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Act of Free Choice: Interview
by Brian Wise
How does the saying go? Last
guys finish nice? Well, somehow over the past fifteen years David
Bridie has not only been able to make his mark on the local music
scene, but has also managed to retain his perspective on the business
to the point where he remains approachable, unguardedly open and (in
an increasingly corporate world) still able to wear his heart on his
sleeve. That is why as we go to press Bridie will be playing a Reconciliation
Benefit - one of many causes he quietly but tangibly supports.
Bridie’s bands - Not Drowning Waving and My Friend The Chocolate
Cake - built cult followings, toured and recorded successfully and
also gave the musician a substantial profile (if not huge fame and
wealth).
At the same time Bridie managed to diversify his musical portfolio
via his production work, playing with and supporting other musicians
(most notably George Telek) and through some acclaimed soundtracks
(for which he won an ARIA award this year).
In many ways Bridie is our equivalent of Peter Gabriel (in fact, he
has even recorded at Gabriel’s Real World studios) - a musician
who has retained his musical integrity and adventurousness despite
the pressures of success (give or take a few million albums).
In the latter years of Not Drowning Waving Bridie would often postulate
on the reasons the band was not more successful - at one stage it
seemed to be a recurring theme (particularly after Mushroom invested
heavily in Circus, an album that promised much but was ignored by
radio).
In retrospect, it appears that Bridie might not have been cut out
for pop success anyway and that part of the reason NDW were not more
successful sales-wise was that Bridie’s heart was just not in
the endless grind of repetitive touring, recording and promotion.
These days he appears to be at a creative peak and moves between projects
enthusiastically bringing a wealth of talents to bear on his music.
However, most importantly, he is an avid music fan, restlessly seeking
out new sounds.
That is most evident on the solo debut album Act Of Free Choice which
sums up Bridie’s entire career in eleven beautifully constructed
songs. It brims with so many interesting ideas that comparisons with
anything else that has ever been done in this country are difficult
- it is really Bridie finding his own unique voice.
The album was recorded in various locations - