After all, Jeffreys is now in his late sixties. I need not have been concerned that age may have wearied him. I caught a late afternoon show in the car park of an art gallery on S.Congress and in that charmingly informal setting Jeffreys put on a jaw dropping performance. At one stage he left the stage and performed in the audience, his diminutive, stocky frame engulfed by the crowd. When he came up for air he had a smile a mile wide – and so did the audience. It was a triumphant moment that it was a privilege to witness.

HHMM: You must be pleased with the time you’ve had over the past few days here in Austin?

GJ: It’s been wonderful. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it actually. I play a show, go back to my hotel, rest, calm down, sleep and then go out again and play a couple more shows, with my band. It’s really good, I think I’ll do this for the rest of my life. I’ll just another thirty to the forty-two years I’ve been doing it. I say I’m on the ninety year plan. I’m healthy, I have a young wife – that’s a good thing – and I’m enjoying myself. In this business its really interesting. If you are not around for a while and then you make a real good record, then its like you never left. It’s the way people respond to you. It’s all about your music.

HHMM: And it is a real good record.

GJ: I’m proud of it. I wrote a lot of songs for it and some of those songs could have been on the record. So now I’m going to make another album and I feel like I have half of the songs already. I’m looking forward for that. To make a long story short – I don’t want to ever put out anything that I don’t think is worthy. I want to be always trying to put out something on a high level. I felt like when I was making the album and the tracks were being recorded that it was all there and there was a limited amount of overdubs I had to do. Working with Larry Campbell was a joy. He’s a very good decision maker. Sometimes when you are making an album you have a lot of choices in your head, and he helped me a lot in making those choices.

HHMM: People could have been excused for expecting the album to be a bit more relaxed and reflective, but its got a really urgent sound and feel right from Track 1. I really like the fact it’s got a lot of energy in it.

GJ: It was natural to do. It wasn’t something I had to think about. A number of journalists have said that the album is an ‘older artists masterpiece’, that’s what they have called it. And they have said that it has more energy that other older artists masterpieces, and they’ve mentioned Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. I don’t mind being in that company any day of the week.

HHMM: As you get older you get wiser and you get more perspectives on things. What do you think is the perspective on this album?

GJ: For me, living in New York, every day you have an experience. You walk out of your house and you have an experience. I could name many, many kinds of things that I see every day. These are the things that infiltrate my mind and body and everything else. And this is what I think about whether I like it or not. I’m conscious of the person that is dying on the street. Recently there was a guy wedged between the newspaper rack and the window and you couldn’t see him, unless you passed by on a certain angle. I went inside and told the shopkeeper, and they said, ‘Oh yeah, a guy up the street died last week’. These kinds of things take place. Every city has this now, its not unusual. But these are the things I think about. I’m not writing pop songs about love as such. I never did. I’m not against it. These days I’m more interested in performing, getting out on stage and rocking and putting it all out there, taking these songs and bringing them to life. One life is the recorded version and then there is the performing version.

HHMM: There are a lot of songs about life and death on the album, but you look at it in different ways. The song Til’ John Lee Hooker Calls Me is a great example of that.

GJ: I was so lucky to come up with that. Some of these ideas are like little gifts that come along. It’s got some great lines in it. It’s a lot of fun. You can’t do anything about death and I’m not thinking about it on a daily basis. I have a young kid, fifteen, so naturally I want to be around and living and breathing and enjoying my life. I sent an email to my daughter last night because she wants to be a performer and she’s very talented. She writes, she plays piano. I told her to keep working on your dreams. You might get some short circuits from time to time but you’ve got to keep working on your dreams.

HHMM: The song The Contortionist is about living your life to suit yourself and not to the expectations of others.  Is that what you were saying to your daughter as well?

GJ: I just don’t want her to give up when she’s in a struggle and to understand that’s its part of the process.  I’m trying to get her a lot of musical information so she can help herself.

HHMM: One of the other lines that jumps out is when you sing, “the king who wears the crowns is not the king necessarily”. Is that a comment on other people getting more public acclaim, but that its about respect not fame?

GJ: No, not really like that. Its much more about a twist on Hail, Hail Rock N’ Roll. You can’t judge a man by looking at the marquee. Judging people quickly without knowing them is a big error that people make. My favorite artist is Bob Dylan. I first heard his voice in the early sixties. It was such a brilliant voice. But judging brilliance….people like to use the word ‘genius’ very freely, and I don’t think there are a lot of genius around these days.

HHMM: Do you recognize the young man who made American Boy and Girl or Ghost Writer?

GJ: I use those albums as models for my own work The Ghost Writer record was magic and it was a special album. For most artists you cant go back to the well in that same way. In this album I feel like I found another way to come up with something on a high level. Right now I feel like I’m sitting with a sense of what to do. It’s a very good feeling.  I put my time in on this album.

HHMM: How great is it to have your fifteen year old daughter on one track and Lou Reed contributing to another?

GJ: That’s very cool. Savannah met Lou when she was a little tiny kid.

HHMM: The respect that you get from Lou Reed and Bruce Springsteen. Has that helped you maintain your belief over the years?

