Leaps And Bounds

22
Dec
2009

100 for 2000 – #35. Belle And Sebastian – Dear Catastrophe Waitress

categories: music

To end another wonderful decade of great music, I’m going to write about ten albums from each of the last ten years, that are either great, or hold some sort of personal significance. A musical kiss off to 00s.

2003 – #5. Belle And Sebastian – Dear Catastrophe Waitress
(Spunk)

I did not discover Belle And Sebastian until some time later. So although I was aware of Dear Catastrophe Waitress (and there were some big fans in the Reservations), this was the last album of theirs that I ever picked up, when I eventually went back. This is one of their very best albums, and Belle and Sebastian are one of my top 5 bands, easily.

I’m always interested in the diaspora of records that leads to someone being a fan. But here is how I met, and fell in love with Belle And Sebastian.

As if I didn’t have enough going on in my life, I was also writing music and DVD reviews for a friend’s film magazine – Filmink (they call themselves Australia’s Best Film Magazine and I have to agree). One of the things I was given to review was Belle And Sebastian’s Fans Only DVD.

Of course I had heard of B&S. They seemed unnecessarily twee and whimsical, girly and – this is an odd one – very Melbourne. There’s this invisible unsaid musical divide about Sydney and Melbourne. There was a twee scene that existed in Melbourne that could never happen in Sydney. You would be killed. So, I’m pretty sure I resisted B&S for the same reason I avoided all those crap twee Melbourne bands in colourful stripey bonds t-shirts. I had no time to pretend I was still a kid.

If you’re not a fan of B&S, you might have a similar view. But, I’m on the other side now – a die hard fan. Almost all of my preconceived notions were wrong. They did, however, inspire many terrible bands (mainly from Melbourne).

So, back to this DVD. I put it on and set about writing a review. I barely knew anything about this band. I skipped over some of the more boring bits, and odd film clips for songs I didn’t know. There were some nice, fun moments on the DVD (a collection of film clips and home footage – it’s more scrapbook than story).

Then came the moment.

Right at the end of the DVD, there is footage from Glastonbury. Stuart Murdoch introduces the song, and quietly launched into The State I Am In. It’s beautifully shot, and sounds great. And the song – like many people before me – blew my mind.

I mentioned this to Paul, who surprised me actually when he told me he was a big fan. An ordering t-shirts from a faraway website type of fan. He made me a mix CD – a best of essentially. It hit all the big songs, and I liked a lot of it. Around this time, they toured Australia for the first time. Someone had a spare ticket and I snapped it up.

That first gig, I was still a novice. Plenty of songs I didn’t know, plenty from Dear Catastrophe Waitress, an album I still didn’t own. I did pick up the b-sides and EP collection, Push Barman To Open Old Wounds. It had the State I Am In on it, so I was happy with that.

As I fell more and more in love with the songs I had, I started again at the beginning. Tigermilk, Sinister and so on. I realised that there was a guy behind this band, Stuart Murdoch, who wrote the best songs. The more twee stuff (especially the terrible songs written and sung by Isobel Campbell) came from an era of the band when they tried to be democratic. That was over and Murdoch was largely in control, and writing almost all the songs again.

By the time I was up to Dear Catastrophe Waitress, a new album was out (more about that later). On the tour for The Life Pursuit, I was a hardcore fan, I had every record and knew every song. I was up the front and sang along to every one.

This album effectively marks the beginning of B&S version 2. Production values went up, with Trevor Horn as producer. Playing live became a priority, and the band sounded full and rich.

It has my second favourite Belle And Sebastian song (after The State I Am In) – If You Find Yourself Caught In Love. It’s a major work – and I loved that when Murdoch was on NPR’s Fresh Air, interviewer Terry Gross asked him about this song in particular. It is something very special. Piazza New York Catcher was recently used in the movie Juno. There is an awesome Thin Lizzy inspired I’m A Cuckoo.

Where did you learn to love music? It’s an odd thought I have sometimes. No one teaches you. It’s something you pick up along the way. And it can happen so randomly, and so quickly.

If you like what this band does, then chances are you’re already charmed by this album. And although they are still relatively new to me, I find it hard to imagine a time when I didn’t love this band.

