All posts tagged mess

  • May 29, 2012

    Mess+Noise Storytellers interview: Shihad – ‘Deb’s Night Out’ and ‘Home Again’, May 2012

    An interview for the Mess+Noise ‘Storytellers’ series. Excerpt below.

    Storytellers: Shihad’s Jon Toogood

    As part of our occasional Storytellers series and to coincide with the release of a new career-spanning documentary, ANDREW MCMILLEN talks to Shihad’s Jon Toogood about two tracks from their back catalogue: an unheralded gem from the mid-1990s and the most popular song they’ve written to date.

    Shihad, one of New Zealand’s longest-running bands, have enjoyed a healthy career marked by experimentation. Now based in Melbourne, they’ve moved from industrial metal (1993 debut Churn) to include elements of pop and electronica (1996’s Shihad, 2008’s Beautiful Machine) while maintaining a central obsession with guitar-heavy rock music, as best exemplified on 1999’s The General Electric.

    I met with singer Jon Toogood [pictured above, far right] upstairs at Brisbane venue Black Bear Lodge – he was in town playing shows with new outfit The Adults – to discuss two Shihad songs in-depth: ‘Deb’s Night Out’ from 1995’s nine-song Killjoy; and ‘Home Again’, the first track from the self-titled album that followed a year later. Much has been written about how much energy Toogood exhibits when fronting Shihad on stage, and the same remains true when he’s engaged in conversation.

    ‘Deb’s Night Out’

    Andrew: I want to start with ‘Deb’s Night Out’. This song sticks out like a bit of a sore thumb, not only on that record but across your whole catalogue.

    Jon: Musically, it was very, very heavily influenced by Skeptics, who we were listening to a lot at the time. They’re a New Zealand Flying Nun band, who were quite different again from the Flying Nun crew in the fact that they weren’t using guitars. It was a lot of sample-based shit, a lot of keyboards. They used Euphonics, or E-Sonics … Some fucking early sampler. They just sounded fucking unusual but they also had this edge … [that was] quite majestic, melodically. Hard to explain. Really beautiful, but really weird.

    Anyway, we were listening to them a lot at that point. Phil [Knight, guitarist] wrote the loop the whole song’s based around, that thing that starts the whole song. That’s Phil on a sampler doing that. When he played it to me I was like, “Whoa, it’s really beautiful.” Then we wrote a bass line and then it was like, “Wow, that’s cool,” and then I just wrote a little poem over the top which was about a friend of my ex-wife’s who was a heroin addict. She came around to our house one night, in Wellington. At that point our daughter was one-year-old. She was asleep in the bedroom and her friend came around and was asking for money. We sort of chilled her out and then we ended up playing games, like Monopoly, but she was cheating. She also tried to steal some money so I actually said, “You – get the fuck out!” And it was pissing down with rain. So that’s where that song began.

    It’s a pretty relaxed instrumental, paired with lyrics that describe a dark tale of a relationship dissolving.

    It’s a song about disappointment, and a friend, really. She was more a friend of my ex-wife’s rather than mine. Oh, it was just the classic junkie thing. She was high; just never trust a junkie, really. She didn’t do anything to dispel that myth, or that cliche. She lived up to it. It was like, “Oh, that’s really disappointing”. I was a bit younger, so I learned, “Right, that’s actually how that drug works.” It was one of my earlier experiences with it. It was before Gerald [Dwyer], our manager, ended up dying of a morphine overdose.

    I didn’t know that.

    That happened after Killjoy [1995] and before the fish album [Shihad, 1996], which is probably a reason why the fish album is all over the place. Our heads were all over the place because we’d lost our manager.

    Was that in New Zealand?

    It was at the Big Day Out in Auckland. He managed us and another band called Head Like A Hole and we both had really blinding sets. We had seen him in the day; he was backstage and he’d rubbed his nose raw … because when he was on heroin, he’d scratch … The last thing I remember, it was really tragic, us all going [at the BDO], “You look a fucking mess, man. Get the fuck out of here! What the fuck are you doing?” He’s like, “There’s nothing wrong with me.” He went back to the hotel between our sets: we were on the main stage earlier, and Head Like A Hole were on the third stage later. He went back and had a hit, and it was really strong and he died. There was no one there at the hotel to help wake him up. By the time we’d got back to the hotel, someone knocked on his door, and then got it open, and he was dead on the floor. We thought it might have just happened, or something like that. But, yeah, he’d been dead for hours.

    Did you know that he had a problem like that?

    We knew that he used recreationally. But he had cleaned himself up for a while, and I think that’s what fucking killed him. Because he’d cleaned himself up for a while and then got some really pure morphine and basically decided to hit up what he used to do when he was using it more regularly – which kills a lot of people, anyway. There was no one there go to, “Hey, wake up.”

    So, ‘Deb’s Night Out’; how soon after that night did you write that song?

    Pretty much straight away, the day after. It was like – bam. [Guitarist] Phil [Knight] had given me that bit of music … It sounded like the feeling that I had, sort of bittersweet. Just sad, you know? And it was good timing. “Here you go Jon, I’ve got this music.” Great … We recorded it at York Street [Studios, Auckland], and we’d wanted it to be a loop rather than a live drum track. At that stage, as well, the studio was still new to us so everything was recorded to a two-inch tape. Before we were using ProTools properly, we went, “Oh fuck it, we’ll just cut a loop of Tom [Larkin] drumming.” So we actually cut it, had the splice going and we had to hold a drum stick in place [so that it could loop continuously] because there was only a small bit of tape. That’s why it’s got this weird skip in it, because it’s not quite perfect.

    That’s another cute thing I remember about that track. I remember laying down those keyboards right at the end, because it was always just one loop. I thought after that last line, “Pray for the rain/To wash you far away”, it needed to “rain”, musically. That’s the most Skeptics-y part, that whole [sings descending chord progression aloud]. It’s that sort of anthemic thing that the Skeptics did, but with keyboards.

    Did you ever see Deb again?

    Actually, I probably did see her once or twice, but nothing too deep. She probably was a little bit scared of me once we kicked her out.