GJ: No! Lou said this was my best album but had he not said it, it wouldn’t have mattered. I know what I’m doing. I have a fondness for Bruce and Lou and I are very close. We’ve known each other for fifty years and we are in a very close time now. I don’t look to them for any kind of reassurance.

Chuck Prophet

HHMM: There’s been a lot of shows over the past few days. Do they all kind of blur into one?

CP: It’s all just one show with an hour break in between. A lot of people have made a point of telling me they have been to maybe three shows. I’m pretty touched by that. It’s not like there wasn’t like 2000 other bands they could have gone and seen.

HHMM: Congratulations on the album. It’s a really strong collection of songs and seeing you play them live really bought that home to me. What was the motivation for doing the San Francisco theme album come from?

CP: I don’t really know where it came from, it just kind of asserted itself. I’d written a bunch of other songs but there was really nothing about them that got me excited. I think there was a batch of songs came through and at one point I thought, “Hey, this is a San Francisco record” and then I started getting excited thinking about all the possibilities.

HHMM: Does that sort of thing need to happen? After you have made a lot of records do you need some kind of a spark like that which is going to make it interesting for you?

CP: There’s enough songs out there and some songs just have that kind of “charisma”, as Peter Case calls it. Some songs you just get excited about and you look forward to playing them live. If I knew what that was I’d tell you, but I don’t really know what that is. But it’s hard for me to make a record if I don’t get excited somewhere along the line. Otherwise why bother? I’m not doing it for the money or any other reason like that. It interesting. There’s a lot of talk about putting songs out a track at a time, or something like that. That’s all well and good, but people just assume that you want to be successful, and that what people assume when they are on the outside. They don’t know about the addiction and the sickness of just chasing a cool idea. The great American LP is still like the Great American Novel in a sense in that everybody feels like they got one in ‘em and if they can pull it off they will be forgiven for all their foolishness. It will just make everything right. That’s the thing about making records. I like records that are cohesive. I like records that hold together.

HHMM: You’ve got a very loyal audience. I was talking to a random bloke from London last night at a show and he was saying he’d been to three of your shows and he was real passionate about it. Does that give you a warm feeling inside?

CP: Yeah, its nice to know because so much of what we do is insulated from that stuff and so much of what we come up against in generally not good news. You know, ‘things are expensive’, ‘we’re gonna have to cut some costs’, ‘people aren’t buying records’, all thaqt kind of stuff. So playing live, it’s really gratifying when someone comes up and tells you that it means something to them. Sure, I love it.

HHMM: The guy from London was explaining how he puts different music on over dinner every night to educate his four year old about what good music is and that whatever he puts on his four year old son tells him that he wants ‘Chuck Prophet’ instead. A Trainee customer.

CP: Yeah (laughs)

HHMM: It really stands out to me over the past four days that there is a bit of a community of people, like John Doe, Peter Case, Garland Jeffreys, Tommy Stinson, the Db’s etc, who are still active and still doing it. Is there a lot of camaraderie in that group?

CP: I think what happened was in the nineties there was a lot of money around and that money made everybody stupid. I think then the mainstream disappeared and when the mainstream disappeared the only thing left was the fringe. So now the fringe element are actually the survivors. So that’s what you see at SxSW, you see a lot less money, and a lot less of that 90’s goldrush and you just see what is left and its kinda cool. I think all those people you mentioned are part of that. For me it was exciting to see Garland Jeffreys play. I actually listened to him a lot in the last two years. That single Wild In The Streets was one of the records I tapped into just to remind myself what can be done with just a couple of chords. That was one of the records I listened to that kept me excited about what I was doing. I made a pretty guitar record with chords that I could teach somebody in ten minutes!

HHMM: Is there a process when you get to a point in your career that you just find where there might be a vein and you mine on that vein for a while. Is that how it works?

CP: I suppose, but the thing is you don’t get to pick it. Offers come in and you try and make things work. I’m lucky that I’ve found a label like Yeproc who are sympathetic to what I am a doing and it’s a good fit.

HHMM: it is a good time for artists like yourself who have a personality that fans like when they get to know you via websites and blogs and newsletters. It’s a good form of communication.

CP: That’s one of the things I look back on. When I was in my early twenties and I was in a band that was on major labels and whatever. Oftentimes I would see a press release and I would think that it was not all that well written or that it was not saying what we wanted to say, but I didn’t have the audacity to say anything about it. We just weren’t one of those bands that had the vision or the togetherness like R.E.M. or some of our other peers. We just kind of let it slide. In the end I feel much better just writing my own press releases.

HHMM: That sense of humour that comes across in your communications with your fans helps us put in context songs like Museum of Broken Hearts on the new album, which isn’t a funny song at all. Because people know you are a funny guy they are able to take a darker song like that and put it in context, rather than filter that through some weird record company interpretation.