22
Dec
2009

100 for 2000 – #34. Josh Rouse – 1972

categories: music

2003 – #4. Josh Rouse – 1972
(Ryko)

Josh Rouse has always been a sad sack. His three previous albums all had lovely moments, and were sadly sighing singer songwriter affairs. But on his fourth album, he decided to have a little more fun. Taking inspiration from the year of his birth, he seeked to recapture the feeling and moods of the era. So he travelled back in time to 1972.

It takes a lot of cues from lots of music I love – Carole King, ballad-y Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Wonder, those early Paul Simon solo records etc. There is also a fair bit of soul on this record. Like 5th Dimension, but by a short white guy.

A bit like Lisa Miller’s Car Tape, this record brought me closer to some golden, olden age of music. I didn’t really care for what bands were on the cover of magazines at this point. I was digging deeper into older, weirder stuff.

This is the place to start with Josh Rouse. Musically, it’s tremendously accomplished. The smooth basslines, the keyboard sounds, the trumpet and strings stabs – it’s beautifully recorded. The songwriting is equally great – looping into harmony laden break downs and huge, soulful chorsues – he pulls off exactly what he trying to do.

The album is, like most of 70s soul, about sex and love (in that order). Under Your Charms is Rouse at his most seductive. The young lovers in 1972 and the playboy in James… all paint a picture of the lonely streets in the 70s. It feels like they are characters from some blaxploitation flick.

Oddly though, in recent years this album has fallen off my radar. Several lackluster albums has dulled the magic of this one. Although I have strong memories of this album for Sydney. And that wonderful show at the Annadale Hotel where he played Gillian Welch’s Look At Miss Ohio and Neil Young’s Harvest.

21
Dec
2009

100 for 2000 – #33. Fountains Of Wayne – Welcome Interstate Managers

categories: music

2003 – #3. Fountains Of Wayne – Welcome Interstate Managers
(S-Curve)

It’s so great when you think you couldn’t love a band’s albums any more than you already do, and they go and drop an album that just knocks you out. It’s even better when you have written that band off completely. In fact, we all kind of thought Fountains of Wayne had broken up. But they got back together and created a killer album – Welcome Interstate Managers.

There is a loose thread running through the record about office work. There’s only really three songs about that, but they loom large of the record. The best two are Bright Future In Sales – showing FOW had not mellowed out, and were still as witty as always. And then there’s Hey Julie – a gorgeous, touching love song sung by someone stuck in a crap job.

Of course, yes, this is the album with Stacy’s Mom on it. And hey, if it weren’t so over exposed, it would still be a great Cars pastiche. As the years pass, I find myself being able to enjoy this song more.

Perhaps it was the extended break. It seemed like every song was a winner – potential single. Mexican Wine, the album opener and second single, is a brilliant bit of nonsense. All Kinds Of Time, a surprisingly sweet song about a quarterback, has been used in ads and TV shows. No Better Place seems like it could have been a smash hit.

(Katy Perry herself covers the heartbreaking Hackensack on her new live record. I wonder why she chose that song. Sure it’s great, but I wonder if she sees herself in the song – the displaced small town girl turned super star.)

As they recorded it in their own studio, on their own dime, they throw in some fun throwaway things. Hung Up On You is honky tonk country, whereas Halley’s Waitress sounds like a perfect 70s power ballad.

Yeah the record is a bit long and could probably lose a couple of songs at the end. But at the time, before Stacy’s Mom became a hit, we didn’t know if was going to be their last record. And even the last four tracks, the weakest on the record, are still pretty great.

This record turned them into career artists – not a one hit wonder anymore (I’m talking Radiation Vibe). And set the pace – 4 or so years between albums. They are all busy with side projects, but at least they have money and rumours are they have started to play new songs…

21
Dec
2009

100 for 2000 – #32. The Shins – Chutes Too Narrow

categories: music

2003 – #2. The Shins – Chutes Too Narrow
(Sub Pop)

This album is one of my very favourites. Yet, oddly, I came to the Shins very late. I owned their first album and liked bits of it, but with Chutes Too Narrow, I fell in love with them.

I think this one is an easy sell as well, right? This was a huge record at the time. Washed up in that whole Garden State publicity, this was a mega-hit record. Ubiquitous use in soundtracks, TV shows, bookshops and coffee houses – this is the soundtrack to the 00s. That jangly guitar, oblique lyrics, pretty repetitive melodies… seen a mobile phone ad on TV lately? Chances are it sounds like the Shins.