    Does she know you wrote a song about her?

    I don’t care! [Laughs] I don’t even know if she’s still alive.

    At what point did you show your partner the song?

    At what point did I show my ex-wife? I remember her being around while we were recording it in Auckland. She would have known what it was about. [Pause] I’m always a bit cagey with lyrics, even with the people who are close to me – even with guys in the band. They’re real personal and I was always real … I don’t want people to not like them, so I keep them to myself until the very moment where I can’t hide them anymore, because we’re releasing the fucking record. Which is probably why I’m so fucking overly sensitive to bad reviews! [Laughs] Because I live in denial all the time! [Laughs] I am getting better at it. I am getting better at going, “Oh, fuck it. I’ve been doing it 22 years, this is the idea I’ve got, boom.” But around that, I was, what, 26 when I wrote that? Still very, very uptight.

    For the full interview, including questions about the classic Shihad track ‘Home Again’, visit Mess+Noise.

    Speaking with Jon about these tracks in September 2011 was a huge thrill for me, as I’ve long loved Shihad; my overall Last.FM charts show that I’ve listened to that band more than any other since I joined Last.FM in October 2004.

    The music video for ‘Deb’s Night Out‘ is embedded below.

    No Comments / Music Journalism, Published Writing /

  • April 27, 2012

    Mess+Noise ‘Storytellers’ interview: The Panics – ‘Cash’, April 2012

    An interview for the Mess+Noise ‘Storytellers’ series. Excerpt below.

    Storytellers: The Panics

    ANDREW MCMILLEN revisits our occasional “Storytellers” series, whose premise is simple: one song by one artist, discussed at length. This week it’s The Panics Jae Laffer talking about ‘Cash’, a song from their 2003 EP ‘Crack In The Wall’.

    Four years before striking it big with their breakout, ARIA-nominated single ‘Don’t Fight It’ in 2008, Perth-based rock band The Panics released their third EP, Crack In The Wall. A stopgap between their 2003 debut LP House on a Street in a Town I’m From and 2005’s Sleeps Like A Curse, its seven tracks saw the still-young band yearning to find a sound of their own. Chief songwriter and singer Jae Laffer is the first to admit that their previous releases sounded like “guys imitating their heroes”, while doing a good job of it.

    Crack In The Wall’s second track, ‘Cash’, is instantly appealing. The song opens with a finger-picked acoustic guitar riff, which remains a central motif even while Laffer’s bandmates build around that earworm riff. I meet with Laffer at The Hi-Fi in Brisbane in late 2011 after their soundcheck. In a few hours’ time, he’ll lead his band through a set which focuses largely on their 2011 release Rain On The Humming Wire and its precursor, 2007’s ARIA-winning Cruel Guards.

    For the moment, though, Laffer is happy to cast his mind back seven years and relive ‘Cash’, a song he demonstrates and narrates for a few minutes while I film him near atop the venue’s staircase. After being interrupted by a couple of Hi-Fi staff, we relocate downstairs, where he continues to strum his guitar while we talk, eking out all manner of half-formed ideas and subconscious melodic curiosities. At one point I pull out my phone to play ‘Cash’ and jog his memory about a particular sound effect; he admits he hasn’t listened to it in a while.

    Jae Laffer on ‘Cash’

    ‘Cash’ was off Crack in the Wall. I wrote it in 2004. We call it an album; it’s got seven tracks, and it feels like an album. But ‘Cash’ is a good example of what was on the record at the time. I’m trying to think of what we were listening to at the time. There was definitely a little bit of Radiohead in our life, that kind of thing. We’ve been big fans of English music for a long time. I can just remember simply doing that [guitar riff].

    The title ‘Cash’ came because Johnny Cash died around the time we were rehearsing the words and writing the tune … At the time, I think because we were so into the Johnny Cash stuff that he was doing – the American Recordings stuff – we started calling the song ‘Cash’ because it had a country feel to it … It wasn’t about him; it was about his kind of character. It’s kind of autobiographical. It’s a hazy song but there was that uncompromising kind of spirit of someone like Johnny. The lyrics started to pour out like [sings], “He took his own life in a fire/To warm his hands, to feel it right.” … [It’s about] the people who give all for art, or for life, or whatever it is. That whole song kind of drifts along that. It’s just the timing of his death, what we were listening to, and just coming up with a riff that had a vague country feel.

    Were you surprised when I asked to talk to you about this song?
    Yeah, because I’ve never talked about that, apart from at the time when … it was on the radio a little bitt. It’s nice. People still request it. It’s a hazy kind of subject but it also seems to be full of purpose, and it’s catchy as hell. There’s something intriguing about the whole thing. I like it for that reason.

    I think of it as the ultimate Panics song, in some ways. It sums the band up well, lyrically and musically. Do you agree with that?
    I don’t know. Because we’ve had a bunch of albums now I could probably think of half a dozen songs which sum up maybe that time, or a couple of years. It is quintessential and I think it’s the style of lyric and also it’s the soft-meets-really-thumping sound as well. We’re known for a few ballads, but at the same time the guys are all-out rockers as well … When we mix them together with my voice, which is – I’m not Tom Jones, I kind of rap along like that. That’s just how I sing. You’re right.

    What do you recall about how the song came together? Was it that guitar bit that started it off?
    Definitely. I can’t remember what we were listening to at the time, but it seemed to be very “of the moment”. I remember thinking that about the riff … It was one of the ones where you start playing it and realise you want to finish the song quick because you want to get it on the radio. It had one of those feels to it. It was cool like that.

    For the full interview, visit Mess+Noise. The song ‘Cash‘ is embedded below.

    No Comments / Music Journalism, Published Writing /

  • March 26, 2012

    Mess+Noise story: ‘The Lost Weekend: How A Festival Featuring The Drones, Dinosaur Jr Went Down’, March 2012

    A story for Mess+Noise. Excerpt below.