CP: I don’t know how that works. I  guess the people I like, whether it be Warren Zevon or Leonard Cohen or Lou Reed – I don’t find that stuff as maudlin as people think it is. There’s a lot of hope and love and I don’t think it’s cynical. For me it was interesting hearing Springsteen talk because he was talking about the line you get through those records. I guess it’s the curse of the self-educated. For me it was always about the records. I’d listen to Ry Cooder and that’s how I was introduced to the German film makers like Wim Wenders, and further back. All that kind of stuff – literature, film and art – all came to me from listening to records. I think it was the Stones that said black culture and black music was were it was at and The Clash embraced so  much different kinds of music and culture and that’s where I got it all.

HHMM: I’m not sure if you are aware of a strange little undercurrent of Green On Red fans in Australia still.

CP: I do have an affinity for Australia that goes way back to bands like the Celibate Rifles and JoJo Zep. I think JoJo Zep was one of the great punk rockers, right there with Graham Parker and Nick Lowe and those guys. Peter Case once told me when he was in the Plimsouls he had a roadie who went to Australia and came back with all those records and that’s what the Plimsouls were based on, that stack of records. For one reason or another I just haven’t gone down there.

HHMM: So is there any prospect of an Australian tour?

CP: It always comes up. I think we need a festival or something to make it possible, but the idea comes up about once a year.

And when we say, ‘a series of videos’, we actually mean 44 of the little devils, constituting all the songs from his albums Only Human, Sweet Nothing and Flame. Apparently there will be a similar exercise performed for the album Ring Of Truth when Yunohu obtains a copy.

The following appeared in our InBox this week that explains this further:

“I’ve just finished uploading everything to Vimeo.

44 videos! I organised them into albums, and also set-up a ‘channel’,which has a different URL, and which would be the best place to go first (it looks better)……the songs are in alphabetical order, but if someone wanted it album by album, they could go from there to the album page on Vimeo.

The new URL  www.vimeo.com/channels/324117

I will see you when you get back from viewing the videos.

But it gets progressively stranger (and more challenging) from there.  The second half of the album opens with a faux–reggae song called The Drone that name-checks Barabbas, Frank Sinatra, Davey Jones (he of the locker fame) and Icarus and seems to be a stream of consciousness observation of a shallow fraud, but could just as accurately be something completely different.

Digging A Hole In The Pine is a dark southern gothic lament built around an incessant rhythmic pattern and a growling vocal that you’d expect from someone like Tony Joe White.  It is followed by The P.A’s PA (now there’s a song title) that is a kind of electro-rock song that could have been on a Chili Peppers album, with Reyne performing a vocal in the style of Matt Johnson of The The – semi spoken in the verses and with a hard soul edge in the choruses. I have no idea what the lyrics are about but I strongly suspect an uppity pain in the arse with a clipboard may be to blame. The soul theme is continued in I Could Have Been Your Dad, which is a kind of blaxploitation funk song that inexplicably breaks into a country hoedown instrumental section at one point. Strange, but effective.

And if you thought the album had ventured down a strange tangential path by this point, wait till you get an earful of Tijuana Bibles. Reyne speaks the entire song in a William Burroughs-styled spoken word rant where he seems to be channeling either Christopher Walken or Hannibal Lector. I’d love to find out exactly who he is referring to in the lyric, but he appears to be taking particular and very specific aim at a music writer and other music industry figures. I think.

Such is the joy of when a gifted songwriter and performer realises that he has absolutely no-one to answer to other than himself. Released on his own label and recorded with trusted lieutenant Scott Kingman co-producing, Thirteen almost sounds like Reyne simply said, “fuck it” half way through the recording and abandoned any concept of self-editing. For some artists that could lead to disaster but in this case the ‘strange’ songs on the second half of this album are the most interesting.  In pushing the envelope Reyne theoretically risks alienating some of his loyal audience, but in reality the risk is in theory only. His bread and butter gigs will continue to draw audiences that will provide him with a living and wont be affected one iota by a few weird songs on an independently released solo album. But he has taken that vaguely luxurious situation and used it to the advantage of his own creative sanity and the stimulation of those who are listening more closely. In an almost perverse way this brace of songs may well be James Reyne at the height of his powers. Just don’t tell anyone. They may not understand.

Admittedly, it was a little strange wandering into the Palace (still known as The Metro to most of the audience, judging by their age) in daylight, to find a hoard of like-minded individuals already immersed in the sounds of the Hard-Ons. And with the Hard-Ons as the opening act I started to wonder whether I was going to survive eight or nine hours of high volume rock. As it turned out the hairy Sydneysiders were probably the loudest band of the day.  Before the first ball had even been bounced at the Anzac Day footy down the road, the stage was being cleared and reset for The Fleshtones.

Now The Fleshtones set the bar very high for those who were to follow. Looking impossibly healthy and fit for anyone claiming to be life sentence rock stars the new Yorkers blazed through a set that had to be seen to be fully appreciated. Who knew that garage rock could be merged so successfully with choreographed dance steps, Las Vegas style showmanship…and push-ups? Yes, folks, I said push-ups. The Fleshtones Keith Streng and Ken Fox managed to somehow end up on the floor of the Palace in a push-up competition while their guitar and bass, respectively, were played by audience members. I’ve been going to rock shows for a very long time, and that was a first. They finished the show by playing their way through the crowd, out of the band room, through the foyer and onto Bourke St.