What set the Shins a step above all the other indie bands of the time (and now) is James Mercer. His unique expression – both vocally and lyrically – gives this band an extra trump. Because, at the end of the day, the guitar playing is not great, the drumming is not out of the world, the bassplaying is pretty bog standard. It is really, really, really, really an album about the songs.

So I have listened to this record hundreds of times (probably) and I still don’t know what half the album is about. But I know what it means to me. Kissing the Lipless is all about the end of a relationship. Mine’s Not A High Horse is about arguing philosophy with other bands. So Says I is a slightly un-Shins-y lyric about…um…the collapse of civilizations? These are all guesses, I actually have no idea.

The open-to-interpretation things is great. And so rare these days with everyone trying to make a point. For a songwriter who is obviously very clever, Mercer doesn’t make a point of it. He goes for mood, not brains. Oblique metaphors aside. But even lines like “Your sheets were growing grass out of the corners of your mind” – that sets a mood. You don’t think – great metaphor James! Good one! Clever lad!

This is another well lived record. I must have listened to this album several times a day for a year straight. It is, like all albums abused in such a way, wrapped up in girlfriends, friends and enemies I had at the time. High Horse in particular – fuck there was a lot of high horses in Sydney at the time. When Mercer sings about the girl “making tea in your underwear” in Those To Come, there is one girl that comes to mind. As for Gone for Good – I know who I wished would go back to their home town and stop fucking around. It’s that kind of record.

Sure, there are more highlights, but I will just be listing them. Turn A Square, Pink Bullets…there’s not a bad song on here. And there’s only 10 of them! I took that to heart very quickly as well.

Two last things about the Shins. I know I’m very much a lyrics guy, and Mercer is like the Hendrix of lyrics. He is just masterful, and taught me so much – when to be direct, when to be guarded, when to play with an image, when to say less. I still try to learn from him. Songs I wrote before this album seem somewhat – simple.

And lastly – when they finally toured, my friend Adrian’s band got to support them. I had guitar tech-ed a little for them. So I got to meet the Shins, they signed my records and that was a blast. But AMAZINGLY, they asked if they could use a guitar if one of theirs broke a string or something. And Adrian used my Fender Mustang as his spare anyway. So there was a wonderful moment when I saw this band play Saint Simon with my electric guitar. That is an odd, happy sensation.

20
Dec
2009

100 for 2000 – #31. The Sleepy Jackson – Lovers

categories: music

2003 – #1. The Sleepy Jackson
(Capitol)

I love this album. I’m so wrapped up in it on so many levels that I had to spend quite a while thinking about how I would approach this piece. This would be one of my favourite albums of the 00s, if not my life. The Sleepy Jackson. And the aptly named Lovers.

There is several things I want to say here.

1) I had a friend named Michael Lock. He was a beautiful man, a wonderful writer and a one of the kindest souls I have ever met. I met him a few years earlier through friends. He was a bit of a hellraiser in his youth, but had moved from Perth to Sydney to get away from drugs and bad influences.

He introduced me to a lot of great music, all that good stuff people are amazed I know at all. I got most of it from Michael. And even though he was older and knew just about every great musician (both locally and internationally) I could ever hope to meet, he and I became really good friends.

The very first band gig I ever played, he was the only friend who gave me some truth, not blind support. Just before he died, he told me that I was in a great band. Sheepishly, I replied to the compliment with something like, well, I’m just trying to be Australia’s Tim Wheeler. I remember, vividly, near the smoke machine at the Hopetoun Hotel, Michael saying to me – you can shoot higher than that. Be the Australian Jeff Tweedy. Or be the world’s Danny Yau. Anyway, that’s probably the best thing anyone has ever said to me.

Michael died just before this album came out. After a long period of being clean, he bought some heroin off some fucker, and went missing for a few days. Michael worked at Red Eye Records at the time, and we had a standing meet up on Thursday nights. I would hang around and we would shoot the breeze about our week, records and whatever. One Thursday he wasn’t there and hadn’t called in sick or anything.

A few days later his body was found in the back streets of Cabramatta, one of Sydney’s dodgiest suburbs. He had OD’d.

A week before that, something that still chills my spine happened. It was the last time I saw Michael. We had been discussing some records – Townes Van Zandt’s Flying Shoes (with No Place To Fall), and Dylan’s Bootleg Series volumes 1-3 in the long box that was hard to get. And out of the blue, one day, he called me up and said, hey, Danny, do you want to buy my copies?