    The Lost Weekend: How A Festival Featuring The Drones, Dinosaur Jr Went Down

    Almost two years to the day since he pulled the pin on his fledgling festival, the founder of Brisbane’s Lost Weekend speaks for the first time about what went wrong and why punter apathy is the biggest threat to would-be promoters. Interview by ANDREW MCMILLEN.

    Billed as a three-day camping event located at a conference centre 45 minutes south-west of Brisbane, a 2010 music festival named The Lost Weekend seemed a worthy contender for the interests of Queensland rock fans who couldn’t afford to head south for Golden Plains. Headlined by Dinosaur Jr, The Dirty Projectors, Wooden Shjips and Nashville Pussy – among Australian bands like The Drones, Tumbleweed, Little Birdy and Whitley – the festival shared several of Golden Plains’ bigger names. Unpowered camping ticket prices ranged from $166 to $207, for a two- or three-day pass, respectively. Hardly a princely sum, considering the ever-increasing costs of competing events on the annual calendar.

    Alarm bells began ringing three months after the initial announcement. A month out from its debut, The Lost Weekend was downsized to two dates and relocated to the Brisbane Riverstage due to apparent licensing disputes. The two-day ticket cost dropped to $150. A M+N news story reported that organisers were determined to make the event in March the “perfect end to the festival season”, and not another Blueprint”. And then, just days out, organisers pulled the plug citing “insufficient time to achieve critical mass”. Unlike the aborted BAM! Festival, an overly ambitious camping event that was set to be hosted at the same venue, The Lost Weekend at least had the foundation of an appealing event by booking a strong, rock-centric line-up.

    It also had festival promotion brains and experience behind the operation. Founder Michael Kerr, 38, had hosted the Sounds Of Spring festival at Brisbane’s RNA Showgrounds in 2008 and 2009, and appeared to be slowly growing the event: the second year saw 14,000 fans take in artists like The Living End, Tex Perkins, My Disco and Giants of Science (the latter two in the midst of a rare dust storm). Yet as The Lost Weekend disintegrated, Kerr went to ground, and hasn’t publicly commented since the public failure of his latest festival attempt. Sounds Of Spring has yet to return, either.

    I meet Kerr for the first time in March, two years and two days after the event would’ve debuted – if only he’d sold a few more tickets. He sips a hot chocolate while we sit at a cafe outside the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. During a wide-ranging conversation, I find Kerr to be quite upfront about his mistakes, slightly disdainful toward the unfortunate habit of Brisbane concert-goers to postpone buying tickets until the last minute, yet optimistic about the possibility to organise future events here in Queensland. He also laughs a lot, even though the topic we met to discuss isn’t particularly funny – or so I thought.

    What was your original desire with The Lost Weekend?
    There was nothing going on. Generally, you try to do events because nothing comes to Brisbane, and we miss out. So we got onto the guys at Golden Plains, and agreed to share some bands but not all, and grew from there. [Laughs] Just to make a good weekend. It was never going to be that large. Never wanted it to be that large. [I wanted it to be] something I want to go to.

    So the Golden Plains connection was pretty integral to making it all work?
    Yes, and no. We probably picked that weekend so we could [make it work], but if nothing happened there wasn’t a big issue. There were enough bands around otherwise to make it work. We did pick up seven or eight of their bands, but not all of them. And that was a deliberate thing we spoke about, because we didn’t want to just do what they were doing, and they didn’t want us to do what they were doing as well.

    Why Ivory’s Rock [Convention Centre]? Had you looked at a few other locations before that?
    We looked at a number of places; particularly it was a really good site. It had all the facilities, had an undercover amphitheatre, had everything; places for food stores, toilets, loos, showers. [It had] everything, everywhere to deal with; where everything else was getting port-a-loos and sleep in the bush. It had proper, flat, perfect camping areas. And no neighbours to disturb.

    How did you come across it in the first place? I had never heard of it until The Lost Weekend was announced.
    Neither had I, actually. Ipswich City Council, who actually were really supportive of doing something, and I originally spoke to them because I was interested in using the Archerfield Speedway area, and they said, “Oh, you should check this place out.” So I checked it out and it worked. [Laughs] Nothing will ever happen there now, though; they don’t want to do anything. They had a change in management and the new managers – it’s run by this religious organisation. The guru from India comes out and speaks there every couple of years and they have like 6000 grannies there. Well, not just grannies but all these people come and hang out there, and pay 500 bucks to hear him talk for five days.

    That sounds interesting…
    The manager at the time wanted other things to go on there, and he pushed really hard to get events in. He’s gone, and the new management don’t want to do a thing.

    So they don’t like the idea of a rock music festival?
    They don’t like the idea of anything else. It’s their little land just for them.

    As you know, after you, BAM! Festival tried to go there. It’s interesting to know nothing at all is going to happen there now.
    Nothing’s going to happen out there.

    To read the full story, visit Mess+Noise.

    No Comments / Music Journalism, Published Writing /

  • February 6, 2012

    Mess+Noise ‘Storytellers’ interview: Gotye – ‘Hearts A Mess’, February 2012

    An interview for Mess+Noise. Excerpt below.

    Storytellers: Gotye – ‘Hearts A Mess’

    ANDREW MCMILLEN revisits our occasional “Storytellers” series, whose premise is simple: one song by one artist, discussed at length. This week it’s Gotye, the Lana Del Rey of M+N, but not for the song you might expect.

    It feels a little strange to revisit what was once Gotye’s biggest hit in light of the monster that is ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’, the Melbourne-based songwriter’s 2011 collaboration with Kimbra which topped the Hottest 100 and has since clocked up more than 63-million views on YouTube since being posted last July.

    Yet without that track’s runaway success, Wally de Backer might not have felt as comfortable in discussing ‘Hearts A Mess’, the third track from his 2006 album Like Drawing Blood.

    When I first approached de Backer via email in May 2010 to raise the possibility of a Storytellers feature about this song, he declined, stating that, “I’ve talked about that song a lot, and I’m working on new stuff, trying not to look back at the moment.” I picked up the thread again in September 2011 and found him in a place where he seems more than happy to look back.

