels have got creative directors, but probably do different things to us. I think what other labels – I’m not aware of any other labels who’ve got a creative team, in-house, who do this sort of work that Phil and I do. There are other creative directors in this building who look after different things, like artwork, or styling, and stuff like that. That’s just a title. It’s more about what we do, really.

    I mentioned the four campaigns of yours that I’m aware of: Kasabian, AC/DC, Editors, and Calvin Harris. I’m interested in how you run these as online marketing campaigns. Say, for example Kasabian [‘Football Hero’ video embedded below]; could you talk me through how that idea started and how it came across through the production?

    Steve: We work closely with a consumer insight team here. I guess part of what is loosely termed “briefing process” is that the consumer insight team, every time there is an artist with an album coming out, they do a lot of market research on that artist, on the audiences for that artist, and we have this thing called the ‘Segment Bible’, which is the UK music market split into 28 segments of consumer, based on age, interests, everything from what brands they buy, where they hang out, how much money they spend. It’s very in depth actually, so when we take on an act to do the online campaign for, we get told who the applicable segments are, and we get the opportunity to speak to people within that segment. They come in and we can talk to them. With Kasabian it was kind of – we already sort of know about Kasabian quite well because it’s their third album and –

    Phil: But there were some pretty obvious things coming out. With Kasabian, we were looking at – we have this thing called an artist DNA, which is a document that sums up everything to do with the audiences for that audience, what matters to them about the band, and so there were really strong themes coming out of that to deal with football, gaming, and the way they hung out with them, what they actually did, what they’re into.

    Steve: It’s interesting, that audience actually cares more about football and gaming than they do about music. Music is sort of a secondary thing in their lives.

    Phil: It was kind of sensible to try and reach them through those channels so we basically said let’s come up with a piece of content that –

    Photo from the set of Kasabian's 'Football Hero' videoSteve: Kind of seems really obvious but I guess it wasn’t like a eureka moment but it was like – Kasabian is sort of synonymous with football, especially here in the UK.

    Phil: If their music is used on the titles of the iTV football program and stuff like that and they’ve been on the Sony Bravia ad with Kaka, the Brazilian and AC Milan footballer. And also, the band are fans of football. They’re fans of Leicester City.

    Steve: They are big football fans. We kind of started off on this idea of doing something with football and then I guess that kind of progressed. We were thinking about loads of different ideas and kind of progressed into gaming.

    Phil: I guess quite a lot of that stuff involves music as well, so that kind of came around to trying to build a giant game of essentially a Guitar Hero type game that people could play with footballs. That was the pipe dream, and from then on it was trying to make it a reality. It was quite a lengthy process in the end!

    Steve: I think that we were sitting downstairs there, when we finally got exactly what we wanted to do. Especially, we knew we wanted to get some really cool, freestyle footballers to do it as well. We don’t know any, so then we had the whole process of finding out how we could build it, who we could get to play it, where we could build it, and all that sort of stuff.

    Phil: Again, we always work with fairly tight budgets and that was the case with this, as well. It had to be doable for a reasonably modest sum of money so that was a challenge as well. We used the hardware, and the software was all open source and it was pretty low cost, all that stuff. There was a very big production on the day but it was only for a day. The R&D process was relatively inexpensive. Then it was a case of building it and seeing how it would go, essentially, and spending a whole day building, and filming it.

    Throughout the whole process is there the risk that the thing wouldn’t work or the footballers weren’t good enough to make it work?

    Phil: Absolutely, yeah.

    Steve: I think so, but –

    Phil: We kind of knew that it would be okay.

    Steve: Just the experience, you minimize all the risks, so –

    Phil: The hardware, the actual game we built wasn’t technically complicated.

    Steve: No, it was one of the least technical things that we’ve done, really.

    Photo from the set of Kasabian's 'Football Hero' videoPhil: That was okay. We knew that was going to be alright so it really came down to would the footballers have enough time to practice, because it was something that wasn’t going to be easy to play.

    Steve: And, just the logistics of them playing it, balls bouncing everywhere, and all that sort of stuff.

    Phil: And the camera gear, as well, to be honest; there was a lot of expensive gear on the shoot and the balls were just flying everywhere. I was sure we were just going to smash everything.

    Steve: Yeah, it was like – you can see in the film, there are the five footballers and each one of them has got a ball boy who is feeding them balls. Then, behind them are literally about 20 people shielding all of the cameras –

    Phil: And jumping in front of the balls, saving something.

