Hiya Nathan, thanks for joining us in the virtual RGM lounge today. Grab a brew and take a seat.
Thanks for joining us today… tell us a bit about where you are from and how you got into music?
Thanks for having me RGM, good to be here. I live in Brisbane, Australia which is beautiful, hot and hilly. I started life in the UK though and moved over at 10 years old.
I got into music essentially from birth. When I was three days old and freshly home from the hospital, my parents staged a photo shoot with me nestled in the blankets inside Dads kick drum, and from then it was game on.
What’s the live music scene like in Brisbane right now?
Brisbane’s scene has always been tight-knit, mainly thanks to its geography. Most of the venues are crammed into Fortitude Valley, Brisbane’s seedy musical nexus.
You can go to multiple gigs in one night if you have the stamina, and all the bands flood out into the same pubs and clubs to intermingle with each other. You get some interesting cross-pollination, and you’ll often see familiar faces popping up in different projects.
We’ve always had good indie, rock, punk, post-punk, jazz and fusion. And plenty of weird and wonderful stuff if you know where to look.
Anyone we should be looking out for (bar you, of course)?
Girl and Girl make great, jagged post-punk. Mosspaw is a guitar virtuoso who is criminally underrated. And of course, Full Flower Moon Band have become Brisbane royalty.
What are your thoughts on all this talk about Indie poo going round the socials at the min?
I manage to avoid social media unless absolutely necessary, so I’ve just had to give myself a quick education on what you’re talking about.
I guess I would feel different depending on the artists’ intentions, or what I assume they are. If someone’s churning out derivative music for what appears to be shallow reasons, then it doesn’t seem that admirable. But if music means absolutely everything to someone, they just don’t have the skills to produce something brilliant, so they produce something mediocre instead, then we should presumably try and give those artists a little more grace. The problem of course is how to decide who has the right intentions.
I’ve definitely done my fair share of complaining about bland music, albeit not on social media. But I admire artists that take big swings, even if they can’t fully escape the shadow of their influences. And artists that evolve their music over time, from something generic into something extraordinary.
And in general, I think people need to be nicer to each other.
What are your ambitions for the band?
The primary focus for me is recorded music. It’s the thing I spend 99% of my life thinking about whether I want to or not.
In my own experience, I feel like I may have spent too much of my career chasing the adrenaline rush of playing live and missed a few opportunities along the way to go deeper in my craft.
Live gigs are unique and communal and fire up your inspiration and make you feel like you’ve found the meaning of life. But they vanish almost immediately. They don’t have the durability of a recorded song and they’re not the thing people carry with them throughout their lives.
I’m not suggesting we stop playing or attending gigs by any means. May live music never die! But my ambitions are primarily focused on recording first.
What is your favourite social media platform to use and why?
I detest them all equally.
What’s your view on the Music industry today?
Probably the same as all the other luddites and fuddy-duddy’s. It’s a scary and confusing place.
I wish society was organised in such a way that artists could spend their time making art instead of PR firms. And I wish we had a fool proof way to get artist’s music to the people that want to hear it, without being funneled through algorithms and short-form content.
But I know the industry is going to keep evolving. We might not use social media in 10 years, or streaming services, or even algorithms, so I try not to take that stuff too seriously and instead focus on what’s actually going to survive the vicissitudes of the industry, namely the music.
What are your thoughts on AI generated music?
For the time being, I personally have very little interest in it.
As a teenager though, I used to imagine what it would be like to hear more Beatles albums, if they’d stayed together through the 70’s. And I guess if the technology becomes so sophisticated that it could make something genuinely compelling, and not as unsettling, I’d want to hear it.
Maybe it will discover unknown sounds that can illicit specific states of mind, and become a new kind of drug? Or maybe it will create a new artistic medium, or at least some interesting new genres?
I haven’t yet found a good use for it though. When I finally finished making my album, I felt the most immense state of fulfilment. And I can’t really imagine feeling that way if I hadn’t painstakingly laboured over every element myself.
But in a miniscule timespan, we’ve started using it for movie scores and jingles and gym playlists and even just good old-fashioned music. So it’s clear that many people don’t care where music comes from.
I wish Bowie was around to give us his opinion, it would be fascinating.
What’s the biggest thing you have learned recently as you progress with your music?
I’m someone who lets perfection become the enemy of good. So I’m learning to change that. I’m indebted to every artist that had enough courage or temerity or madness to actually put their music out into the world.
We seem to have a weird duality in the industry, where there’s an overabundance of music being released, but also an epidemic of talented people who can’t finish anything, because they’re paralysed by too many choices or not enough collaboration, or a fear of rejection.
As I said in a previous answer, releasing music is a vulnerable position to put yourself in. The thought of someone responding negatively to it can seem like a personal affront and stop you from ever doing it.
But ideas exist on a continuum. You only get them once they’ve been shaped by external forces. And when you turn them into something like a song and release them back into the environment, they start shaping other people’s ideas, and so on. So don’t take it so personally, put your music out and keep working.
What’s currently in your ears and on rotation at the moment?
They recently screened David Byrnes movie True Stories at my local cinema and I’ve had the song People Like Us on repeat for about 3 weeks. What an absolute dream of a movie. John Goodman could do no wrong!