    Between overseas trips and a 10-date Australian tour, we spoke at length over the phone about the track that charted at #77 on triple j’s Hottest 100 Of All Time countdown in 2009.

    Gotye on ‘Hearts A Mess’

    ‘Hearts A Mess’, with apostrophe, not without, correct?
    [Laughs] To be honest, I think the lack of an apostrophe was just an oversight. Which, for me – someone who’s fairly fastidious with grammar – it’s quite hilarious. It was an oversight at first, then I just decided to leave it.

    Does that mean your high school English teachers are cursing your name for making such a simple mistake?
    [Laughs] It’s funny. I’m actually in touch with my Year 9 high school English teacher reasonably regularly. He sends me [album] covers to sign for his friends in random places like Scotland and South Africa. He’s never mentioned that before. [Laughs]

    Do you feel like you’re in a good place to reflect on this song now, after it’s been superseded by a bigger hit?
    I guess so, yeah. I guess the songs are kind of related; the place in the track list on the respective records, the kind of emotional terrain, my own possible scruples while putting together this record [Like Drawing Blood], wondering whether the song ‘Hearts A Mess’ was the high watermark of what I want to achieve with my music – at least in terms of the response from people, the connection with it. So that’s been interesting to see [‘Somebody’] take off and eclipse it, from one perspective.

    I believe ‘Hearts A Mess’ was two years in the making. Is that correct?
    Yeah. It’s like a macro example of my whole process. It spanned the whole making of the last record.

    Where do you start, with a song like that? The final product is so smooth and seemingly effortless, but I know there are so many layers going on underneath.
    Well, quite specifically, I started with laboriously editing multiple snippets of Harry Belafonte’s ‘Banana Boat’ song [embedded below] into a coherent, one-bar loop of music. That was an interesting process in itself. I’ve never edited bits out of a track so extensively, to then reconstitute them into such a small amount of music; that one bar. For whatever reason, when I heard the possibility of chopping around Belafonte’s vocals to get into the backing track of that recording, and turn that into a loop to underpin a possible track … I don’t know. Right from the start, that loping groove had something for me that felt – how can I describe it? Like it had something special about it. I felt the desire to keep that specialness right to whatever the end product, whatever the song would become. That pulled me forward through the pretty extreme length of finishing the song.

    It’s almost like I committed myself; in that regard, I feel like ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ is quite similar, to a lesser extent, because the little two-note guitar lines from the Brazilian guitarist Luiz Bonfá that I sampled [in ‘Somebody’] also started that song off. It didn’t necessarily have as much of a hypnotic pull for me as that bar loop that underpins ‘Hearts A Mess’. It still felt the same thing. I was like, “This has an aura about it that I can’t quite describe, and I just need to not fuck that up. And anything I add feels like it has to enhance that and feel like it stays with that initial aura that I sense, whatever it is”. In both instances, that would lead me through to the final song.

    How much live instrumentation was recorded?
    For ‘Hearts A Mess’? None. Oh, not true. The shakers are played by me. [Laughs]

    At what point did you begin introducing lyrics to the equation?
    I can’t remember whether it was before or after I had some of the “hook” figure, like the Hammond line that’s in there. I think it might have been before. I basically had that kind of loop from the ‘Banana Boat’ song, and I had some textural things like the lofty string bits that provided a sense of the chord progression over that loop. Then I started bits of the verse, and found bits of strings that would give some of the descending chord progression the turnarounds throughout the song … There’s an interim bit in the song with the lyric, “Love ain’t fair/So there you are/My love.” I had that penned as an anti-chorus for the song. The chorus was written quite late, and I had it penned as a textural piece that just had these little drops, that functioned as anti-choruses for probably the good first six months to a year of it sitting around, as a piece.

    In the second verse there’s a bit of call-and-response going on between your vocals. What was the intention there? Was that the narrator arguing with himself?
    Yeah, as it usually is. Possibly even more so on tracks from the new record [Making Mirrors]. There’s kind of multi-voice conversations happening in a few songs, which I think usually represents the various internal dialogues that sometimes can go on in my head, or the discussions that you sometimes have with yourself: second-guessing yourself, playing devil’s advocate.

    For the full interview, visit Mess+Noise.

    1 Comment / Music Journalism, Published Writing /

  • February 6, 2012

    Mess+Noise interview: ‘Heatwave Festival founder and CEO Patrick Whyntie’, January 2012

    An interview for Mess+Noise. Excerpt below.

    Heatwave Promoter Breaks Silence: ‘We Bit Off More Than We Could Chew’

    In his first interview since his fledgling hip-hop festival came to a dramatic close last week, besieged Heatwave promoter Patrick Whyntie tells ANDREW MCMILLEN that he’s determined to prove doubters wrong. 

    A festival “worse than any other failed festival in the history of Australian music” was how Tonedeaf reported on the final leg of Heatwave 2012, a national hip-hop tour that began in South Australia as a three-night camping festival on January 12 and ended in Melbourne on January 22. Between those dates, capital city shows were booked in Brisbane, Sydney, Perth and Canberra, in some of those cities’ biggest venues.

    The festival debuted in January 2010 with a single South Australian show, at Abbotts Reserve, 90 kilometres south of Adelaide. Headlined by American rapper Xzibit and Australian DJ tyDi, the all-ages event was attended by an estimated 800 people.

    Festival founder Patrick Whyntie – who also performs under the MC name Mastacraft – was 22 when he staged the 2010 show. His LinkedIn profile states that he has “been around the Australian entertainment industry for 10 years” and has “connections from Australia all the way to Detroit”. Whyntie had previously told the Victor Harbor Times that people were “blown away” by the first event. “There are a thousand things I can grow and build on for next year,” he said at the time, “but we had tons of security and everyone was safe.” Though there was no 2011 event, Whyntie returned to concert promotion in 2012 with a significantly ballsy move: a national hip-hop tour.

