Tassie music, the ’70s, and why your local scene is so important: we take five with The Silverbeets to chat their new album Stay Tuned.
Tassie act The Silverbeets only dropped their new record Stay Tuned recently, but it may as well have been released in the ’70s. The LP calls back to the rock gods of old, names now idolised in record collections, on stages, and in halls everywhere.
After giving Stay Tuned a first spin, we thought it high time to catch up for a chat.
HAPPY: Hey there guys, how’s it going? What are you up to at the moment?
BILL: Practising drums, playing guitar.
NIGEL: Starting work on new material.
FARNZ: Skiving off and doing absolutely nothing. Either that or organising a launch and oodles and oodles of posts about our latest release, Stay Tuned.
HAPPY: Really digging the album. How are you feeling about this record, now that it’s out there?
NIGEL: I’m really enjoying it being in the public sphere. I’m the newest member of the band, having only been involved for a relatively short amount of time. So my relationship to the music is still very fresh and totally from a different stylistic direction.
In fact I was listening to the tunes the other day while I was showing some of the lines to Aaron our touring bass player and was surprised to find the lines were almost unrecognisable to me. Haha. It was a great recording process for me. To come in when everything was pretty much finished was great and quite uncommon for me. It allowed me to hear everything rather than say being at the early stages of recording when it’s more stripped back. It allowed me to have more impact and on more levels of the music. I loved that.
FARNZ: Relief I guess, it was a long road for me. However the hard work doesn’t stop with the recording being finished, in fact for me it almost gets harder. Trying to get it out and heard by as many people as possible can be frustrating and almost heartbreaking at times. There’s so much involved in trying to get it to as many stations and reviewers as possible. Then once that’s done you kind of just have to hope they like it and want to play it, hopefully for the bands sake, a lot! I think it’s akin to having a child out there in the world, you do your utmost to set them up and prepare them for life and you then you set them free and just pray and hope they do well.
JAMIE: I am very happy with it. I think there are some really great tracks that people will really dig.
BILL: I can’t wait to play them to a live audience, it would be cool to hear what people think between the live act and the recorded product.
HAPPY: Have you had any great feedback on the record?
FARNZ: So far that’s all we’ve had, thank goodness. Pretty much anyone who has commented, especially those who have heard it in full, have nothing but great things to say. The reviews from those who have reviewed it have also been fantastic. It seems that each and every song speaks to someone which for a songwriter is a great feeling.
NIGEL: I’m a huge fan of music in general from classical to jazz, all kinds or rock and world music. I honestly love it and let it influence me almost as it sees fit. The beauty of Stay Tuned for me is the flow of it! Also the complexity is pretty incredible as well. I think that it is all of this which is what the people who listen, like, and give such great comments on. I’m incredibly proud of this album. The work everyone has put in is there for the hearing. Farnz is an amazing band leader. Very balanced between knowing when to be direct and when to let the musicians creativity come to the fore.
HAPPY: I hear a Harvest Moon-era Neil Young vibe in a few of the tracks. Is he a big influence?
FARNZ: I do love that album. My friend, Frank Kruse, who started the album with me in its original format, used to play a cover of Heart of Gold in his live shows. Also my partner’s child, I remember who at the time was eight, used to sing songs from that album. It’s kind of nice but strange hearing kids sing songs with emotional depth over and above their years. I recall him singing lyrics about the soul from a Death Cab for Cutie song. Such innocence and beauty. Oddly enough this is now the third mention in the last few days about Harvest and Neil Young. So it must have rubbed off on me, and the others (even if we never noticed). If I think back to what I remember from the ’70s one of the first albums that would come to my mind is Carole King’s Tapestry. However both of these are old school albums, yes they have great individual songs but the album is stronger than the individual song. People have mentioned Pink Floyd and Dark Side of the Moon to me with regards to this album, but personally I probably listened more to The Wall although I wasn’t a big listener to Floyd.
BILL: No not consciously although Neil Young and his Harvest definitely interested me many moons ago.
JAMIE: Nah, only what has seeped through subconsciously.
HAPPY: Which other artists were you calling back to when recording these songs?
BILL: Bill Bruford (Yes, King Crimson), Ziggaboo (The Meters), Airto Moreira, and the Steely Dan drummers
FARNZ: It’s a hard question to answer. I think it’s kind of hard to answer because if you focus too much on an artist you are in danger of just emulating what they are, or what they did. I can hear bits of The Eagles’ guitar in some of Jamie’s lines, especially in Bureaucratic Philosophies. Nigel has a McCartney moment in Love Puzzle #10 and then in UBT he has a lovely little homage to Paul Simon’s Graceland. However these are just moments taken from influences gathered over a lifetime of listening (with hopefully a lot more listening still to come).
I do recall with mixing of every song speaking to our fantastic producer, Ernie Oppenheimer, and talking about stylistically what band or song each track I was thinking of. For example I had Tool in mind with Bureaucratic Philosophies. I had The Long and Winding Road as a reference point for And I/You Thought. Then songs like UBT I would mention Mr Bungle’s California but with a cross of Radiohead or even a little bit of Grizzly Bear. I think one song he came back with that he was giving it the King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard treatment which I was ecstatic about. It’s funny though ‘cos I don’t think any of the bands we talked about we ever really ended up sounding like.