Were we having fun yet?

I wandered upstairs into the Attic (which was known as the Gods Bar when I was a slip of a lad) to catch a few songs from the Lovetones, who fittingly reminded me of the Dream Syndicate. As one of the young bands on the bill the Lovetones confirmed that the legacy of psychedelic styled rock is left in good hands.

Having established a good spot in the Attic, our two man army decided to remain in place to await Steve Wynn’s set rather than catch The 5,6,7,8’s. It was a good decision. Backed by his wife Linda Pitmon (drums) and the Fleshtones’ Streng and Fox, who had obviously found their way back into the building, Wynn’s set was sublime.  Although Wynn has an extensive repertoire to draw on he treated the Dig It Up crowd to a selection that drew on his early Dream Syndicate days.  We got Halloween, Tell Me When Its Over, That’s What You Always Say and the title track from the Days OF Wine and Roses album. He also played The Miracle 3 song, Amphetamine that was a howling success. The set was over too soon; despite the age of some of the material, there was nothing nostalgic about this performance, just vital, muscular, articulate rock music, played by a master of the form. Wynn actually seemed surprised at the fervent reaction he got from the faithful, and we can only hope this inspires him to return to our shores sooner rather than later.

To be honest, I could have gone home at this point and claimed to have received my moneys worth. But in reality, we were only half way through the bill.

Redd Kross delivered a powerful set that probably had less impact on me than I expected. They were good, but after the dexterity of Wynn’s set, the California band seemed a little one-dimensional and heavy handed. No doubt others would take the opposite view.

There could be no difference of opinion about The Died Pretty. Their set was superb, with Ron Peno definitely bringing his A game to this show. Unburdened by the need to pace a longer show, the band powered through their allotted 45 minutes and if it really was to be the last we see of them, then they have departed on a triumphant note.

The Sonics were a surprise packet – not the fact that they were good; a bit of You Tube research could have revealed that before their show. What was interesting was just how contemporary their sound was despite it being rooted so deeply in the 60’s. And again, there was nothing nostalgic about their performance, especially from singing bass player Freddie Dennis, who packs a walloping voice that balances well with Gerry Roslie. As the newest member of the band Dennis has made his mark.

Much has already been said about Hoodoo Gurus show. Sure they played a shortish set and didn’t play a second encore that meant most of their bigger hits never got an airing. And sure that meant that a few fans who might have been expecting those hits left disappointed. But lets just emphasize a few key points. Firstly this show was well advertised as being a retrospective, built around Stoneage Romeos and it’s inspirations. Secondly anyone who was only a fan of the Guru’s FM radio hits quite possible wouldn’t have paid over $100 to see this show, when they would not have known any of the other bands on the bill. The show was not designed for what we might call “the Triple M” audience. Finally the fact that the Gurus were even the headliner was more to do with their role as hosts – in many ways, the bill was intended to be more ‘festival’ styled than a traditional gig where the best was necessarily kept to last.  It wasn’t the Gurus greatest ever set, but it was the right bunch of songs for the day.

There’s no doubt that the Dig It Up idea is a beauty, and with a few tweaks it might become a viable on-going event for those of us who are not too old to stay home, but find the idea of cherry-picking a bigger festival line-up to find the nuggets of gold a bit too tiresome.

Photo by Kyleigh Pitcher

The tour celebrates the release of Oceania, the band’s first album with new drummer Mike Byrne and bassist Nicole Fiorentino, who both joined the group following the Pumpkins’ last album Zeitgeist in 2007. The album should be released in June, in plenty of time for the tour.

It’s anyone’s guess what material Corgan will play on this tour – it would be reasonably to expect only a smattering of their early songs, because Corgan isn’t one to enjoy retrospection. It will be interesting to what the Oceania material sounds like. Regardless the shows will be well worth a look.

General on sale at 9am on Wednesday 9 May

Thursday 26 July – Challenge Stadium, Perth

Tuesday 31 July – Entertainment Centre, Sydney

Thursday 2 August – Hisense Arena, Melbourne

Saturday 4 August – Vector Arena, Auckland

A new Melbourne show is now scheduled for Tuesday 24th July at the Palace Theatre, with Friday 27th July at Enmore Theatre in Sydney also being added.

Earlier this year Del Rey released her debut album Born To Die, which debuted at #1 on iTunes in eighteen countries. It’s one of the few albums to have sold over a million copies around the world this year.

Del Rey has been one of the most talked about artists to emerge in the last twelve months. It began when her home made clip for the single ‘Video Games’ went crazy on You Tube achieving over 32 million views.

It was genuinely a great song, but no-one really expected the reaction it got and immediately questions were asked about the hype that may have been propelling the reaction to the artist.

Pressured to back up the runaway success of ‘Video Games’ that went viral overnight, Interscope rushed out the singer’s debut album and thrust her onto television screens across the world with her performance on Saturday Night Live, which was largely regarded as disastrous. That didn’t hurt the sales of the album though.

No doubt there will be a lot of interest in her live shows.

