Watching the Wheels Go Round

Rip It Up, Issue 237, 1 May 1997, Page 20

Watching the Wheels Go Round

Greg Johnson says he’s having one of those days, and it’s impossible to doubt him. Talk to

Johnson on a good day and he’ll make sure you’re laughing more than breathing; but talk on a bad day, and it’s like having one of those emotionally draining conversations with a

friend whose lover has just left. Today Johnson has tons to talk about: the concept of happiness, his new album, what it means to turn 30, and

the fact his lover has just left.

The sun pours in the windows of his Ponsonby home, a relaxing place that carries a vibe that says the owner lives here, and is not simply residing. It was here Johnson wrote his previous album, 1995’s Vine Street Stories, and also penned the bulk of the tunes on his latest long player, Chinese Whispers. Describing the record, Johnson laughs and says, “It’s a real trip, it gets

steadily more down as it goes.” The recording of Chinese Whispers took place at Auckland’s Airforce Studios, where Johnson “camped out for two weeks”, working with engineer Chris Van de Geer. From the day Johnson started piecing the record together to the day it hit the shops, only four months passed; “Because we’ve done it so quickly I haven’t had a chance to get sick of it, as you can do,” he says. The album,

Johnson’s fourth, is his first in a new record deal signed in November, with the EMI label.

“I was really happy about that. I wanted to do a record to world standard in terms of production and time, and you just can’t do that for five grand with my sort of music. It’s a four-album deal; whether it goes the whole way is entirely dependant on how well each one does, but the bottom line is, I’ve now got a vehicle to release records for the next eight years.” In addition to the new contract, Chinese Whispers also saw Johnson making his debut as a producer, and he wrote and played four songs (‘Chinese Rockets’, ‘Liberty’, ‘Ship Sitting Low’, ‘Vertigo’) on guitar for the first time. “Those songs take a bit of getting used to. I was kicking around, bored, a couple of years ago and Jen said to me, ‘Why

don’t you learn the guitar?’ So, I gave it a go, and it’s not that hard to strum a few chords. It’s nice to be able to sit under a tree and write a song, something you can never do on a piano.” This album sounds way more bare than any of the others... “Yeah, it’s been a gradual stripping away of the things around my songs. On this record, I made everyone really justify themselves to me before they did their part. It was like, ‘Why do you want to play this part? What’s it going to do for the song?,’ and I think that was due to a general growing in my confidence as a writer. I used to smother everything, I thought if there wasn’t a big wall of chords the melody wouldn’t stand up, or the idea

wouldn’t get across. Now, I think the less there is, the more the message can get across — it’s not how you say it, but what you’ve got to say that counts.” What experiences shaped the record

lyrically? “That’s a tough question. I never write too consciously, I always just sit down

and see what comes out, and then try and figure out what it means afterwards. When I saw [the songs] all together, I just thought, ‘Shit!’ I’ve written all this stuff when I’ve been going out with Jen and I’ve been very happy, but looking at them, I can see I always knew I was in a temporary thing. There’s a lot of that personal thing, of my knowing subconsciously that this idealistic, wonderful situation was due for termination at some stage. I guess I consciously blocked that one out, but obviously my heart was working overtime. Apart from that there’s general kind of themes, end of millennium kind of shit, and the general confusion of the planet. Communication has become so easy, yet people on a one-to-one level, it hasn’t helped at all. A million mobile phones, the Internet, and everything else — people

still find it very hard to make real contact with each other no matter how many toys we can build to help make it easier.”

You’ve also turned 30 since Vine Street

Stories was written, has that had any effect on you? “I think it has. It’s an interesting time because the popular thought is that you should have achieved something by now, and you should be thinking about settling down. For me, I’m doing what I want to be doing — making albums, and this is number four in what I hope will be a large body of work. So, along those lines, I don’t need to panic as people tend to do when they turn 30, like, ‘Fuck! I’m 30 and I’ve never had a real job.’” Johnson may not have what is considered by the general populace to be a ‘real job’, but he has been busy. In 1996, he started a music production company with Paul Casserly of the Strawpeople, and in

the past year the duo have recorded an album apiece, written music for 26 episodes of the TV series City Life, produced music for four small screen commercials, and scored a short film.

Johnson hardly has ‘idle hands’. “That’s the big worry, that you can end up not realising you’ve actually been

doing work. There’s no one to say to you, ‘What did you do today?,’ and you don’t get a docket that tells you the hours you’ve worked in a week. It’s the best, but because I’m naturally paranoid, I sometimes think, ‘Am I just sitting here watching the world go by, or am I actually in it?”’ Have you come to a conclusion? “I think I’m driving alongside trying to figure out what they’re doing in the other car!” Do you feel like you’re doing what you want to with your life, that you’re not wasting time? “I think I am. It’s not wholly realised, obviously there’s a lot of work to be done, there’s a lot of things I still want to do, and I have a long way to go to achieve the kind of goals I have as a writer. But the wheels are all on this machine, and it’s just a matter of keeping the wheels in my head rolling the right way — that’s the hardest thing, trying to keep some vague sanity. It’s a very frustrating job to be a writer, because you get left alone a lot, and work tends to come in spurts, and there might be a month where there’s nothing happening. Meanwhile, everyone else is doing their stuff and you get left in your house, and those times can be really destructive. As you get older you get to know your own personality, and your propensity to self-destruct if left alone too long without something to do, so you hopefully get to know those times and try and do something about them — cut them off at the pass, so to speak. I don’t write if I get too bummed out, if you get into a

fucked headspace it’s not really productive. ”

Can you listen to the four albums together, and chart where your head was at with each record? “I’ve never had the four records in one place together and thought of them like

that. In some ways the themes are recurring. In a strange kind of way I think Everyday Distortions would be the happiest record — ‘Talk In This Town’, and all that stuff. Vine Street was still that chaotic period where I never really knew if I was going to make another record — it was such a struggle to get everything together, and there was very little money. I tended to be preoccupied with the logistics of getting it off the ground, and hadn’t thought as much about the actual recording side of things. In that sense, Chinese Whispers is a far more thought out concept for a record.” With Chinese Whispers now released, Johnson is angling to get on the road ASAP. It has taken him some time, but he’s becoming less plagued by self-doubt in live situations, and has finally found his style.

“Certainly, I know on a good day I can do a good performance of a song, whereas I didn’t know that before, I always

thought I was crap. After Vine Street came out, there were a few times I played ‘Swagger’ on my own at the end of the set on the piano, and [the audience] liked it, and I realised I can actually hold the attention of a number of people with just me and my joanna, and that’s a really nice feeling. I feel like I’ve finally got my head around what I am live — the whole notion that you don’t have to rock the

crowd out — I wish I’d realised that earlier. We’re gonna come out and play some shows for this album, and it ain’t gonna be dance music, that’s for sure — my name is Greg and I’m not funky.” Funky, no — but happy?

“...I’m anticipating happiness [laughter], happiness is imminent, I know it, it’s just round the corner, it’s a few more steps. I don’t know... it comes and it goes, it’s such a relative thing. The truth is, I do what I love to do and I’ve really got nothing to complain about. If it wasn’t for the fact my most wonderful woman and I have busted up, I’d be happier now than I’ve ever been. Everything’s kind of in place except that, 50... I guess you can’t have everything.”

JOHN RUSSELL