I said sure. I’ll grab them off you next time I see you. No, he said, I can come around right now. I was at my folk’s place in the suburbs – not really near anywhere. He said it’s okay, if I have the cash, he would come now. Strange, I thought, but OK, he said.

I got a call a little bit later, saying to come out and meet him around the corner. Sure I thought, maybe we could grab a coffee or something, I thought. I walked out and Michael gets out of a parked car with some other guys inside. He has the two albums with him. We barely exchange pleasantries, and I give him the money. He thanks me, and gets back into the car and drives away.

To this day I still don’t know if that $40 contributed to the heroin that actually killed him. I thought, wrongly, for a while I was doing him a favour. Right now, in 2009, that few minutes – I can’t think of a single bigger regret in my life. Something was very wrong here.

But I was just a kid. Michael seemed like such a super cool, together guy. How do you say, hey Michael, what’s going on man, when he was the guy who knew everything about everything?

If you look inside your booklet for Lovers, you will see a little post it note for singer Luke Steele. It’s a note saying that Michael Lock called – the two were good friends as well. Luke was busy in a film clip and never called back. He died before Luke could call back.

If it’s okay, I’ll just skip the moral wrap up, about drugs and what happened and what I learnt and all that bullshit. None of it matters. All I know is that the day we heard Michael died, it rained pretty heavily for the next two weeks. I barely left the house.

2) Lovers. This album makes me think of old lovers. Luke taps into something so easily – this brittle romantic thing. He is so open with his heart, and expresses himself so well.

I listened to it at sad times, and I listened to it at happy times. It said the words I couldn’t. So much about girls, about loneliness, and that very particular heartbreak felt by over sensitive boys with a pop slant. Good Dancers, This Day, Don’t You Know – my heart was wrapped up in all these songs.

When, in your twenties, and you’re listening to all the love songs, and you’re just getting to grip with what love even is, all that confusion was on this record. And, when it came to love, these years were fucking confusing times. I’m not sure if this album made it better of worse.

3) The music is amazingly eclectic. I know this was one of the reasons many of my friends did not take to this album. No two songs sound like the same band. But I loved this. Old Dirt Farmer sounds like a 1920s field recording. Vampire Racecourse sounds like the Soft Boys. Don’t You Know sounds like Boz Scaggs. A friends daughter sings Morning Bird.

This is such a brilliant album, and such a brilliant album to have in your early, confusing 20s. It’s still an emotional listen for me. But ultimately a happy one.

20
Dec
2009

100 for 2000 – #30. Machine Translations – Happy

categories: music

2002 – #10. Machine Translations – Happy
(Spunk)

Machine Translations is the name of the project fronted by J. Walker. A reluctant performer and a fantastic producer, he made indie pop albums on a friends label when it took his fancy, and gigged very occasionally. I’d heard them and they were always too indie, navel gazing for me. Until Happy, an album full of great pop ideas that brought them into the heart of the Aussie alternative world for a brief minute, before they went back again.

I’m not sure what can be said about this album other than its the perfect mix of weird and pretty. All the chords seem to be wrong, but all the melodies seem to be spot on. Opener Acres sums it up nicely – a clanging, almost out of tune piano, and J Walker’s brittle voice singing one of his best melodies made for something quite exciting.

Released in the same year as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, these two albums made me think a little bit more about how songs could be dressed, above and beyond two guitars bass and drums. There are all sorts of subtle feedback, backwards tape, samples and things that add colour but don’t get in the way of the songs. In fact, Walker even played some solo acoustic gigs around this album, proving the songs stood up on their own.

And the songs are great. Two radio hits – She Wears A Mask and Amnesia, both inventive pop that had no right being on youth radio. Even better are Simple Shores, a bittersweet ballad, and Found, one of this band’s most blissful, summery pop songs.

It all ends with the 8 and 1/2 minute Be My Pillow. A gentle goodbye/lullaby of amazing tenderness. Walker performed this live once and it was the first time I saw someone use that neat trick of looping their own performance and building up to a mighty crescendo.

There’s not much more to say about this record other than it’s really good. Years later, I got to work with Walker on a record. This was the record I was hoping that record would sound like. It didn’t but that’s a story for later…

20
Dec
2009

100 for 2000 – #29. Lisa Miller – Car Tape

categories: music

2002 – #9. Lisa Miller – Car Tape
(Raoul)

Cover records are tough things to pull off. This might be the only one I’ve really loved since I started buying music. Lisa Miller’s Car Tape was huge for me and a few friends, who tried to hunt down every song on this album.

