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That came out really great. The record I don’t have, your second solo album, where did you record that? It was at Sunshine. That was going back to Brisbane, the one I
did with Tony Cohen. I just wanted to go back to my hometown and
record after the big Berlin thing. The material that I was writing
just lead me in this direction, I just wanted to go back to a studio
that did jingles. That might do the odd country act. I wanted to
get back to that. Are you happy with that one? I am. The songs probably aren’t as good. The songs probably aren’t as strong as on Danger in the Past. I like the sound of it. It’s a smaller, homey sound. It’s like a Neve desk and a small recording room. It’s a little more boxy which is the sound I wanted to go for. I didn’t want to make another big record. The sound of the record is more important to me. I wanted to go for lo-fi later on. It’s the way I wanted to go. I wanted to make more Brisbane, let’s-put-a-couple-of-mics-up-around-a-lounge room record. More casual, a little bit more time. I should have followed my convictions a little bit more. There’s a record of mine that I produced, I did that. I should have maybe of gone a little bit more funkier. I like it. There’s sort of a dark star of everything that I’d gotten. Then there was Warm Nights, that last record, with Edwyn Collins producing, right? He is a complete and utter studio sound obsessive. He buys gear on the road, like when he’s on the road he goes to vintage sound shops. And buys things that he takes back to his studio. You know, like, the record company people are trying to get him to do interviews and he goes off and buys gear. He’s got a 16-track Neve that he bought years ago for a ridiculous price that people would now pay in the millions. He’s got a great microphone collection.
The title sounds like the sound of the record. I always think of that one as being a fuzzy warm record. Edwyn’s always been a big Al Green fan and he’s listened to and appreciates a lot more 70s black music than I have. It’s a lot more swampy and a lot of it we just did as a three-piece like the drums, bass and guitar. We kept everything like most of those tracks were just the three of us playing and then we’d come in and we’d overdub really lightly. I really like that record. It’s my favorite... I have to say Danger in the Past is my second favorite. One of the reasons I thought about doing the interview is that the Go-Betweens records and your records had a real different feel to them. Yeah, my three albums of original material have been Berlin, Brisbane and London and it’s been Mick Harvey, myself, Edwyn Collins producing. With records it’s really like casting to me, the songs start to get a feel. I want to talk about form. I can imagine going down to Tucson, there’s a feel in that Calexico album and it’s just amazing. You just get into it. You know the Band albums that you were talking about. You just get into a feeling and you’ve just got to follow it. Sometimes you might want to make an 80s digital gated drum-type record. It’s ironic. Now it’s ironic. Edwyn and I will be recording those drums and Edwyn will just go “bum, bum, bum” and he’ll get the gated drum sound just for a joke. He is really lucky because when his studio opened, people would come in, like the big producers around town would go in and go, “What the fuck is going on here? We’re never gonna bring anything in here.” But the good thing about is he had earned enough money off “A Girl Like You.” He built the studio he wanted to build and so he doesn’t have to buy all the latest toys. To sell the studio. Yeah, to sell the studio. Because he doesn’t need anyone else to come in. His studio reminds me a lot of Lee “Scratch” Perry with his studio in the 70s. It’s exactly the sort of thing it is and it’s personal. It’s like, “This is the sound of the studio and not fishing for top 40 acts. Not fishing for some sort of generic indie rock thing. This is the way I want my records to sound” and it’s a very personalized thing and that’s what I love about what he does. I like that. It had a great feel. How long did you spend on that? It was actually quite long. It took about six weeks but he was still involved with the promotional period of “A Girl like You”. This was still going on. And so, there’d be things like him taking two days off to go to Sweden and then he’d come back and then “This TV show wants you...” A lot of interruptions while you were trying to work on it. And it was the first album he did so when I walked into the studio on the first day, he had a soldering iron and was on the ground. I was like, “Okay, alright, we’re not gonna be getting sounds in the first two hours.” But that’s what’s great about Edwyn, he’s very much a producer/engineer and he’s very much out there on his hands and knees putting the mics beside the Fender speakers. He’s very hands-on. The only other solo record is the covers record which you produced. Was that done with Tony Cohen? No. That was done at a studio, a good studio down in Melbourne. The record I’m not that keen about. It’s not your songs, first off, you know. I think some of them were great, I think the Grant Hart cover is one of my favorites. Yeah, that’s good. There’s a few good things on it, but I hadn’t written any songs for a long time and there were a lot of songs from around 1989-90 and I recorded the album in 1994 so it was already past the period that I was covering. You were infatuated with these songs? Yeah. It was about five years old, I don’t know what I was doing. It was one of those things to start things off that I shouldn’t have done. The title is from Jonathan Richman. But you didn’t do that son on there. No, no. I tried to do one of Jonathan songs but I wracked my brain for months trying to think of songs and I wanted to do a song of his called “Important in Your Life” because it was like a great song. www.jetsetrecords.com/bands/go_betweens/
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