Tickets on sale now

Monday July 23 – Palace Theatre, Melbourne

Tuesday July 24 – Palace Theatre, Melbourne

Thursday July 26 – Enmore Theatre, Sydney

Friday July 27 – Enmore Theatre, Sydney

The Sonics

HHMM: Great that you are here to do the Hoodoo Gurus Invitational. Were you surprised to get the call to do these shows?

RL: Well we were gratified. We’ve wanted to come down here and play for quite a while and we always run into people when we are playing in Europe and in the States…we run into Aussies who talk to us after the show and ask us to come and play down there. For that to now happen is totally the responsibility of the Hoodoo Gurus. We are grateful for that and we are about to see them at soundcheck and thank them in person.

HHMM: How does it feel to be getting new fans, who might not have heard of the band before, at this stage of your career?

RL: It’s amazing and that’s what bought us back in the first place. The first show we did was the Cavestomp Festival in New York City and we weren’t really aware that was the case until we came out on stage and saw the audience – and they were young! Then we got contacted by a promoter in London who said they were going to have to add two shows for us because, in his words, “you’ve been totally discovered by the kids”. That was great, because our audiences are now mostly 18-35 – there are a lot of other ages too – but that’s the core.

HHMM: When you were doing those early recordings did you have any sense at all that they were going to be so enduring and so influential?

RL: None whatsoever. At the time we needed desperately to put an album out and get tracks on the album as quickly as we could come up with them. We had no idea at the time about longevity; for the music or us!

HHMM: Those early recordings – the sound is very raw and muscular and unpolished. Was that what you were trying to achieve or did it just happen?

RL: It was sort of what we were trying to achieve. We were trying to achieve in those days is exactly what we are trying to achieve now – and that is to play as hard as we could. We weren’t a jazz quintet, we didn’t play blues. We liked Little Richard, we liked Chuck Berry, we liked Jerry Lee Lewis in those early days. We wanted to play hard rock n’ roll and that’s just what came out. We played on those albums just like we played live. A number of the songs on those albums – Have Love Will Travel for instance – was just a song we played live. It turns out, just by the luck of the draw, that its become very popular and its been used in movies and used in a lot of commercials. But we recorded it just off the top of our head, we had no idea.

HHMM: Recently as SxSW Bruce Springsteen was talking about how he was affected by The Animals, because they were hard and scary and unpolished and they were cool, but not in a “nice” way. Were The Sonics a bit like that? Was there that dangerous element that attracted people to you?

RL: You know in the early days of The Witch and Psycho that is exactly right, exactly right. We were trying to do that. The goal then was to have the big rock station in town play your record. The Witch was our first record and they wouldn’t touch it. Their disc jockeys used to go out and do high school dances and the kids were coming up and asking then to play The Witch by The Sonics. They actually bought up 45’s and said, ‘play this’. The radio station reluctantly started playing it and it got popular very quickly, but they wouldn’t play it during the day for the housewives. They would only play The Witch after four o’clock in the afternoon when the kids got home from school. In Seattle the big rock station was KGR and we never became No. 1 on that station with The Witch. The best we did was No.2 and No.1 was Petula Clark doing downtown. We found out 35 years later that we were in fact No. 1 by a great margin, but because of that scary, evil, mean and nasty concept that we’ve been talking about they didn’t feel they could put us at No. 1 because it would be an advertisement for being evil or something! We were just 19 year old rock n’ roll boys, we weren’t eating snakes and giving blood!

HHMM: Listening to the song I’m Going Home, the guy in that song is going home to his family beaten and bruised and defeated. It wasn’t a story about how great life was and we are all surrounded by California Girls.

LR: That’s right. We got shoehorned into doing one third of a Christmas album, so we went into a studio and recorded I Don’t Believe In Christmas. It was the dark side of Christmas, saying ‘I got nothing in my stocking and Santa Claus doesn’t like me’.

If you talk to Gerry who wrote a lot of the lyrics in those songs, he gets asked “Why did you do those lyrics?” and he’ll tell you that he wanted to be different to ‘moon, june, croon, spoon’. He wanted to be more hard edged and savage. I’ve know Gerry since we were sixteen and he’s never eaten a snake in his life, but he wanted to put a hard edge on things so we didn’t sound like all those other groups who were singing about walking hand in hand by the sea shore.

HHMM: Your saxophone serves the same purpose. You never played it as a crooning instrument. At lot of your work on those songs is almost as a rhythm instrument.

LR: Nice of you to say so. It’s all in the way I learned to play. I wanted to be a rock n’ roll sax player. I wanted to play hard and the guys that I liked that were much better than me like Johnny and the hurricanes, those guys played with a certain kind of attacking style. I worked on learning to do that myself. In learning to do that I totally disregarded jazz and blues so I don’t have that jazz or blues tone that a lot of really wonderful sax players have. The other thing is that all five of us tried to play as hard as we could. Bob Bennett our drummer was a beast and Gerry screamed. I tried to do the same thing on the sax. That’s the way I play now. If you asked me to play a jazz song now, I probably couldn’t do it!

HHMM: Gerry never sounded like a teenager. He always sounded like an old man in a young mans body.