Lisa is from Melbourne, and had released a couple of country albums to some local acclaim. But Car Tape, which began as a bit of a side thing, became her biggest hit to date.

Firstly, what a great album cover. The backcover is an amazing photo that would have been the cover. The now-cover was to be the tracklisting on the back. Someone suggested they should change it and that someone was spot on. It’s just cool.

So a great covers record introduces you to new songs. And coming out of country music, I was slowly making my way towards soul music. This was my stepping stone. The gorgeous country songs on here were done with a soulful sadness. Some I know – No Place To Fall and Give Back The Keys To My Heart. Both are pretty good versions.

But the soul songs! I had never heard Arthur Alexander before, and this album opens with The Boy That Radiates That Charm (Alexander used ‘The Girl That…’). Bill Withers for me was a one hit wonder before this. I set about exploring.

Then, there is a spectacular, stripped down version of Colin Blunstone’s Say You Don’t Mind. I only discovered the original after this record, and was surprised how strings laden the original is. The same as George Jones’ We Love Eachother. I finally went out and got the Behind Closed Doors album – every bit as great as everyone said.

Then there’s Words For Sadness. Tim Rogers of You Am I and Lisa Miller were friends, and he wrote this song for her. This is what I’m told anyway, by my friend Sophie, who wrote the bio for this album. By coincidence, I was wrote the bio for the You Am I album that a new version of Words For Sadness would appear. Sophie and I imagined we were in some Gram Parsons fantasy argument (there is conflicting stories of who Wild Horses was written for, and whose version came first – the Stones or the Burritos).

The overall sound of the record is this smooth, smoky late night country jazz soul. I’m surprised there wasn’t a Patsy Cline song on here. I love the sound of this record – it’s gentle yet sexy.

But more importantly, it brought some awesome songs, and artists, and genres into my life. Thats what a good cover version should do.

Every so often, I think of songs I would cover for a covers album. Start to finish, 13 tracks – what point will I try to make. What genres should I dip into? The first such game of this, again with Sophie, was done after this record came out. I don’t have that list anymore but I’m sure it would be very different 7 years later.

And there was always talk Lisa Miller of doing another Car Tape. I hope she does one day. I want to learn more.

18
Dec
2009

100 for 2000 – #28. Peabody – Professional Againster

categories: music

2002 – #8. Peabody – Professional Againster
(NonZero)

Of course, you always want to support your friends albums. And the local scene. I tried my best, I’d like to think. Peabody was definitely mates. I tried to go to any show I could. I quite liked their Rock Girls Computers EP (“three things we know nothing about” they’d banter). They were fun guys. They wrote fun, funny songs. Then came Professional Againster and I became an unapologetic fan.

Peabody was always around. Bruno, in particular, as an around kind of guy. He volunteered at the same radio station as I did. He would be at the same shows as I went to. I’m trying to remember when Bruno and I actually met – I’m usually good at such things – but I can’t. We just were around. I remember Marianne telling me he was in a band.

Two other guys rounded out the band – bassist Ben Chamie, not so around but his brother used to visit me at the record store, shoot the breeze a little, and by this time, Graeme Trewin. I first saw Graeme in a band called Pennidreadful. He has the reputation of being the nicest guy you’ve ever met. One time he played with a band that supported Superjesus and we could not get a negative word out of him. He hit the drums so hard too. Theory was he bottled all that negativity into his playing.

So enough about them, onto the record. After a couple of pretty good EPs, I reckon they knocked it out of the park with their first album proper. Instead of doing the thing that ALL bands seemed to do, which is to go into the studio, do perfect takes, double some guitars, make pristine vocal takes – they deliberately went more raw. A marked difference from their EPs, Professional Againster was an abrasive album.

The songs were also a lot better. Gone were the cheap jokes, replaced with something more tender, and a story telling style (on the part of Chamie, it seems, who wrote the story songs). Best of these is Stupid Boy, a meticulous lyric about a misadventure on a Friday night, yet it probably rocks hardest on the record. Peabody had found this nice balance.

There’s a handful of really great rockers – all of which did only ok business on radio. This Mood Has Passed, Rockwell, Butterflies and Clowns…all clever, all rocking, all melodic, all better than anything than before. But then there are a couple of important departures.

