HUNTING & COLLECTING

Rip It Up, Issue 184, 1 November 1992, Page 17

HUNTING & COLLECTING

Mark Seymour has watery blue eyes, chiselled lips and vampiric cheekbones. He is lead singer and songwriter for Hunters and Collectors, the Australian band that never really arrived (in America like INXS) and refuses to go away. Cut is the band's seventh album and the reason we're chatting together in the Festival boardroom today. As he talks about the programmed percussion landscapes against which the band recorded their parts, I notice a preeminent vein which zig-zags down his right temple. In truth, I haven't taken much notice of Hunters and Collectors' music for years. All I can remember is their two great singles, 'Talking To A Stranger' and 'Throw Your Arms Around Me'. Two songs into their new album my boogie box swallowed the tape so questions about his new music are scant. But Mark doesn't mind, he likes talking about himself. After all, he is into psycho-therapy. I feel like an analyst myself perched opposite him, watching him twist around in his chair, stare at his hands, temple vein popping as he struggles to articulate his feelings about his work and other things like: HIS MUSE:

BEING A DILETTANTE:. "It's very easy to get trapped into being a dilettante and going Igo to see alternative films, and I read really profound and interesting books in order that I stay ideologically frontline'. I think diologue about culture is really spurious- anyway. Fora long time I think Hunters an H Collectors were regarded that way, the talking . heads syn- 2 drome. I think ** it's just as im- I portant to read the glossies as it is to read the Daily News." THE POLITICAL CONTENT OF HIS SONGS: "Politics is all-pervasive and omnipresent. I don't see politics as something that hapJ

"I've got into really trash things. I read hard-boiled novels and I rent videos a lot, instead of trying to be artistically correct and being sacrosanct about artistic sensibility. 1 think the idea of the artist's muse is really important but there is a limit to how relevant it is. Sometimes I just look at what I'm writing and go 'who cares?'

pens over there in Parliament House or out at the picket lines in Burney. I regard my lyrics as a political gesture. I'm always referring to my relationships with other people or with the world." RELATIONSHIPS: "I don't see romantic love as being a sacrosanct idea of human behaviour, that somehow you find the perfect life partner. I just don't believe that. I kind of admire the idea of the middle European cultures where marriages are organised, the only problem in those cultures is it's a patriarchal way of organising them. The idea that it's an individual choice is a myth which is as destructive as the idea of having a partner chosen for you by your father — they're two extremes. To say romantic love is this kind of spiritual truth is bullshit." FREEDOM: "Freedom is an ideal like democracy. It doesn't exist in reality at all. You'll have moments of truth and self-reali-sation but they emanate from within yourself, they're not something you can get from someone else."

DONNA YUZWALK