A Chat With Gareth Liddiard

After more than ten years fronting The Drones, Gareth Liddiard released his stunning solo debut to a small but fanatical reception. With that record six months in his past, he’s now heading out for a national tour with Melbourne songsmith Dan Kelly his accompanist. Soulshine’s Max Easton caught up with Liddiard for a chat about contrast, perspective and songwriting.

A few albums into his work with The Drones, Gareth Liddiard had become a hidden talking point amongst the Australian music community. He was that guy who couldn’t sing fronting that weird, polarising band from fuck knows where. They were strange and unique, alternatively powerful and desperately quiet, circling their experimental murmurs around Liddiard’s bizarre lyrical turns and yelps. While they’re still no household name in 2011, they’ve found their accolades. 2009’s ‘Shark Fin Blues’ was voted the greatest Australian song of all time by a collection of Australian muso’s, they scored an Australian Music Prize and they’ve been widely regarded as one of the most interesting acts this country has produced…and Gareth Liddiard is the face of all this secret recognition. With his solo debut, Strange Tourist, Liddiard dichotomized his audience with critics swinging between vehement denial and rapturous applause. Speaking to Liddiard though, he puts things firmly in perspective.

“Someone said the other day that I’m a celebrity or something,” he mumbles down the phone line, “but I’m not. Fuck all people know who I am, and I know that cos I’m looking at the record sales. But it’s weird anyway, even the little bit of attention I get I find weird. I still feel like I always felt…just this dude in his bedroom making weird music. I was in my late 20’s when I got any [recognition] and I’ve been doing this since I was fuckin’ fifteen. I’m not Daniel Johns where I got my arse kissed when I was seventeen and I believed it, I can see how absurd it all is and I do think it is funny.”

“Y'know, I do think what I do is pretty good…I don’t think it’s shit…but at the same time, I’m not Fred Hollows, I’m not in the fucking Red Cross. There’s people better than me. People like Peter Singer, he’s an Australian…people should fuckin’ go clap at him. He’s awesome.”

Ethics philosoper Pete Singer may be the hero Liddiard points us towards, but it’s hard not to be taken by his unique brand of music. Strange Tourist was a minefield of mystery; lines upon lines of curious portraits painted about the strangest of characters. Amongst these were the violent understudy to a tightrope walker, suicidal Japanese businessmen and David Hicks, so there’s not exactly a lot of light in his acoustic venturings, a fact that I put to him as a possible conflict to his personality.

“It’s not as though it’s a pose or an act though,” he responds, “it is kind of me in a sense… I’m a depressive and I’m grumpy….but at the same time, I like to have a laugh as well. It’s just the other side of my personality that isn’t healthy, and with everything else I’ve learned how to go out in the world and be charming so I can pay the rent.”

The meeting of two sides seem to be something Liddiard is increasingly intrigued by, especially in terms of the meeting of his dark poetry with Dan Kelly’s bubbly pop-folk on his upcoming national tour.

“When I go to see something, I don’t like seeing two of the same things in the row, I’d rather see something mixed up. So there’s quite a contrast, and often, an extreme contrast can be very interesting. We’ve done a lot of stuff together in the past; it’s not the first time we’ve done this by any means. We’ve been down this road before and it seems to have worked previously.”

The sound that most people seem to latch onto with The Drones and Liddiard’s solo work is its inherent weirdness. Strange passing notes find their way into unusual scales and chords, his melodies are never quite what you’ve heard before, but the structure is never entirely unfamiliar.

“I write music I would want to hear if I was gonna see a band or if I was going to a record store to buy something. I would want to find something like what I’d make up, with these weird notes that are surprising and new. It’s the same with the words…I want shit I haven't heard, I don’t wanna hear the same old shit. I look for stuff like that, and sometimes it takes ages to come across it in a shop, but sometimes it’s as easy as looking at a textbook about modes and all the answers are there. You pick at the weird sections and sometimes you just write a song because you’ve opened a schoolbook about music.”

With a tumultuous era of venue closures and changes, we briefly discuss venues like the revamped Gaelic Theatre (now featuring half its old floor space as a poker machine VIP Room) and the briefly finished Tote.

“Yeah, it’s a fucker,” he agrees in response to the trouble music venues have been having, “but the Tote here had a bit of trouble a year ago and Dave Graney wrote this great thing where he sorta said ‘put it in perspective.’ [He said] it’s a shame when something like that goes, but only because it’s a building that has gigs, it has a stage which is always there, and a bar who is willing to serve drinks to people who come to see bands…it’s set up for bands and bands only, and it's a shame to see it go because it’s custom made for music. But back when I was young, [Graney] said, there were no venues, so we’d just go and hire the local Town Hall and make it BYO and hire a PA…so we still had rock n roll out of necessity and the mother of invention and all that. And that was kinda cool, cos it freshened everything up and it cleaned a lot of slates…it would’ve helped with people’s imagination and their drive, and rock n roll was the whole thing. So something like the Gaelic Club...yeah, it's a shame, but simply because it’s a very practical place to put on music. If everything dried up and you want rock 'n' roll, then fuck it…you do it in your backyard, you do it at the Town Hall, you do it at the park.”

It’s this attitude which makes Liddiard such an attractive prospect for alternative music listeners. He’s no anarchist, but he’s very comfortable in personifying this bohemian outlook of music in his distinctly Australian way. The appeal of The Drones has always been the line they drew between  bizarrity and familiarity, and it’s that line which he pushed so far to the left on Strange Tourist. With Dan Kelly no stranger to quirkiness himself, their upcoming shows are set to be an excercise in the unusual with wit and broken genius its guide.

Gareth Liddiard tours Australia alongside Dan Kelly on the dates listed here.