Sound Republic: Interviews

78 Saab Interview

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By Max Easton
6 November 2010

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78 Saab

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Good Fortune

With a new label and a new album on the shelves, Ben Nash from Sydney’s 78 Saab has every right to be feeling positive, as Max Easton writes.

The turn over into a new decade seemed to mark uncertain times for Australia. The Prime Minister we elected was dumped, the opposition saw fit to make an anti-abortionist religious zealot the face of their political party and the Australian dollar came agonizingly close to reaching unity with the US. However, in this bizarre year of drawn grand finals and withdrawn insulation batts, there was one constant that Sydney has always been able to rely upon; that every three years, 78 Saab will release the exact kind of soaring, melodious rock that we’ve come to expect.

In 2010, this took the shape of their fourth studio album, Good Fortune. Produced by Tim Whitten (Powderfinger, The Go-Betweens, Augie March) and released on new Sydney label Other Tongues, Good Fortune was champagne Saab. Dense atmospheres of warm, guitar-driven sound tore underneath that signature croon belonging to Ben Nash; guitarist, front-man and banker.

“I’d love to say to you that I’m presently sitting somewhere in the Southern Highlands, duck season’s approaching and I’m about to head out for a bit,” Nash begins with a laugh, “but Sydney is an expensive place to live, and we’ve got to hold down jobs.”

Indeed, 'Warm Jets' - one of the highlights of Good Fortune - was inspired by the bankers behind the Global Financial Crisis, the backdrop to this era of uncertainty. “I wouldn’t say I get inspired by work, but it does contextualize the band and the music. Sometimes I get sick of the concept of knowing a band has been sitting around all day daydreaming, sometimes I can feel that in their music. We work, and my wife and I just had a baby who’s 15 months old now, so time gets eaten up by a lot of other things, and while we don’t believe the quality of the songs has ever suffered, it just takes a bit of time between albums to get stuff out. But there’s a sense of urgency to make things especially good this way…to realise that it could all disappear tomorrow.”

Releasing their debut record Picture a Hum, Can’t Hear a Sound back in the year 2000 on Ivy League, it’s hard to imagine that a band who have outlasted so many of their contemporaries could ever disappear completely, although Nash concedes that they’re no strangers to dealing with some obscurity.

“There have been times where it felt like we were banging our heads against the wall with some of our songs,” he acknowledges, “It’s been a bit disappointing that they haven’t gone on to grab a bit more airplay, but you just have no control over that whatsoever. All we can do is go back to the drawing board and keep being really proud of what we put out.”

“I guess it’s pretty obvious for us because we have such a pop sensibility at the heart of what we do and I think that when people think of hooks and our type of songs, they think of something that could really fit onto a radio station…but maybe the time has passed where that matters. Twenty years ago your listeners were coming through radio or the press, now the internet is driving music, and in one way that’s quite exciting how people can get influenced and pick up on things…it doesn’t discriminate. Radio stations have got to play to their demographics and I understand the reasons behind that, but it means for us…well, we start to think where do we fit in? [laughs].”

The release of Good Fortune marks ten years since their debut record hit shelves. Having just inked a deal with a new label in Other Tongues, it seems that there’s a lot of positivity going on in the 78 Saab camp that has them firmly focused on the future.

“Good Fortune feels like the end of an era for us,” Nash continues, “I think we have a certain way of writing pretty well-established, and it’s up to us now to throw a bit of sand in the gearbox and go from there. When we came up for air at the end of Good Fortune we thought ‘well, this is a really good album,’ but we were more excited about where we were going next with the stuff we were listening to.”

“We’re always ahead of the curve I guess. At the same stage that people hear the album for the first time, we’ve been at the end of a 12 or 18 month period with it. It’s natural for us to keep thinking ahead to the next step while we get out and play these songs…and any band would tell you the same thing; whatever’s ahead of the curve is the most exciting because you have no idea what that is.”

The place of Good Fortune in the 78 Saab story seems to be sitting at the end of a quartet, with Nash eagerly discussing the band’s new influences, their direction and the philosophy of where these recordings fit in the history of the band rather than everything that has come before it.

“I feel that this [Good Fortune] is a very conscious attempt to connect with the pop sensibility at the heart of what we do, which isn’t dissimilar to our previous work. It’s not like we’re going to turn into a complete dirge - I think anything we do will always sound like Saab - but we’ve got our own studio/rehearsal set-up now where we can just walk in and press play that we’ve never had before…and I think that’s really going to benefit the way we approach our songs.”

With all this talk about what the Saab have done and where they’re going, it’s a little hard to figure out exactly what this new iteration is going to sound like. Nash acknowledges that they plan to buck the trend of the three year space between recordings with an aim to release a new one in December next year before admitting an obsession with Radiohead’s 2007 album, In Rainbows.

“I think that any muso will tell you that when they listen to a song, they’re thinking about how it was constructed and how they went about getting to a point where they recorded that way. In Rainbows is such a good album in the sense that it’s a fair way into Radiohead’s career, but it’s still really exciting; they’ve always challenged themselves, and I think that’s something we want to raise the bar with ourselves. We want to disassemble everything and put it all back together and see how it goes from there. We think we’re a good enough band to do that and we’re definitely up for that challenge.”

It may be that good old reliable 78 Saab is set for something entirely new. With a ten year recording career delving into sounds that fall somewhere between R.E.M, The Church and Neil Young’s tighter works, they’ve been a beacon of regularity. So any assumption that we can rest assured of a three year wait and more of the same blissful sounds that appeared at the Annandale and the Hopetoun for the first decade of the 21st century seems to be entirely voided. A change is most definitely on the horizon for 78 Saab, and they seem just as excited about it as anybody.

Good Fortune is out now on Other Tongues, while national tour dates for February 2011 are set to be announced shortly.

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