JAMIE: Stone Temple Pilots, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Weezer, and Queen.
HAPPY: Could you share a favourite track for the band to play live?
FARNZ: I’m going to answer this one for Bill ‘cos as anyone knows drummers love the slow songs with oodles of space and time between each beat, haha or maybe it’s the technical drum rolls at the start of And I/You Thought that he loves. I’m sure I’m about to get whacked over the head with a fish shortly. I can tell you that he recorded Love Puzzle on the first take and I was astounded and thought it was pure brilliance.
BILL: At the moment it is Bureaucratic Philosophies, its second movement is partial to improvisation so it’s always fresh.
NIGEL: Any of them, love playing groovy bass.
JAMIE: We’ll see how it goes. For me it’s the songs that provide the challenge of guitar and singing together. It can be really hard and complicated at first but really satisfying when you get it right.
HAPPY: There’s a big throwback feeling to the whole album. If you had to go back and live in decade, which would it be and why?
JAMIE: The ’70s. Would have been pretty great to see some of those iconic bands, eg. Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Queen, while they were young and at their best.
BILL: The ’70s, lifestyle, cool cars, prog and dad inspired music scene. Seeing the bands of Miles Davis from 71-73 would be very exciting or maybe 13,060 BC as we’d invent everything and be godkings!
FARNZ: I think there’s a specific moment in the ’30s in America with the prohibition that would have been really cool to have been a part of. The big bands, the atmosphere, the clothing (even the poor seemed to be dressed really well)… I reckon the illegality of prohibition would have just added to the excitement of everything going on.
NIGEL: My decade of choice would have to be the ’70s, so much amazing music through that period, lots of great bands. My favourites are Queen, Pink Floyd, The Police. The other part of the ’70s I love is the steps that were being made in what is called fusion but I like to think of as crossover music.
HAPPY: What’s the live scene like in Hobart at the moment? Aside from a few venues and Dark Mofo, not much news reaches us up here.
FARNZ: As I write this Dark Mofo has just finished for another year. It’s quite spectacular to think what a difference it has made to the city and the arts here. So many great international, national and local artists get to perform in front of a lot of people who used to not go out during the middle of winter so it really is amazing. The local scene is also thriving with so many great acts, Hobart has a great community station in Edge Radio who get behind the local artists. The bands and the people in them all know each other and play for each other in different bands or record for them all sorts of cool interactive stuff going on and there is some attention starting to come from this. I’m seeing tours of Tassie bands with large acts like Jet, seeing tunes get played on triple j by local artists, Tassie acts winning the NLMAs it’s all rather cool and it is nice to be a small part of that.
HAPPY: Were local artists a big influence on you growing up?
FARNZ: Well I grew up in Sydney and I remember seeing my first real live act at the Newtown Neighbourhood Centre, a local punk gig with a band whom I can’t remember how to spell their name. Tuttipazzi or something like that? The gig was awesome, the energy was so electric. It was all rather cool and different for an 18 year old out of suburbia. I reckon all of the band members have had an experience like this with local bands regardless of genre, music does that to you. Local guys just inspire you to believe you can do it yourself. I played my first show at the Sando with Gerling and another band Dreamy Time Escorts who had Justin Hayes and the eternally young Pete Kostic in it. Just playing with local acts made you feel twenty feet tall. I remember putting on benefit shows for FBi and getting to play on them alongside bands like Sneeze, Front End Loader and Nunchuka Superfly who for a kid who listened to the Hard Ons was like meeting living gods. I must say that all of them were so nice and so un ‘rock star’ that it inspired me to just keep playing and remain humble.
JAMIE: Yeah, some bands around Melbourne that were doing great live shows even though they may never have really made it. I’m thinking Skunk Hour, Killing Time, and some other band that sounded very Chili Peppers but can’t remember their name.
BILL: Surfin Poobars, Toilet, Septic head-rot, Existence, Crucifier, Funkenstein, Gunge, TSO.
HAPPY: Any plans for live shows coming soon?
FARNZ: Well we are in the rehearsal studio working out a live set. We have to wait for Jamie to finish up with his musical production as this has taken up a good chunk of his life let alone any spare time (one of the problems of being a talented musical genius). So we are looking at a late September date for shows. One of my personal goals is to try and play on one of the cool festivals with my own band. I have been on the stages of the Big Day Out and Falls but never for one of my own projects so I would really love to try and get the live act up and running and be noticed by the promotors of these kind of events. Plus playing live is such a buzz. I love recording, I think you can hear that in the album, you get the chance to do things with the music that live doesn’t necessarily allow but a good live performance is a massive adrenaline rush. I remember not being able to sleep till the wee hours of the morning after shows because of that buzz and only a live audience gives that feeling.
Stay Tuned by The Silverbeets is out now.