    Steve: The cameras, and the monitors, and all that sort of stuff.

    Phil: Yeah, the directors and monitors did get hit in the screen at one point, and it didn’t break. Luckily!

    Steve: The thing is, and this is kind of what all our work is about; it’s an experiment and we’re not aiming to do things that are going to be perfect. What we want to do is to tell a story about how we did it, what we’re trying to do, and gear that towards an audience that is interested in that. No one is ever going to believe it if we made this –

    Phil: It would be easy to fake –

    Steve: … came in and faked it, and all the footballers play and get 100% and everyone is really happy. That’s not believable. To us, what we try and do is to create stories that people want to talk about. I think one of the main things that came out of the Kasabian one was most people said, “I’d love to have a go on that. It looks really difficult. It’s obviously difficult but how much fun is that.”

    Phil: It’s like during the shoot, every time we’d stop the take and the footballers went off to have a drink or whatever, the whole crew was playing the game and we were creating just as much carnage ourselves as they were.

    A photo from the set of Kasabian's 'Football Hero' videoSteve: Most people we’ve spoke to since are like, “Where is it?” [laughs] We had to take it down, which was a shame.

    Phil: As Steve says, it’s all about telling the story of what we’re doing. It’s not – we’re all about taking on ambitious experiments, trying to make them work, and documenting the process, and telling people about it. The way that works is it becomes an interesting story for people. They pass it on to their friends and it travels around naturally like that.

    Steve: More importantly it becomes an interesting story for the type of people who we have an insight that they sort of might like that particular artist. Then it’s targeted marketing, essentially.

    Phil: But it’s not that we’re pushing a message at people. We’re letting them spread it. It’s up to them. We’re not even expecting people to do it. It’s just if we create a piece of content that is good enough and interesting enough to those people, then they’ll naturally spread it around. That’s how your message gets out.

    The way you describe it to me now, you knew that Kasabian fans were into football and gaming. It seems obvious that it was going to be a winner. I looked at it this morning. It was up to 800,000 views.

    Phil: That’s been out for about a month now, so I think it’s still growing quicker than the AC/DC one did. [The Excel-based ‘Rock N Roll Train’ AC/DC video embedded below.]

    Steve: That’s because it’s not the same segment as AC/DC. We sort of have an idea of population numbers of people in those segments.

    Phil: There’s about 5 million, isn’t there?

    Steve: 1.5 million in the UK. Then obviously our stuff sort of spreads around the world, as well. You can kind of get a good idea of whether you’re hitting the right people or not, and the amount of people in each territory that are hitting, and you get a good percentage on that from what you’ve spent to do it against how effective it’s been.

    Beyond the view count, what are the metrics you use to measure the effectiveness of these campaigns?

    Steve: We look at – I guess you could say a lot of people write stuff about what we do, and blog about it, and that’s one of the aims – to get people to share.

    Phil: It’s less about the view count, to be honest – actually, those view counts, on average 70% of those views come from embedded videos and articles, and blogs and things. It’s much more about securing coverage in the right channels, that we know that the targeted audience reads. If ‘Football Hero’ pops up in the tech channels, the gaming channels, and sports channels, it could be newspapers, blogs, or whatever, then we know that we’ve done the job.

    Steve: That one – most of the stuff that we’ve done often spreads out into traditional press, TV, and stuff like that as well.

    Which is the ultimate, in many ways, wouldn’t it be? Obviously, your work is online based, but making that leap across is quite the achievement.

    Steve: It’s quite interesting the way that you see it. It all transcends through various audience groups. When you read a newspaper, you’re kind of always reading yesterday’s news online. It’s like you pick up today’s newspaper and apart from the breaking stories, you could have read about all this stuff yesterday on Twitter, or blogs or stuff like that. It is interesting when you see – we don’t really press release what we do so it’s nice when you see a journalist has obviously seen it, and picked it up, and then written about it in the newspaper. It’s kind of cool.

    Phil: Yeah, that’s kind of that natural spread. That’s what we kind of aim for. What we try and do is to earn our own media so that’s really the magic – getting in the right media and in the right place. If we did, then fine, that’s the job done sort of thing.

    Steve: We believe that you shouldn’t have to pay for media, especially not online, because banner ads are really ineffective, and companies still spend a lot of money putting these banner ads on various sites.

    Phil: Yeah, they’re utterly ineffective. I think it’s fair enough; if you want to advertise outdoors, for whatever reason, then you’re going to have to pay to get billboards. It’s as simple as that. But, if you want to advertise online, then it makes much more sense to me to try and earn your own media, in the editorial of sites, and stuff, rather than trying to buy ad space where no-one’s looking. And in order to do that, there’s no shortcut to it. You have to create content that people care about, essentially.

    And as well as the content, the relationships with those people who write the content, I assume.

    Phil: Oh, not necessarily. You’d be surprised.

    Steve: I don’t think that’s as important because even the way that we sort of go about launching a campaign, we kind of experiment with a lot. Pretty much, our launch plan is to send it to a couple of blogs and –

    Phil: Yeah, so in a particular area there might be a fanatical blog about something to do with electronics, or football, or something like that. Then we’ll send it to one of them and say, “We’ve made this thing. Do you like it? Do you want to cover it?”

    Steve: One thing that we’ve sort of found is that generally bloggers and journalists want to kind of write their own content. They want to write their opinion on things and I think when you press release stuff, and you sort of bombard them with the copy, you tend to get a fairly uniform story but there’s not going to be much passion in it.

    Phil: There is not much variety, so you get the same story everywhere. What we try and do is don’t even press release.

    Steve: We just let people pick up on it because I guess if it’s good, people will do that. If it’s compelling, people want to share it. That just happens.

    Phil: They’ll come to you with questions if they have questions, and you can answer them.

    Steve: But you get people who write in about it for real, and you get people saying, “I’ve just seen this in Wired and here’s my opinion on it.” I guess people will talk.

    I saw AC/DC on Wired last year. I saw Editors on Creative Review [‘Editors Hack Google Street View’ video embedded below], and I’m not sure where I found the other two.

    So you guys didn’t really coordinate those placements?

    Phil: Well, Creative Review, we’ll tell them what we’re up to. They don’t have to cover it, but we’ll tell them.

    Steve: We’ve got a bit of a relationship with Creative Review, just in terms of we speak at some of their conferences and stuff like that.

    Have you given any presentations lately?

    Steve: We did Click two weeks ago.

    Phil: Which is like a London digital industry, digital advertising conference run by Creative Review. Inevitably, you end up making some contacts, so next time we go back to – do you know Make Magazine, which is like a – we’ve got a great contact at Make, a real nice guy who’s interested in the technical side of what we do. We’ll tell him about what projects we’re doing and he’ll go, “Oh, I like this one, and I’ll write about this one,” or whatever. He’ll ask us some questions.

    Steve: Yeah, but it’s not a formal thing. It’s more like conversation, only it’s the work that we’re up to at the minute. I think that it also depends on the type of project that you do because Creative Review, I guess will cover our stuff; it’s more of an industry thing. It sort of – because the projects vary quite a bit, you’re looking at different target audiences for it. We might not always have stuff that Make are going to cover, or Wired or people like that. It’s more about allowing self discovery in the channels of that audience.

    Phil: When it came to Kasabian, we didn’t really know anyone in the gaming channels at all, but we didn’t have to worry about it – or football, but we didn’t need to worry about that. It just came up in all the major gaming sites, major football sites. It’s much more about making good content. You need to get it out there, at the same time. Once it’s out there, small waves –

    Steve: I guess our theory is that if it’s good, and it’s compelling for people to share, it will do it anyway. If it doesn’t, then your content’s not good.

    It’s interesting to hear you say that, because it’s such a different way of thinking from the old way of spending on billboards, like you said earlier.

    Steve: It’s like Phil said; instead of being a push model, it’s a pull model. Yeah, you’re exactly right; it’s completely different from just putting things in front of everyone’s faces. It’s allowing –

    …the right faces, ones who will be interested in it, because it appears in those channels.

    Phil: Yeah, so instead of pushing a message out and paying for media for it to be there, you are putting a piece of content out and hoping it will pull people to it, and that people will share it around. It’s totally about making the content compelling and tailoring it to the right audience. It would be difficult to be doing that without the targeting information.

    Steve: We sort of talk about this a lot and talk about this with other people; I guess a lot of it is sort of digital creative agencies or creative agencies doing this type of content – I know a lot of people who do some really great work, and it’s really cool ideas, but I guess what we do which a lot of people don’t do is really think about who we’re targeting, rather than just having a cool idea. It’s having a cool idea for the right audience because it might be, sometimes, that we have to sell something to a bunch of 35-year old women, and it’s really easy to make assumptions and make mistakes when you’re making something that you think’s going to appeal to them. So having all this insight and artist DNA and stuff like that helps find something that you’ve got a good idea that they will be interested. They won’t feel like they’re being advertised to.

    Steve Milbourne and Phil Clandillon at the Sony Music London officePhil: You’ve got to get out there and put yourself into their head essentially, and think, “Alright, if I was this type of person, what would I…” The actual people in the insight department will go as far to do this. They’ll spend a week in the life of a particular segment; they’ll consume the right media, go to the right things, so they’ll try to experience that person’s world so they understand it better.

    A lot of people say, “That’s not very cool, targeting stuff, and consumer insight,” but what you’re doing is instead of filling the world with advertising which is generic, not aimed at anyone, and annoying for vast quantities of people, instead you’re trying to make something a certain type of person will be interested in. It will reach them naturally, through their friends, and the rest of them through channels they’ve been seeing, and the rest of the people just might see it. In a way, I would argue that type of advertising is more sensitive to end users than the current model of push advertising.

    Steve: Yeah, and it’s interesting that it’s not really about numbers, either. It’s about quality of engagement and the people that you’re engaging.

    Phil: Some of the segments have a very small active population so what we call the fanatical segments, which are really enthusiastic about music, and there’s not many of them. There might be 50,000 in the country.

    Steve: If that’s who you’re aiming for, if that’s who you’re aiming a particular creative ad, in order to get something back out of it, then it’s not really about numbers; it’s about engaging those particular people.

    Phil: So on the fanatics, we’ll look for smaller numbers, but engaging them for a longer period of time. The Editors project, that’s aimed at a fanatical segment, and that’s looking at smaller numbers. Something like 100,000.

    Steve: But you’re looking at stupidly high engagement rates.

    Phil: Yeah, like over 3 minutes per person, and an average of 4 tracks each across the application. That’s the opposite way of doing it. Some of the segments are, “Right, let’s go for a big audience, with low engagement.”

    Steve: I guess it depends on the objectives of what you’re trying to do, and it really has to support the wider market and campaign for the ad, as well.

    Phil: There will be other activity going on, posters and things like that, and events. Ideally, our activity will create a sort of buzz in the news at the same time as all that auxillary stuff is going around. Next time somebody’s buying some music, they’ll have it in their head that they’ve enjoyed this bit of content with that music in it.

    You’ve had a few successes with these kinds of campaigns now. How do you think the label management view these kinds of campaigns? Are they starting to see more value, giving you guys a bigger budget to work with for these kinds of projects?

    Steve: Kind of, I think it’s like anything; the music industry is very similar to the advertising industry as well. It sort of takes a long time to turn things around to new models, and to change the behaviors of old, in terms of something huge like advertising. Really, it’s about the way that people consume media, which is changing. Any big company that starts looking at new areas like that, it’s a bit like turning a super tanker. I guess it’s slowly but surely – we’ve kind of started rolling these campaigns out. We don’t spend enormous amounts of money, at all. In fact, anything but – it’s really modest sums, especially for the advertising world. It would be like pocket change.

    I guess the labels and the company in general sort of do attach value to what we do because we’re kind of proving we don’t need to do media spend, that we get really good engagement rates, and that we’re making interesting content that people are interested in, that isn’t just a Kasabian album out now. I guess budgets are going up a bit, but then –

    Phil: I think we may be seeing that over the last two years, they’ve gradually given us more freedom and more autonomy to do what we do. It isn’t directly giving us more money for our projects but they’ve made it gradually easier for us to do.

    Steve: I think that’s like a trust. I think sometimes an artist or artist manager might kind of see on paper what we’ve proposed to do and kind of go, “Ew, that’s different,” and they’re very sensitive to how artists are perceived by the public and things like that. I guess when we do stuff they feel like they’re taking a bit of risk, as well, but I guess the more we do this stuff, the more people see that it actually works and we sort of do the artist good. I guess more freedom comes from having that trust.

    Phil: I’d say that’s been the major change to the artists. It’s not like we’ve suddenly got tons of money to spend, but we do definitely have more freedom now and definitely have more trust from the managers and artists and people like that. That kind of comes back into the work, so that we can do better work next time around.

    Steve: The other thing about budgets is sometimes having endless budgets stifles your creativity. I think it’s nice to be able to execute stuff within the budgets that we do, and execute it well. Often, it means that we are very hands on, but I guess that being hands on means we also sort of keep an element of control and ownership over what we do so we get it the way we want it. We don’t just have an idea, then pass it to someone else and say, “Go and make that.”

    Phil: Under some extreme circumstances, we’ve actually been cleaning the floor after the shoot. If it has to be done, we’ll do it.

    Steve: Exactly, and I think that’s good too, because you think, “What’s the best that I can achieve for this amount of money that I’ve got to spend, when I can’t actually just go in and pay for lots of people to go do it?”

    Phil: It’s a bit like you’ll spend what you’re given, generally, so someone gives you fifty grand, you’ll spend fifty grand, but that doesn’t mean the work is going to be any better than if they’d given you twenty.

    Steve: I guess one of the things, as well, is that because we’re kind like an internal agency, we’re not trying to make money out of anyone. We’re actually just spending what we need to spend to do the project. It might be sometimes that actually what we need to spend is half of the budget that we’ve been given, and in that case – brilliant. Often, it’s not. Often, we’re sort of sitting on the very edge of what we’ve got to spend because it’s often not very much, but –

    Phil: Yeah, in theory, if we didn’t need the whole thing, we wouldn’t spend it, but in practice you’re talking about such small budgets that we do spend it all.

    Steve: We’re working on a new project at the minute. It’s quite difficult. One of the guys that helped on the Calvin Harris project. [‘Humanthesizer’ video embedded below.]

    Which other labels or teams in the industry are you aware of who do similar stuff to you guys? Do you think you’re unique?

    Phil: There isn’t anybody doing what we do.

    Steve: In the advertising industry, for sure.

    Phil: There are some campaigns, like you might have seen the Oasis campaign –

    The buskers?

    Phil: Yeah, and that’s BBH in New York, an ad agency.

    Steve: There are a lot of ad agencies that we really like the work of, and that we see doing really good work.

    Phil: That’s who we see our peers as other people in the advertising industry, rather than –

    Steve: Rather than the music industry. What we do is advertising for the music industry. That’s why we’ve got interesting projects to work with. We’re not trying to sell dog food. It kind of makes your job quite fun.

    Phil: Less soul-destroying.

    It does sound like a pretty awesome job, to get to be creative with artists’ work.

    Steve: It is really cool, actually. We have a lot of fun.

    Phil: Can’t complain.

    Steve: We have loads of fun doing what we do. It sort of is cool to be able to have really creative ideas and then be able to execute them for products that you’re actually quite passionate about or even if not passionate about, just sort of is more interesting than something which people generally find mundane. I’m not hugely into commercial pop music, but when you’re doing something for a really commercial pop act, and you see the people that you’re engaging, they’re really passionate about it so it kind of makes what you do feel worthwhile, rather than sort of –

    Phil: Trying to sell people something they don’t need.

    Steve: Yeah, try to sell a product that people don’t have – don’t care about at all. It’s completely different and it does make the job sort of really worthwhile and really good fun to do.

    Phil:  I guess the other side of it is we’re always seeing R&D on new ideas, new technologies, and new things that we might develop and we have the freedom to be able to do that alongside our normal work, so that’s really good fun. We’re always tinkering with something, making something new, or trying to investigate how to do something.

    Phil Clandillon and Steve Milbourne at the Sony Music London officeThat’s what I really enjoy, just getting my teeth into something that looks impossible and trying to make it happen. We’ll be trolling through the Internet, looking at writing programs, and drawing things, and trying to work out if we can make something work. It’s another fun side of it, what’s coming next, what are we going to do next.

    I’ll leave it there. I’m out of questions. Could I grab a photo of you two as you are now?

    Steve: Sure.

    View Phil Clandillon’s portfolio at: work.clandillon.com

    Steve Milbourne on Twitter: twitter.com/stevemilbourne
    Phil Clandillon on Twitter: twitter.com/philclandillon

    This interview was conducted for a story that appeared in The Music Network issue 770, January 18 2010. Read it here.

  • A Conversation With Craig Mathieson, Australian music journalist

    Craig Mathieson, Australian music journalistI wrote recently that Craig Mathieson wears the crown of Australian rock journalism. Allow me to elaborate. He’s recently released Playlisted: Everything You Need To Know About Australian Music Right Now, his third music-related book, and his byline has regularly appeared in Rolling Stone, Juice, Mess+Noise, and Fairfax news publications. He’s even got a Wikipedia entry.

    Craig, at this point in your career, which writers do you view as your contemporaries?

    My contemporaries are simply the good writers, those who have a voice and critical faculties. In terms of age that group is all over the place. Most are younger ; I named Shaun Prescott, Tim Finney and Emmy Hennings as talented examples on my blog. A few are older – I’m 38 years old. And I’m still flummoxed that someone decided to knock up a Wikipedia entry for me.