    Announced some 35 days before the tour’s first date, Heatwave 2012 – featuring Kid Cudi, D12, Obie Trice, Tech N9ne, Chamillionaire and Crazy Town – was an eclectic proposition from day one. By the end of the 10-day stint, D12 had missed most of the tour due to mishandling immigration paperwork, the Perth show was cancelled via Facebook on the day of the event, and the whole thing culminated in a disastrous Melbourne leg that saw liquor licensing issues, a no-show from Chamillionaire, and Kid Cudi trashing the stage after power was cut due to reported schedule mismanagement. A couple of Facebook hate pages emerged in the wake of the Melbourne show, with punters calling for refunds and describing it as “the biggest music festival fail ever”.

    Schadenfreude runs rife in the notoriously vicious live music industry, so it was unsurprising to see sections of the Australian music media taking delight in Heatwave’s perceived failures, especially following recent debacles such as Blueprint and BAM!. However, recent Flo Rida and Mos Def tour cancellations have highlighted how bringing US hip-hop artists in this country can be an exercise in hair-pulling frustration at the best of times, not to mention the difficulties faced by even seasoned promoters such as the Big Day Out’s Ken West.

    In an email interview with M+N, 24-year-old festival founder and CEO Patrick Whyntie speaks for the first time about the controversial 2012 events; his regrets, the so-called media “misrepresentation”, dealing with Kid Cudi, and what he’s learned after coordinating his first national festival.

    What inspired you to become a festival promoter in the first place, Patrick?
    Festivals are great fun and I wanted to bring some entertainment to my local area – which has never seen anything like this.

    I’m guessing that the 2010 event was a big learning experience. What did you learn?
    Quite a lot: from visas, to how much fencing was required, to how to deal with on-the-spot problems. A substantial learning curve.

    Who funded Heatwave 2012?
    Outside investment.

    Leading into your preparations for the 2012 event, were you concerned about whether or not the Australian market could support a national hip-hop festival like Heatwave?
    I think if all the stars align, any genre of music can be supported. It’s always a risky business, and things need time to grow. We did go too big, too quick.

    It seems to me that the festival’s main point of differentiation is its low cost. The festival’s marketing reflects this, and I saw on the event Facebook that you even taunted rival festivals about this. How did you manage to keep costs so low?
    We decided to put prices extremely low – the cost of, say, one concert act – to attract more people in. We took a risk keeping them low.

    Did the 2012 line-up reflect your particular musical tastes, or were you aiming to book a diverse group of bands to attract as many people as possible?
    Hip-hop is obviously my fave genre, however I listen to a wide range of music. We booked a range of hip-hop – from mainstream to underground – to reach all bases.

    Tell me about how you were feeling ahead of the tour’s first show, in Adelaide. Did you have all your ducks in a row? Were you happy with how the event planning and set-up went?
    Costs blew out substantially and we were having battles with council and police to keep the event going. This cost quite a bit of money and time, fighting something they should have supported. The camping festival [in SA] was a huge undertaking, and in hindsight, we would preferred to have concentrated solely on this [event], and had other national promoters taken the other states.

    At what point were you told that D12 had missed their flight?
    D12 was an ongoing struggle to coordinate them here to Australia. There was a range of problems. We were desperately trying to negotiate them getting here for the Saturday [for the first weekend, at the SA camping event], or even the Sunday.

    What happened next? Did you have a contingency plan in place, or did you have to scramble to make new plans?
    Just like most major festivals, an act sometimes does miss a few dates. We moved things around, of course.

    How many staff did you employ to assist with the festival?
    It varied in each state. SA had well over 50 staff, and even more volunteers.

    You told me via email that the Sydney and Canberra shows were “awesome”. What worked with those two shows, as opposed to the rest of the tour?
    Sydney ran well both nights, though minor problems occurred. The crowd was great for Sydney, aside from a guy running on stage and quickly being removed by our security guard.

    For the full interview, visit Mess+Noise.

    No Comments / Music Journalism, Published Writing /

  • August 4, 2011

    Mess+Noise live review: Splendour In The Grass, August 2011

    A three-part live review of the music festival Splendour In The Grass 2011 for Mess+Noise. Excerpts from each day are included below. The photos used in this blog post were taken by Justin Edwards, who shot the event on behalf of M+N. His photo galleries are linked from my reviews.

    Report: Splendour 2011 Day 1

    Woodfordia is a really good venue, Gotye will top the Hottest 100, showers are best taken in the day and Kanye West apparently likes fish sticks – things learned on day one of Splendour In The Grass 2011 by ANDREW MCMILLEN.

    In the lead-up to Splendour In The Grass 2011, it felt like the first year where the honeymoon could be over for Australia’s largest music festival. Most notably, this is the first Splendour in recent memory that failed to sell out. Days away from gates opening, promoters even decided to offer tickets to each of the three days at a heavily discounted price. Compare this to last year’s event – the first time the festival had been staged at Woodford in Queensland, and also the first time it stretched across three days – which sold out in around five hours. Evidently, an $80 price hike while offering what’s arguably an inferior line-up appeared like a mistake, but once on site, all the bad press in the lead-up to the festival all but slips away.

    Organisers even seem to have sorted out a better entrance process this year. Rather than hours spent sitting in slow-moving traffic kilometres away from the gates, those who arrive after midday on Thursday are impressed by how smoothly it all runs. Perhaps the speedy entrance can be attributed to the lax security when it comes to searching vehicles for alcohol. The tray of the M+N ute could’ve been filled with bottles of spirits – and we’d have gotten away with it. Maybe they were relying on last year’s scare tactics to discourage BYO booze? It didn’t seem to work. On a cold Thursday night, a man next to me at the urinal exclaims, “There’s fucking steam coming off my fucking piss!”

    Day One: July 29

    We learned last year that Woodfordia is a very good venue for accommodating 30,000 music fans for a weekend. This rings true today. Very little has been changed as far as the layout is concerned. The majority of the musical action occurs at three stages. Mix Up and the G.W. McLennan are housed under tents in the centre of the festival grounds, while the Amphitheatre – the main stage – is located at the far end. It’s a huge bowl that’s entered by taking either the high road – which is quite a steep climb – or the lower path, which funnels into the “D” section in front of stage. The first Amphitheatre performance of the festival is scheduled to start at 11am, yet the gates remain closed until 11.10am for no apparent reason.