LR: (laughs): That’s a good observation. He was just trying to go as hard as he could too. That’s were that comes from. We didn’t lay back  we used to play three sets in those days and a lot of times we’d start playing the first set and it would still be daylight outside. People would be standing there when we started with their arms folded staring at us and we wanted to get them involved right from the beginning, so instead of easing into it we would start as hard as we could right from the beginning. Strangely enough that’s exactly what we do now.

HHMM: Do you think The Sonics were a real reflection of where you grew up in the North West?

LR: There were a lot of different factors to that. We all grew up in Tacoma, Washington, which is a working town. Our dads were all blue collar workers and it was a work ethic kind of town. The bands that played there were all harder edged bands than the bands that played in the nearest city which was Seattle. They were more swingy, more jazzy, more prone to doing shuffles and things. We just wanted to rock n’ roll.

Jo Syme

HHMM: Working in a café on a beautiful sunny Melbourne afternoon. That must be a bit of a reality check after being at SxSW, Toronto, LA and New York.

JS: Yeah, it is. We were away for almost a month between doing some recording and being in America, so I thought I’d lost my job, but they try to give me a few shifts. I still find it weird having days off in Melbourne.

HHMM: How did you find the whole SxSW experience? Were you a first timer?

JS: It was our first time overseas as a band. It was great. I was thinking beforehand that as exciting as it could be I thought it could be pretty stressful and a bit overwhelming. But it was pretty manageable and a lot of fun. The whole city has such a great atmosphere. I was just really happy to have experienced that. I don’t think I would have gone if I had been a patron all my life.

HHMM: When you have your first big overseas trip as a band and its something as chaotic as SxSW, when you come back does Melbourne seem kind of small or does it seem familiar and comforting?

JS: Coming home, it does seem familiar and comforting, and even the fact that the four of us were sharing double beds, coming home and having your own space is really nice! But doing SXSW you just realize how many incredible working bands are out there and it did make Australia seem a little bit small. But on the other hand it didn’t make the rest of the world too big to get involved in either.

HHMM: Does it make you look a year ahead and think, “where might we be?”

JS: Yeah totally. It’s actually really good. For the last two years I’ve always known where I’ll be a year in advance, but now I kind of know the next six months but after that…Now that we are looking towards overseas a bit more it really is exciting. I cant even put myself on a phone plan in Australia, because I’m hoping that I wont be around here too much.

HHMM: Word has spread about the band very quickly in the last year or so. Has it surprised you, because clearly you are fairly eclectic and I would have thought it was a case of finding pockets of support rather than the across the board support.

JS: We’ve been really lucky with Triple J in terms of the younger audience.  We’re lucky have such eclectic songs that they have still supported us. In that year we’ve found different genres appreciate different parts of us. I’m surprised we’ve been taken as well as we have because I definitely think that people would listen to one song and like it but really dislike another because it would be so different. So we are lucky that we have a good loyal fanbase. I’ve noticed over the last month that it’s stepping up a bit which is exciting for the upcoming tour.

HHMM: Do you think some artists and definitely labels under-estimate fans a bit. They are actually capable of liking quite diverse bands and the labels assume that it’s going to be too hard for them to do that.

JS: That’s why we did stay independent knowing Tom’s songwriting style. It  wasn’t going to be easy for him to be told, “OK this is what’s working now and so you have to write these kind of songs”. We had heard horror stories of labels trying to have that influence. We haven’t directly come across that because we have been in control, but earlier on before we released the album and we were chatting to some labels, and they were like, “Yeah, we love how its so diverse, but what genre is the album going to be?”

HHMM: Even in Melbourne my perception was that you guys were never really part of a scene. Is it kind of strange that you seem to be the focus of your own scene in a way, now that you are selling out multiple shows at the Corner Hotel.

JS: I don’t think we were ever part of a scene. We were both in other bands playing all the different venues and exhausting that thing of texting your family and friends every weekend. When we started we were kind of over that and we didn’t play an abundance of shows and therefore we never made those close friendships by playing the same gigs all the time with the same bands. But I’ve been really looking forward to playing a Corner show with this band for four years now and so I’m really happy about that.

HHMM: And then after that you are playing Groovin’ the Moo in regional centres.

JS: We’ve been pretty naughty because we’ve never really done a regional tour. I was pushing for it but it is actually quite hard and quite harsh if you are not filling up rooms. So this is such an awesome excuse to get to play regional centres. And we’ve never really been on a touring festival so I think this is an especially good one for us to be on.

HHMM: You’ve made a big leap forward with Vacation, which is not surprising. Does that now mean you have to have a plan were in the past you could just let things evolve?

JS: Actually its been good because leading into Vacation we were both pretty unfocussed about what we wanted. We didn’t know what producer we wanted to whether it should be a slick recording, or lo-fi. We needed a bit of direction. This time around Tom knows exactly what he wants and he’s super focused and he’s producing it himself. I think just making that first baby step has helped us understand exactly what we want it to sound like and what sort of band we want to be.

HHMM: Out of SXSW, did anything specific actually arise?