The Greatest Compilation Of All Time ends the album, and it’s by no means the first song about listening to songs – but it’s one of the very best. Never cutesy or winking at you about how clever it is, it’s gorgeous, inviting music makes you want to sit back into your own mix tape and get lost in it. It really was miles and miles more than I expected by the fun three piece rock band from the next suburb.

Next is She’s Heading Unto Zion. A great riff, a decent mid tempo rocker, but the song – a goodbye to a girlfriend who just has to leave. The lyric breaks your heart, but again, Peabody escape sentimentality and sugariness. I don’t know how they do it, but it’s still probably their best song. I used to perform this live when the band wasn’t looking.

Finally, Do You Wanna. Finally – a love song. Again, not schmaltzy – just the simple excitement of being young, living in a big city, hoping you’re good looking and, the greatest come on ever in rock history – do you wanna hang out with me? I mean, of the million love songs I have in my collection, this one actually used the words I use. I have thought about this song when it came to just about every girl I’ve ever liked, even in the slightest. I guess this is what falling in love in Sydney, circa 2002 was like.

Even better than all that though, Peabody got even better. They would knock me off my feet again in 2005.

(I cannot for the life of me find a single video, live or otherwise, from this album)

18
Dec
2009

100 for 2000 – #27. The Vines – Highly Evolved

categories: music

2002 – #7. The Vines – Highly Evolved
(Capitol)

There is a lot to say about the Vines. They were the great white hope for a moment there, and I totally believed it. Then they got mangled up, came out as something different, salvaged a great record in Highly Evolved from the ruins, and then went further into freefall.

This is a record and a band that most people I know hate fiercely. I just want to acknowledge this up front, and that there is no hope for a lot of people to ever like this record. This story is not excuses or reasons. It’s just a story.

The Vines story started at the radio station I was working at back in 2000ish. That station, FBi, had a Vines live session (the drummer’s brother was a regular gig goer, passed the tape to someone, and it got to us). The tale told is the guys at Ivy League Records heard this live session and tracked the band down.

I’d known the guys from around. I knew the drummer brother guy. Some of them would come into the record shop I worked in, and we’d chat. I’d see the singer at gigs and we’d chat about Muse. Just normal, life stuff. Yeah, they kind of had that weird/shy indie musician thing, but then again, so did most people you might see at the Hopetoun Hotel on a Wednesday night. We were all freaks.

So, you see, they had this tape. This awesome, awesome tape. Recorded at home. Raw as fuck. Drums sound like a train hitting a paper bag. Mixed so badly that the vocal harmonies were a spooky, psych mess. Songs that went for a minute, and if it had a chorus it was likely sung twice only. The songs were about weird things, some anthemic, some just weird about wildlife and gardens. In short, it was brilliant.

There were a few of us that thought so. As a favour to the Ivy Leaguers, I took that tape and put it on CD (I was an early owner of a CD burner). I also made a little cover. A later, slightly more polished set of demos, with some new songs were recorded, and at the end we had this double CD of demos, all of which I thought were brilliant, that was being sent out to people.

Nobody liked it. I remember one night, one of the Ivy Leaguers saying to me that they don’t know how they can keep the label running, even into tomorrow. This is WITH the Vines on the books. Eventually, we gave the demos to Engine Room music, a new company, and somehow, someway, they got the Vines a deal.

In America.

Where they loved them. Capitol were wild about the band. I mean, yeah, they were young and whatnot but they were exciting – and exotic. This was well before the Strokes or the White Stripes became big. So, they were sent to America to record the album.

All the while the legend of these demos grew back home, and the Vines started gigging regularly. At a You Am I gig, we made up some 4 track samplers of the demos and handed them to anyone who cared. (Andy Cassell, the smart man that he was, realised a lot of money could be saved by making the artwork just a stamp)

Even to this day, people tell me how I handed them a copy of that Vines demo. When the band was at their peak, these were going for hundreds of dollars on Ebay. I’m pretty sure I still have a few at home. Even more interesting is when someone pulls out the whole 2CD set that I originally made in my bedroom with my colour printer. That still happens as well. Cos, you know, we were there when this band was special.

Rusty from You Am I had a new label that just did 7”s. The Vines released a 7” on there that was also, once, worth big bucks. It was that CD2 of demos, recorded at Zen studios. The songs were sounding so great live. Drown the Baptists, Winning Days, Get Free. I remember one show where Craig did Sunchild solo acoustic.