    Once inside, Brisbane act Millions are playing to a crowd that seems to consist largely of triple j staff, including music director Richard Kingsmill. The quartet won an Unearthed competition to play today. They play catchy indie pop built around confident songwriting and a laidback delivery. This slot may well give their profile a nice boost. The band who played at this time last year, Jinja Safari, take the same stage at 1pm today to what I assume is a far bigger crowd than their first time around.

    For the full report on day one, visit Mess+Noise.

    Report: Splendour 2011 Day 2

    Perfect 10 performances from Gareth Liddiard and The Grates, strange timetabling decisions and disappointing sets from Mona and The Mars Volta – ANDREW MCMILLEN reports on a musically inconsistent day two of Splendour In The Grass in Woodfordia, Queensland. But, hey, at least the weather was good.

    All weekend, the weather is a dream. It couldn’t be better. It’s so good that you tend not to notice the clear skies, and instead take it for granted. There isn’t a moment of rain, which makes for happy camping.

    First on the Mix Up stage are Ghoul, who admit to not having played a show in six months but prove to be captivating. Evidently I’m not the only one who’s fond of Ivan Vizintin’s distinctive voice. By the end of their 45 minutes there’s a few hundred heads facing the stage. At the Amphitheatre, it’s a tough day to be a Cut Off Your Hands fan. Their set is bland and uninspiring, but this could well be the Kiwi quartet playing at their best. It’s indie pop that you can dance to, but the absence of hooks leaves the crowd cold. They lean heavily on material from new release Hollow. Fifty minutes of Nick Johnston’s voice becomes grating. They save their best for last, when Johnston ditches his guitar and wails along to early singles ‘Still Fond’ and ‘Expectations’.

    “If I was booking a festival, the first thing I’d do is not book me,” says a typically self-deprecating Gareth Liddiard. He attracts a few hundred punters to the McLennan tent at 1.30pm just to hear his voice, acoustic guitar and between-song gags. He tells us about the inspiration for writing ‘Highplains Mailman’ and ‘Strange Tourist’. He refuses ‘Khe Sahn’ requests as he says he’s got his own; in ‘Shark Fin Blues’, presumably, which he plays without fuss. He mocks the techno bumping from Mix Up, and reflects on how people tend to romanticise the decade in which they were raised. He bemoans the current fascination with the ’80s. “Joy Division and The Birthday Party aside – what the fuck?” A stagehand gestures at him. He replies, “Is that 10 minutes left? Or 10 out of 10, Gareth?”, before finishing with ‘Jezebel’. The latter, Gareth.

    Looking down on the Amphitheatre at 2.20pm from the top of the hill is hilarious. “We’re Mona from Nashville, Tennessee,” one of the tiny figures on stage says into a microphone. “Let’s bump up the party!” There are perhaps three dozen people in the D-section at this point. The entire crowd here wouldn’t fill The Tote. It’s mind-boggling to look down at the mostly empty hill and recall that last night, every square inch was packed during Kanye West. “Never trust anything that blows up,” the figure says after a few songs. “All great things start small.” Right. Their music is embarrassing. It sounds like a cross between Jet and modern Kings Of Leon.

    For the full report on day two, visit Mess+Noise.

    Report: Splendour 2011 Day 3

    A fatigued ANDREW MCMILLEN powers through the final day of Splendour In The Grass 2011, taking in performances by Pulp, The Panics, Coldplay, The Vines and the last ever show by Townsville’s The Middle East.

    By now, fatigue has set in. I’ve spent Splendour sober – I’m in the midst of a three-month break from drinking – and I’m still ruined from the walking, the dust, and the volume of food and soft drink consumed thus far. Time for one last push. At the Amphitheatre, Melbourne’s Alpine are winning fans under a cloudy 11am sky that threatens to break. They tell us that it’s their first festival, yet the six-piece handle their set like true pros. “I can’t stop smiling, even though some of the songs are sad!” one of the singers enthuses between tracks. They end on ‘Villages’, a fantastic indie pop song that hints at their potential for greatness. The prospect of relocating to another stage is too much to handle, so I sit in the shade and wait for Grouplove, a band about whom I’m blissfully ignorant.

    As it turns out, they play a set consisting entirely of Arcade Fire covers. I kid. these guys are from Los Angeles, not Quebec, so there’s at least one point of difference. Their showing at midday is powerful and evocative. It’s all blustery, feel-good indie rock, which fits the zeitgeist like a glove. They pull a big crowd. It feels as though a lot of those here are discovering a new favourite band. They thank Splendour co-founder Paul Piticco for inviting them here, and dedicate ‘Naked Kids’ to him. They’re a very easy band to like.

    On the same stage at 1.10pm – like I said, fatigue has set in – Hungry Kids Of Hungary prove their sound works well in an arena context. With no one else really playing at the time, they’re handed the perfect opportunity to impress a good chunk of Splendour-goers. They don’t miss the mark. They play most of debut album Escapades and kick beachballs into the crowd (as you do). With a new record reportedly underway, they’re well on track to continue ascending the Australian pop ladder.

    Under the McLennan tent, Leader Cheetah sound great but are otherwise dull. They show strong songwriting, but give us nothing else to latch onto. We might as well be listening to the album. I arrive in time for ‘Bloodlines’ and a wave of material from the newly-released Lotus Skies. I stand at the back of the tent and look out across the pond of filthy water upon which the nearby “pontoon bar” is housed. There’s a momentary break in the timetable, so I scamper for an early afternoon shower and return to catch the final 30 seconds of Liam Finn’s set – which is a shame, as it looked like a good time. A decade into their career, The Herd are a classic festival draw by now. They play a set of crowd-pleasers intermixed with material from forthcoming fifth album Future Shade, which are well received. I prefer them over most Australian hip-hop acts because they treat melody with as much respect as their rhymes. Watching thousands of people sing along to their hooks, it’s easy to see why they’ve established themselves near the peak of the genre. While they mightn’t have the hardcore fanbase of acts like Hilltop Hoods or Bliss N Eso, they’ve certainly carved out their own niche.