JS: Its not like the head of Sony saw us and signed us straight away! We met some cool people and I think what we will do is release Vacation the same way we did here, by putting together our own team and release it independently. We feel like we met some people we want to work with and when we do go back it will be a bit easier and less daunting because there will be some familiar faces who have seen us place and are excited to work with us.

Tom Iansek

HHMM: From a songwriting perspective, going to SxSW where there is so many bands doing so many things, is it eye-opening, inspiring or depressing, or what else?

TI: It’s totally inspiring and eye-opening. Towards the end of last year playing live for us was becoming a bit of a drag in a way because we were so busy doing everything else, and then seeing all these amazing bands and being surrounded by all this awesome music all the time, it was really inspiring for us and it re-ignited the spark for us playing live. It was really re-invigorating for us being over there and being a part of all that. I cant put my finger on exactly what was so exciting about being over there but there definitely was an energy that rubbed off on us.

HHMM: In a way I’m kind of surprised the interest in you is coming from the US, rather than the UK and Europe. It seems to me the band would really appeal to UK and European audiences.

TI: I don’t know what to say about that. I’m constantly baffled by how the music industry works and I’ve come to learn that there is no real rhyme or reason to how anything works. We’ve never been to the UK or Europe so I can’t say how we would go down over there. We did originally think it might be easier to get the ball rolling in Europe first and then the States so its funny how its happening the other way around.

HHMM: I said that because when I listen to your music I’m hearing things that remind me of bands like Japan, XTC, Squeeze, even Roxy Music. Is that a strain of music you are aware of?

TI: No, I don’t know any of those bands you just mentioned (laughs)

HHMM: Collectively those bands became kind of known as “art-rock” and when I hear you I immediately think “art-pop”. Does that make any sense?

TI: Do you mind if I write them down? Its funny you mention that because I’ve just discovered a British band in the 80’s like Joy Division. I’ve been getting into them in a big way, so I’ll have a listen to those bands you mentioned. I think we have come to learn that there is a pop element to everything we write. I think we only really learnt that while we were recording Vacation. Its interesting because we didn’t like the idea of being super-pop, and because of the fact that we now know there is going to be a pop element to it we are trying to push the boundary a bit knowing that its always going to be a bit pop.

HHMM: Listening to some of the songs I felt like they were little ‘pop operas.’  They have that narrative to them and there’s a lot of ideas moving through the songs quickly.

TI: I think there’s a pop structure that I love. I don’t like having unneeded elements in a song. I always like to get rid of anything that doesn’t really have a valid purpose. I guess that sort of lends itself to some sort of narrative and a lot of them were actual stories. So I can see how you can hear that and I’m glad you are hearing that as well. You don’t hear those sort of comments from a lot of people.

HHMM: I’ve already read that the next album will be a departure again which is becoming par for the course. Do you think you are going to be able to create an expectation amongst the audience that they need to expect the unexpected?

TI: I hope so. I think for listeners who hear it for the first time there is often a feeling of confusion when you hear more than one song. That probably works against us in a lot of ways in terms of making a career and all that, but I think when they get it they realize that we don’t really like doing the same thing. So I think that would be ideal for us if that would happen; if we had an audience that enjoyed expecting the unexpected that would really open the gate for us to really push ourselves as well in what we create. That would be best case.

HHMM: Having done a few shows when you played for audiences that didn’t know who you are it will be interesting doing a couple of sold-out Corner Hotels, which is a bit of a milestone in this town.

TI: It was kinda nice to be the opening band that doesn’t want to get in the way too much and quietly goes about its thing. It was nice playing to not many people and in some ways I miss that because it reminds me of the early days of a band when there is that initial excitement of doing something new. It did make us appreciate what we’ve got going in Australia and that’s part of the excitement of these shows we’ve got coming up.

HHMM: You strike me as the kind of guy who is not likely to ever get complacent. You are restless creatively.

TI: Absolutely, whenever it gets to the day that I feel like I’m happy with everything that’s the day when it all starts going downhill creatively. In a lot of ways I try to be my own biggest critic and try to get the best out of myself. I’m always looking forward and when you stop and think how great what you are doing is, then it’s really unhealthy.

Levon Helm

Helm appeared frail in recent years, but there was no inkling his health had taken a grave turn until Tuesday last week, when his wife and daughter posted a statement on his Website announcing, “Levon is in the final stages of his battle with cancer.Please send your prayers and love to him as he makes his way on this stage of his journey.”

Helm was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 with the other members of The Band. And in 2003, Rolling Stone magazine named him as one of the “100 greatest singers of all time.”

His voice reflected an Arkansas drawl and lifetime of musical influences, from country to blues and soul. Helm learned to play several instruments and performed in Arkansas throughout his teenage years before joining Ronnie Hawkins‘ rockabilly band, The Hawks, after high school. Helm and Hawkins played frequently in Canada, where they recruited other musicians to play with them –guitarist Robbie Robertson, bassist Rick Danko, pianist Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson, who played the organ.

Helm and his new band mates eventually split from Hawkins and struck out on their own, touring as Levon and the Hawks before becoming Bob Dylan’s road band in the mid-1960s.

