Titanic Rock

Rip It Up, Issue 247, 1 March 1998, Page 23

Titanic Rock

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Very few Ms herald liieir IM Y£QU |£ M| "final" album prior la its i yItFl 11 & W release, but Australia's Hunters And Collectors have dene just | that. And no hand would call their final album Juggernaut? j Do they want Io put cynical words in reviewers' mouths? Why the title Juggernaut? Does it mean that Hunters And Collectors got too big for you? “Originally, we were going to call the album ‘Titanic’, and then it looked like the Titanic movie was going to be a roaring success, and we : thought, ‘well, that’s gonna fuck it up’ so we had to come up with : another title to convey the idea of this huge, lumbering kind of : neanderthal monster that you can’t stop. We were kind of investigating : imagery associated with the idea of being a dinosaur, and it became ; quite a studio joke, part of the banter of the record — I actually put a ; sign up over the door that read ‘Jurassic Park’. We were mocking the • idea of the last album and being a bunch of guys, late 30s, who’ve been ; around 17 years, and it actually turned into a very fruitful line of 1 discussion, ‘cause I got heaps of lyrics out of it, and one thing led to j another and we were generally wanting to come up with a title and j vaguely relate it to the idea of being big, a huge sort of lumbering . i machine that once it starts, it’s very difficult to stop it.” . •- ; '■ The band is sounding fresh and alive. Is your cynicism directed at the : industry, because as a music making unit, the band is working? “I’m not cynical at all, that sort of imagery is about trying to be '■ funny, and trying to be a little bit ironic, I suppose some people don’t i quite grasp our sense of humour. We wanted to make a point that, ; given the fact we’d made the decision we were going to retire as a band, ; we wanted to go out with a bang. We wanted to make it clear that : creative issues weren’t the essential reason why we were retiring. There j were other issues involved in that decision that aren’t about writing : songs, a lot of bands say ‘musical differences’ as the reason why they : stop, but that’s not the reason why we’re stopping.” ' i In rock’n’roll, there are probably people you would admire that are in their 60s now, BB King or someone like that, so it’s not an age thing, : is it?

“No, not really. I mean, I have every intention of continuing to be a songwriter and making a living out of performing, so I don’t see that as being an impediment at all. There are sort of more long term issues, like we haven’t managed to have any real overseas success which has meant that it’s forced our hand regarding continually going around the circuit in Australia, and the tours have been getting longer and longer. The prospect of doing that over and over again without discovering any new level of experience is pretty daunting really. We’ve always been able to leave Australia and go to other parts of the world, score deals internationally and be able to keep the whole thing interesting in a way, but those doors have more or less closed to us in the last few years, so we’ve just had to accept the fact that there was nothing on the horizon in that regard, so that had a lot to do with why we decided to call it a day.” With your doing a solo album, is your involvement in the band’s new album as much as on prior albums? “That’s a good question. I think what’s happened in the last few years is my involvement has become less and less — it’s diminished. Obviously, I still write all the words and the melodies, but the band as a group have become more proficient at the collaborative exercise of making things work together in a room. If I look back on the earlier records I had a lot more to do with pulling things together in the old days than I have on the last couple of albums. Just sort of making the bits work together, and using the vocals as a way of turning a bunch of chords into a song while everybody’s there. Whereas on the last couple of albums I’ve got to try and make things stick with a number of people’s different muses, so I’ve found that quite frustrating in recent times and for me, the sense of control that I would like to have in seeing an idea developed over time, and being pretty much responsible for that. I’ve found it personally pretty frustrating over the last couple of years as I’ve gotten a clearer idea of what I wanted to get across as a singer.” It’s quite ironic, because as the band contributes more to the equation, it suggests the band is becoming more creative and prolific in a way. “Yeah, you’re right, but at the same time, it’s kind of lost on the general public. You can’t really keep on telling people ‘Oh, It’s really great that we’re collaborative blah blah’, ‘cause at the end of the day, it’s how well the album’s going and how receptive people are to songs. We are at a stage in our careers now where people really want to hear ‘When The River Runs Dry’ and ‘The Holy Grail’ and ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’ and ‘Do You See What I See’ and ‘Talking To A Stranger’ — not so much ‘Talking To A Stranger’, because that’s before a lot of people’s time — but it’s those songs that people want.” How did you come to collaborate with Paul Kelly on one of those songs? “Well, more by accident. We got to the end of the album and there was just this one song that I couldn’t for the life of me come up with a lyric for. I had a couple of key lines, but everything I wrote I hated. I said I was going to have to collaborate with somebody else, and he’s obviously the songwriter of choice, so to speak. I rang him up and said

‘Can you spare the time?’, and he was happy to do it.” You delve into the legend of Pauline Hansen? “Well, that was another accident as well. I’d actually written a diatribe about some strange fusion of Mother Hubbard roosting over a nest full of dinosaurs. The guys had come up with this glam, eight bar jam sort of thing and I had no words for it, but I had this really long winded rave about this woman living in this gruesome prehistoric landscape, ccoking this awful kind of gumbo for these little baby dinosaurs. Very bizarre. I was at a stage where I was just pulling imagery out from all sorts of areas, and it was quite liberating in a way. Anyway, I did the performance and walked back into the control room, and I was pretty happy with what I had, and somebody in the band said ‘This isn’t about Pauline Hansen, is it?’, and I had another look at the words, and yeah, it kind of is about Pauline Hansen in a strange sort of way. There is kind of a dark fascination about that woman, she’s very weird, she’s a cultural anomaly but she does speak for a proportion of the Australian population.” It’s horrific, but it’s democracy too. “That’s exactly right, and you have to allow for mediocrity, because mediocrity has its place. And it was funny, Robert said ‘lt reads like Pauline Hansen’, and I said ‘You’re fuckin’ right mate’, so there you have it.” It must have been funny to see the progress of the movie Titanic, as everybody talked about it being the big loser, it was going to be the movie that brought two film companies down. You’re actually on a winning path, maybe.

“Yeah, there’s something really perverse about the whole thing. Actually, in the last couple of days the album’s started to creep up the charts which we can’t believe. There’s just this whole new generation of bands and new albums that don’t sound anything like the kind of music that we play, and we just weren’t expecting it to do that well. It charted very low, but as the tour’s unfolded it’s started to creep its way up. So, who knows, we might be finding ourselves with an album that does really well.” You do sound shockingly alive and well. Was the album planned or did the material give rise to it? “We weren’t actually planning on an album at all. All we knew was that when we finished Demon Flower and we’d gone out to promote that on a couple of tours and the album hadn’t done well at all — I don’t even think it went gold in Australia which was very disappointing for everybody. And there was a lot of weeping and

gnashing of teeth, and going over why it happened, and there was a certain amount of in-fighting about whose fault it was. That kind of situation is very destructive, where you start looking for scapegoats.” How do you feel about this album in relation to Demon Flower) “Well, we learnt a lot from Demon Flower. We went out of our way to make a harder record than the one before. With this album we’ve • just followed on from there, but lightened up a little. It’s a lighter sounding album but it’s still a pretty organic, rootsy record. We did it very quickly and kept it simple.

“It was quite liberating to realize the will was there to make one last album, we felt like we could do pretty much what we wanted to do.”

MURRAY CAMMICK