    For the full report on day three, visit Mess+Noise.

    No Comments / Music Journalism, Published Writing /

  • April 18, 2011

    Mess+Noise album review: ‘Lostworks’ by Faux Pas, April 2011

    An album review for Mess+Noise. Excerpt below.

    Faux Pas – Lostworks

    Less cohesive than last year’s Noiseworks, but no less compelling, Lostworks is a collection of “lost songs” and b-sides created by Melbourne musician Tim Shiel between 2008 and 2010. Crucially, these aren’t half-formed ideas mashed together just for the sake of pumping out a follow-up; after all, he’s charging zero dollars for it, so it’s hardly an attempt to cash in on the success of Noiseworks, his second full-length release. Instead, Shiel appears to have invested a similar amount of time and effort into polishing these tracks for public consumption: he calls this release a “companion piece to Noiseworks” on his website.

    Lostworks’ production isn’t as immediately attention-grabbing as what we heard on his 2010 effort – to my ears, there’s a little less depth in the bass, and fewer gaudy synth sounds filling out the high-end – but the result is still more than serviceable, considering it was assembled, produced and probably mastered by Shiel himself.

    As ever, it’s difficult to judge just how much of Faux Pas’ output is sampled and how much is original, as these songs betray very little about their origins. Even when Shiel teases listeners with familiar musical phrases, they’re skewed almost beyond recognition. He re-appropriates Carole King’s vocals from ‘Where You Lead’ – a song made famous by Barbra Streisand – throughout ‘I Will Follow’. In album closer ‘Don’t Go’, he hints at ‘Waterfalls’ by TLC. (The latter inclusion is a titular nod to Noiseworks’lead single ‘Chasing Waterfalls’.)

    For the full review, visit Mess+Noise. For more Faux Pas, visit his website (where you can – and should – download the album for free). An audio sample of Lostworks is embedded below.

    Lostworks (free album download) by Faux Pas

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  • March 29, 2011

    Mess+Noise ‘Storytellers’ interview: Ed Kuepper – ‘Eternally Yours’, March 2011

    A ‘Storytellers’ article for Mess+Noise. Excerpt below.

    Storytellers: Ed Kuepper

    ANDREW MCMILLEN revisits the “Storytellers” series, whose premise is simple: one song by one artist, discussed at length. This week it’s Ed Kuepper on Laughing Clowns’ 1983 classic ‘Eternally Yours’. The song will be reprised acoustically with backing from drummer Mark Dawson at a trio of shows in NSW this week. Dates below.

    If you were forced to summarise Laughing Clowns in a single song, it’d be hard to pass up ‘Eternally Yours’. The Sydney-based band – formed in the wake of guitarist Ed Kuepper’s departure from The Saints in 1979 – played a distinctive style of jazz-influenced post-punk that remains peerless to this day.

    ‘Eternally Yours’ was recorded in late 1983, released as a single in March 1984, and appeared on the Clowns’ second LP, Law Of Nature. The band recorded a promotional video for the song, too; a rarity among their short-lived career, which came to a halt by the end of the year. (The band reformed in 2009 for the All Tomorrow’s Parties festivals, and earlier in 2010, they supported Dirty Three’s Ocean Songs tour by performing the compilation album History Of Rock ‘n’ Roll Volume One.)

    Characterised by Kuepper’s waves of open chords and Jeffrey Wegener’s proud drumbeat, the focal point of ‘Eternally Yours’ is a towering, timeless saxophone melody performed by Louise Elliott. The song remains a staple of Kuepper’s live set: during last year’s spate of reformed Clowns shows, it frequently appeared as the set closer.

    Late last year, I visited Kuepper’s southwest Brisbane home to discuss the song. We drank tap water and sat in the shade underneath his house, while his dog Oscar noisily dug at the rocks underfoot in an effort to reach the cool dirt underneath (“I’m finding this very distracting,” he admitted halfway through our conversation). Kuepper smoked three cigarettes over the course of our 33-minute conversation, speaking haltingly at times; long pauses, and many knowing, ironic glances. Ultimately, though, he spoke freely about a song of which he’s clearly proud.

    Were you surprised when I asked to talk about this song?
    No. It’s kind of a standard song for me. It’s survived in a lot of different versions over the years … It’s more interesting than talking about ‘(I’m) Stranded’. Which I’m not knocking, but that has been … covered.

    Extensively.
    To say the least.

    I’ve seen you play several times in the last few years, and ‘Eternally Yours’ still crops up in the set quite frequently. I could be wrong, but you seem to get some kind of pleasure out of it. You seem to go somewhere else when you play that song.
    Most of the time, yeah. When it works, it still has the capacity to [become] something new, which is more than I can say for some songs that I do. Not that I expected that at the time. For a long time I didn’t play it at all. I think when the Clowns split, I didn’t touch it again for about five years or so. It made its first reappearance in a radically different way on Today Wonder, where it was just acoustic. I think because of doing that record – going off ‘Eternally Yours’ specifically here, a little bit – doing that record basically made me reappraise a whole lot of things, and luckily, that [song] was one of them.

    It says a lot about the strength of the song if it can withstand an acoustic version, as well as the full-blown band treatment.
    And also, really different full-blown band treatments. I haven’t really played the Clowns version live; maybe once, on one of the Clowns tours that we did recently. Generally each version has developed. Where it goes from here, I have no idea.

    For the full interview, visit Mess+Noise. The video for ‘Eternally Yours‘ is embedded below. This article was a true pleasure to pitch, interview and write up. Probably because it’s my favourite song ever.

    No Comments / Music Journalism, Published Writing /

  • March 29, 2011

    Mess+Noise interview: George Nicholas of Seekae, March 2011

    An interview for Mess+Noise. Excerpt below.

    Seekae: ‘We’re Too Busy Forging Battle Plans’

    While other bands are out partying, Sydney’s Seekae are too busy playing LAN games backstage. Ahead of the release of second album ‘+DOME‘, they talk to ANDREW MCMILLEN about poverty, illegal downloading and how they recently “annihilated” Cloud Control on ‘Starcraft’.

    Since releasing their debut album The Sound Of Trees Falling On People in December 2008, Sydney trio Seekae have become one of the most interesting independent acts in the country. Both in the studio and on stage, their set-up consists of laptops, MPCs, live drums, keyboards and melodica; their sound, a distinctive and complex brew of electronica. Rarely do vocals work their way into the mix, yet the band have a reputation for delivering: they won a Sydney Music, Art and Culture (SMAC) award in 2009 for ‘Best Live Act’, and re-released Trees with a bonus disc of remixes (and a PVT cover) upon signing with indie label Rice Is Nice.

    So how have the trio – John Hassell on synth/guitar, Alex Cameron on synth/drums and George Nicholas on synth/melodica – spent the couple of years between their debut album and its forthcoming follow-up, +DOME? Playing too much Starcraft, according to Nicholas, though he confirms they still attempt to record new ideas each day, even if most of it is “absolute garbage”. It’s fitting that a video game would distract these three from their artistic calling; they were originally named after the DOS game Commander Keen, before shortening to a stylised version of its initials after discovering that the name had already been taken.

    Though Cameron was initially scheduled to do this interview, some unexpected laptop problems ahead of a show supporting Mount Kimbie in Perth on the next night – simply, a computer wouldn’t turn on – caused him to flee to the nearest repairs store, leaving Nicholas to fill his shoes.

    There was an article published in triple j mag in March last year, where you wrote: “Musicians don’t have any money. They spend all the money they earned on new instruments and laptops.” Is this still the case?
    George: Yeah. I think I’m the poorest I’ve ever been, actually. I don’t think we’re going to hit the jackpot for a while. I hope we do, but we’ve still been eating spaghetti for a couple of weeks now, waiting for our cheque to come in.

    You’re the poorest now that you’ve ever been?
    Yeah. I mean, we put some money into recording the album, and stuff like that. What people don’t understand is that, in order to write an album, you have to take a lot of time off work. You have to dedicate a lot of your time to doing it. I think that’s the main reason why we’re so poor, I guess. But it’s not that bad. We’re not entirely starving. [Laughs]

    Does the lack of money bother you?
    No, it’s alright. I mean, it does bother me, because it’s always hard juggling a shitty day job and a band. A lot of my friends are going and getting real jobs and careers, but I look at this and just see – although I’m not being paid that much for it – it’s good to be able to do this stuff, and have people listen to it. It’s all fine. It’s all gravy! [Laughs]

    You also wrote that you have to “try and convince security that an MPC drum machine is pretty much the same thing as a laptop, and that it was designed to destroy dancefloors, not jets”. I take it this conversation happens every time you’re in an airport.
    [Laughs] Yeah. We always get a few snickers and laughs every time we go through the x-ray machine. I carry all my stuff in my backpack. I carry my laptop, my soundcard, my hard drive, my MPC, my Kaos pad, all in one bag. There’s like 10 different things. It’s really absurd when you see someone taking out all these suspicious-looking things out of their bag. We get a lot of strange looks. But we always make it through, although every single we time go through, we get the explosives check.

    For the full interview, visit Mess+Noise. For more Seekae, visit their Myspace. The audio for their track ‘Blood Bank‘ is embedded below.

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  • March 1, 2011

    Collapse Board story: ‘An Open Letter To Stonefield’, March 2011

    A story for Collapse Board. Excerpt below.

    An Open Letter To Stonefield

    Dear Stonefield,

    I recently interviewed you for the Australian music website Mess+Noise. I prepared for the interview just as I’ve done for many others: by listening to your music, by studying your past published interviews, and by dipping into online comments made about you. Having seen you play live, at the One Movement For Music festival in Perth last October, I had an inkling of how people would respond to the published interview. As a band of young girls, your image is naïve and innocent. I don’t believe that this is an act, Stonefield: I think this is just who you are.

    In Perth, you got up on stage before a crowd of hundreds, under a tent in the middle of the day, and performed well. You stayed strong throughout your allotted half-hour. There was a fair amount of shoe-gazing going on among your younger members, but I chalked that up to nerves more than anything else. In that moment, you were an ambitious group of young women playing a game controlled by men. The vast majority of guest speakers at the music industry conference that had taken place in nearby hotels were male. The festival line-up was stacked in favour of men, too. In that environment, you were outsiders, in every sense of the word. Yet you played as if you belonged. That sense of self-confidence won you a spot on the line-up of this year’s Glastonbury Festival, in the UK, as a direct result of your strong performance at One Movement.

    As I watched you play, Stonefield, I took in the crowd around me. Toward the front – up against the barrier – were groups of males in their 20s and 30s, beers in hand, cheering and leering at you. You probably noticed them. The men in attendance outnumbered females by a considerable margin. You probably noticed this, too. This was disconcerting, Stonefield. Over those five days in Perth, I saw dozens of male bands play, and few of them provoked more than appreciative applause between songs. But when you played, the crowd reception went far beyond respect for your musical talent. All around me, men were undressing you with their eyes.

    Herein lies the rub of your band and bands like you, Stonefield. No amount of musical talent, studious networking and careerist determination can compare to the sudden rush of blood that occurs when humans are placed in the presence of attractive members of the opposite sex (or the same sex, if you’re that way inclined). So while we can pretend until the cows come home that you are hot property among the Australian music industry in 2011 purely because you’re talented, we’re fooling ourselves if we don’t admit that your gender and your looks weigh heavily on the minds of the people who make these decisions. Festival bookers, publicists, A&R reps; they each have one thing on their mind, and it’s not your musical chops. You have those, of course, but you’re also blessed with rarer, more distinctive traits: sisterhood, and beauty. With a story like yours, Stonefield, the press releases practically write themselves.

    For the full article, visit Collapse Board. For more Stonefield, visit their Myspace. The music video for their song ‘Through The Clover‘ is embedded below.

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