    You stand as an example that it’s possible to earn a decent living as a full-time freelance music journalist in this country. Am I right, or do you have another job on the side to supplement your writing?

    I’ve freelanced full-time for twenty years, but it’s been divided between music and film. In the music scene I’m a veteran, in film I’m still something of a kid. My career to date comes in two parts: 1989 to 1999, which was very music-orientated, mainly in Sydney; burn out and a corporate sojourn at Sony Music during 2000 and the first half of 2001; back to Melbourne and dividing my time between film and music ever since.

    The way film and music writers/critics are considered is chalk and cheese. Everyone has a film critic, but the idea of a music critic – as opposed to the music writer who might pen the odd review – being on staff is anathema. I was the film critic for The Bulletin, the ACP-owned news weekly, from 2002 until it closed in January of 2008, and that was an absolute pleasure.

    Having two disciplines to write about has also made me a stronger critic – it gets you thinking about the work you’re appraising in different ways.

    Do you think it’s still possible for freelance writers to earn a decent living in 2009?

    I’m sure it would still be possible today for freelance writers to swim upstream as it were, but there’s the question of what they’re striving for? There are very few secure full-time jobs at the end of the rainbow and not everyone is comfortable doing the freelance shuffle, because there’s not a safety net present.

    Playlisted by Craig Mathieson, featuring Gareth Liddiard of The Drones on the cover

    Though you mostly focus on how the musicians profiled in Playlisted sound and appear, I noticed the occasional comment about demographics and marketability. Is the marketing/promotion side of the industry of particular interest to you?

    It does interest me, because it impacts on how music is perceived and sometimes, to the artist’s detriment, it can be the defining element of someone’s career, as opposed to the actual music they produce.

    Before playlisted.com.au, a blog created when Playlisted was released, you’d not blogged elsewhere. Why?

    I didn’t have the time or the inclination. I knock out a fair few words every week and I’m focused on maintaining a decent standard of living for my family – marriage/mortgage/offspring tends to refocus a lot of younger freelancers and move them onwards; I have a stubborn streak. Even now, doing the blog for Playlisted, I’m sporadic at best.

    Aside from Mess+Noise, you seem to write exclusively for print. Aside from the fact that its publications pay better, what do you enjoy about writing for print?

    As a freelancer, you can’t underestimate how important “pay better” is, but aside from that I’m attracted to the audience size, which is pretty sizable when you file for The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald. I’m also a traditionalist, in that almost every day of my life since the age of 12 I’ve read one of those two Fairfax titles, so to be a part of them now is very satisfying.

    Which are you favourite music blogs, both Australian and otherwise?

    Mainly the online voices of writers whose work I already enjoy, be it Simon Reynolds or Anwyn Crawford. I don’t have much time for the blogs that are focused on being first – first review, first streaming – with something. “First-ism” grows dull quickly.

    You wrote most of Playlisted in the summer of 2008. How much editing and revision was required between then and its November publication?

    There was a sturdy editing process, then proofing, for a solid period between April and June. I’m not the cleanest writer and I’ve never been much of a sub myself, so I’m sure it needed work (“needs more,” I’m sure someone will snort). But after that it entered a kind of publishing limbo until November, when finished copies appeared and the whole release/promotion rigmarole kicked off.

    Craig Mathieson

    When writing, are you much of a procrastinator?

    It can take me a while to start, but once I do I tend to find a groove very easily and I work quickly, until finishing, after that. It’s rare that I junk a draft – most pieces come together reasonably smoothly.

    As for procrastinating at the start, unless I’m under extreme deadline pressure then I actually try to take the time to enjoy it. Sometimes it’s worth letting your mind wander a little, you might have a far better lede than that intricate one you’ve been obsessively plotting just come to you.

    Finally, what’s thrilling your ears lately?

    I’ve been compiling end of year lists for various publications, so this week’s scope has been a little wider than an ordinary week, but in terms of recent releases I’m enjoying Fuck Buttons, Whitley, Denim Owl and Rihanna.

    I genuinely like pop music and I write about commercial releases quite frequently – to me that’s part of a critic’s job, to try and take everything in and see what may or may connect the mainstream and the alternative scenes. I get frustrated that some younger critics are almost specialists, they can become completely niche-orientated. I’d love to read them taking on something completely outside the aesthetic they’re drawn to.

    Thanks Craig. I highly recommend Playlisted; buy a copy here. Keep an eye on Craig’s blog here.