They followed Dylan to Woodstock, where they practiced together in a pink house. The locals simply referred to them as “The Band.” They adopted the name when they issued their first album, the acclaimed “Music from Big Pink,” in 1968. The Band became one of the most influential groups of the era for their blend of rock, country and R & B. But the group was short-lived. They played together one last time in 1976, a farewell in San Francisco that included appearances by Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. They called it “The Last Waltz,” and gave a young director named Martin Scorsese free reign to film them onstage and off, creating a documentary that memorialized one of the legendary concerts of all time — as well as the tensions that fueled the band’s breakup.

Helm’s voice provided the lead on such enduring classics as “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down” and “Up on Cripple Creek”.

Helm also appeared in movies as an actor, making his screen debut in “The Coal Miner’s Daughter,” playing Loretta Lynn’s father, Ted Webb. He also had a role in “The Right Stuff.”

But music was his first love. After The Band’s breakup, Helm recorded several solo albums, toured with Starr, and periodically reunited and performed with some of The Band’s other members in the 1980s and 90s — but never with Robertson, with whom he had a falling out.

The two had an emotional reunion, when Robertson learned last week that Helm was dying, and he asked to see him at a New York hospital.

“It hit me really hard because I thought he had beaten throat cancer and had no idea that he was this ill,” Robertson wrote on Tuesday on his website.

“I sat with Levon for a good while, and thought of the incredible and beautiful times we had together. … Levon is one of the most extraordinarily talented people I’ve ever known and very much like an older brother to me. I am so grateful I got to see him one last time and will miss him and love him forever.”

In recent years Helm had made a comeback, although he had never stopped making music.

In September of 2007, Dirt Farmer Music and Vanguard Records released Dirt Farmer, Levon’s first solo, studio album in twenty-five years. A project particularly close to his heart, the CD contains music reminiscent of his past, and songs handed down from his parents. Dirt Farmer was awarded a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album in February 2008.

That same year he was also recognized by the Recording Academy with a lifetime achievement award as an original member of The Band and was given the “Artist of the Year” Award by the Americana Music Association.  In 2009, Levon released Electric Dirt which marked his highest debut in Soundscan era at #36 and spent six consecutive weeks at #1 on the Americana Radio Chart. He won a second Grammy for Electric Dirt in the inaugural category of Best Americana Album in 2010.

In September 2008, Levon took The Midnight Ramble on the road to Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium. Buddy Miller, John Hiatt, Sheryl Crow, George Receli, Sam Bush and Billy Bob Thornton helped The Levon Helm Band create an evening of unforgettable musical joy. Ramble at the Ryman – Live CD and DVD, (sold individually), won him his third consecutive Grammy, again as Best Album in the Americana category, in February 2012

There’s been numerous things already written about Helm since his death, but one of the most eloquent came from Joe Henry, who named his son Levon after Levon Helm Henry wrote this reflection, titled “Gone/Not Gone: Levon Helm in Motion”:

This past Tuesday afternoon, many of us began to receive and share word that Levon Helm was in the final stages of his long and heroic battle with cancer.

By that evening, Levon was not yet gone, but neither was he fully among the living. As we understood from his family, he was hovering at the doorway between this world and the next … still taking the air of mortals in shallow and halting breaths, but with his eyes rolled back against the drawn curtain of his times. And we hovered with him.

Yet already in that moment, for many of us sadly absorbing the falling shoe of this news and preparing for the other to drop, he had assumed the flickering posture of memory; of those who had danced alive in our high beams, throwing shadows that moved like ancient black rivers; of those who have pointed the way forward from so far behind us that they shall forever, henceforth, stand ahead on the pathway like an omen of what is still to come; of those disappeared into omnipresence, like word into deed, fear into mercy and grace.

Levon entered my life when I was so young as to have had no notion that my gate needed a guard; thus, he waltzed right in while I was completely vulnerable to his raucous and ranging alchemy, and he changed me. Like children pulled into ministerial service when still in single digits, I looked unquestioningly upon Levon Helm as my church elder … a deacon who spoke our gospel; who swung- and sung-out time in glorious illumination of its wild and elastic poetry.

In the same way that his great friend and sometimes-boss Bob Dylan connected the dots between Jimmy Reed, Arthur Rimbaud and Muhammad Ali, so Levon drew the second line that had Howlin’ Wolf, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Marvin Gaye and Hank Williams all dancing out in front of the same New Orleans funeral parade. (They all walked liked Bo Diddley and didn’t need no crutch.) He brought soul and an open heart to the darkest corners of rock music — in a troubled era he helped shape and define — and a rural humility to the grandest stages.

As I awaited word of the inevitable — while we all waited — I found there was nothing I could do but listen. And when I did, I was moved; was moving … leaning, as implied, from past tense into present action; loosing my mind to what my body already knew, to the instinctive sway of my knees and shoulders in the face of unease; and I was reminded how much of our true intelligence resides in our physical frames’ southern hemisphere.

Yes, all I could do was listen and move, and it is what we will all do today. But then, that is all Levon Helm ever asked of any of us.