I’m having a Bonnie Raitt moment and making my way through her discography. Had no clue she was so prolific. Joan Armatrading too.
Been smashing Nested In Tangles – Hannah Frances since it came out. Is It Now – Automatic. I Inside The Old Year Dying – PJ Harvey. Keyboard Fantasies – Beverly Glenn-Copeland. The latest Julia Holter record, and Alabama Shakes. Thee Black Boltz – Tunde Adebimpe. A vibrant compilation called Nigeria 70 – Funky Lagos.
And then anything and everything by Tom Waits, Blur, Cat Stevens, Rufus Wainwright and Lou Reed.
I hear you have new music. What can you tell us about it?
I do! My first solo album, ‘Flash Channel’, will be out September 30th.
It’s 12 tracks that were designed as a front to back listen. It’s an hour long. It’s a blend of rock, pop, indie, psych, soul, folk, prog and americana. It explores love, despair, madness, idols, art, causality, shaken confidence and connections that transcend time and space!
It’s self-written, produced, performed and recorded, other than some vital contributions from friend, engineer and guitarist Scott Mathison, of Sugarbag Blonde, pianist Daniel Khoury and Sugarbag drummer Brett Newman. It was mixed and mastered by Darek Mudge, with artwork by the great Sean Halford.
It’s taken many, many years to finish and pushed me to all measurable limits.
What was the recording process like?
Sometime in mid-2023, I was watching a movie at a friend’s place, and he turned and asked me out of the blue if I was still making music. I was so taken aback by the question, because it felt like all I ever did with my spare time was obsessively make music. But I hadn’t actually finished or released anything since COVID started. I realised that even though I felt like a tireless muso in my own mind, from the outside looking in, it was easily forgivable to assume I’d given up on the endeavour entirely.
That moment galvanized me and I spent the next few weeks pulling together as many loose threads as I could, to piece an album together. I devised a mid-tempo, folky sort of thing. Father John Misty meets The Band.
I booked a week in September 2023 at Airlock Studios, owned by Powderfinger guitarist Ian Haug, with Scott, Dan, Sean and my partner Rosie. It was the same studio my former band The Jensens recorded their first ever single, and I’d done a fair amount of session work there over the years. I’d always loved the sound of the room, and I was determined this time around to capture it properly.
My initial, naïve hope was to record the whole thing in a week, and keep it raw, loose, sparse and roomy. Time got the better of us though, and we only managed to lay down the beds, albeit for 14 tracks.
I began to work on them in my home studio, and for many months I chipped away at the record I thought I was supposed to make. But around that time I stumbled across a few albums that really REALLY blew my mind. Ordinarily that’s a great thing, but at this point in time it sent me into a world of comparison and self-doubt and completely rocked my confidence.
I was suddenly confused as to why I was making this middle of the road, jovial nonsense and I walked out of my studio and didn’t go back in for a long while.
After a solid depression, I developed a new vision for the album, which was brighter, punchier, more layered and more colourful. I scrapped 5 tracks from the original session and added 3 others that I had begun recording myself as far back as 2019. I re-recorded every single element of every song, recording in my Dads shed and my home studio.
I re-wrote chords, changed lyrics, altered structures. Every iota of the record was put under intense scrutiny, to ensure it was the best it could possibly be. And I didn’t re-record it all once, but many, many times. Some songs being recorded from the ground up 5 times or more, each time with new drums, new melodies, new instrumentation etc.
After about 2 years of doing this, I went absolutely bloody mental. I thought everything I had made was total rubbish and didn’t think I had what it took to finish it and locked up my studio once again. But after a long-planned trip to Europe with Rosie, the fresh sights and sounds, along with her unfathomable patience and wisdom, comprehensively hit the reset button on my brain.
When we got home, I got straight back in the studio and started sewing together pieces from all the various sessions I’d worked on over the last few years. It took a few months to add all the final touches, but I gradually molded it into its final form.
I had decided on our trip that I wasn’t going to mix the record myself. If I was going to make it to the finish line, I needed help. So I booked a week at the Byron Bay Music Farm with Darek Mudge from Brisbane Alt-Rock legends Screamfeeder, and we mixed in a caffeinated frenzy from 12pm to 5am every day.
After three or four sessions over a couple of months, we eventually got everything in its right place. Darek suggested we master the record ourselves too, so we did a final session at the studio and ran it through the Neve console and some vintage Pultecs and a tape machine that Darek refurbished himself.
There was a fair bit of work to do, in order to pull all the disparate recordings together and give the record continuity. But at some point, after years of work, I listened to it one final time and knew it was done.
Would you change anything now it’s finished?
It’s impossible for your taste to stay exactly the same over time. I have actually had this record finished for over a year now, so naturally I’ve started to hear it differently. But it wouldn’t be the same record if I changed anything. I just have to let it be and respect the version of myself that heard the final master and signed off on it.
And by going through this whole process and releasing some singles and letting the music interact with the outside world, I’ve learnt so much and now have a head full of ideas for the next record.
Is there anything else you would like to share with the world?
Sharing this album with the world has been a difficult enough task, so I think I’m going to leave it at that for now. But I’ll let you know when I have something else to offer! Thank you so much for having me RGM.
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