So what was so great about these demos? Part of it was what was going on with music at the time. Rap-metal was big. In Australia, this electro-rock best summed up by Alex Lloyd or Regurgitator were huge. And these guys were young, thrashy, pure. And then they started covering Outkast. And Teenage Fanclub. Fuck man, you should have been there.

But things were getting darker behind the scenes. Craig, the singer, had a problem that no one would know about for years to come. His Asperger’s was the cause, but the symptoms were scarier. Erratic behavior, bouts of going missing, and some of the shows came a little too close to falling apart.

Three school friends left for LA to record a debut album. Only two were left by the end. Drummer, David, sick of it all, left the band. It effectively ended the Vines Mark 1, the one that us secret few really loved.

They got in Rob Schnapf, on the strength of his work with indie masters Guided By Voices. Some session drummers straightened the songs out, and the pristine production lost a lot of the lo-fi atmosphere. For me, this is like Monty Python at the Hollywood Bowl – the sketches are great, but why are you just doing them exactly the same but worse?

(As an aside, another label, XL, one of the biggest indie labels in the world, just missed out on working with the Vines. And their idea was to put the demos out as the album. History may have been so different. Especially in the slightly more caring hands of an indie)

And, it has to be said, thanks to the Strokes, the album was a hit. Washed up in the new rock hype, NME fell in love with them – yet, so few of the songs actually fit the narrow genre of ‘New Rock’. Get Free was all over the radio, world wide. The Vines had arrived.

I do like this record. A lot. It was still very much the Vines. They had the hippie element – that naive world view of sunshine and gardens, almost an 8 year old cartoon of the world. But there was the 8 year old nightmare as well. Outtathaway and Highly Evolved are paranoid classics.

But as they sing themselves, it’s 1969 in their heads. Along with the best songs from their second album (Winning Days, Sunchild that are on those very first demos etc), it’s is a jammy, proggy style of music that dominated their live sets. Dandy Warhols were mentioned a lot. I know this put some people off, expecting Strokes II.

The big budget recording brought out some brilliant stuff. Factory now cut tough with it’s jagged guitar sound. Best of all is Homesick, with a proper piano and all the bells and whistles. Sunshinin’ just simmers along so nicely. We thought it would be big – and it was.

And then it died. Public violence and breakdowns, losing Patrick the founding bassplayer, a lackluster second record… but all that are sidelines to the bigger problem: the world moved on.

I thought Craig was a genius. The musicial ideas I heard on those demos were so far out. Highly Evolved brought out one side of them, and radio and press leaned towards the rockers. A lot of those great demos became b-sides. And it took another crazy Australian guy would make the kind of crazy albums I thought Craig would make.

There is so much regret, mistakes and missteps in the Vines early story. A really good album came of it. Some lives were changed forever. But, god, what could have been…

18
Dec
2009

100 for 2000 – #26. Darren Hanlon – Hello Stranger

categories: music

2002 – #6. Darren Hanlon – Hello Stranger
(Candle)

Last time on the Darren Hanlon story…. our hero had just released his first EP, and got his first national radio exposure with Falling Aeroplanes. The story continues with Hello Stranger.

I don’t think I missed a single Darren Hanlon Sydney show in the first five years of this decade. And every time, the shows would get a little bit bigger. And more and more new songs crept into the set. So we got to know these songs live – meet them, great them, work out what they were about, pick out our favourite bits – all before it made the eventual record.

Hanlon was on fire at this point – inspiration coming from all angles. A tour of Europe provided three amazing, and amazingly different songs.

The Kickstand Song – Hanlon met a girl on a train who claimed her father invented the kickstand. So from that he wrote a song from the view of that man – and why not?

Operator, Get Me Sweden – a long distance declaration of love, with an obscure reference to the Vasa, a Swedish war ship.

The Last Night Of Not Knowing You – a hint of things to come, and one of the last songs written for the album. A genuinely touching ballad without a hint of novelty, about the happenstances that lead to a perfect meeting.

And the rest of the album is just as good. The most upbeat song was naturally the single – Punk’s Not Dead. Sweeter still is He Misses You Too, You Know and the hospital break-up story of Cast Of Thousands.

In retrospect, it’s a showy album. It’s too reliant on cheap songwriting gags – it’sthe lyrical version of a special effects movie. Hanlon would get better as he got subtler with future albums.

To be continued…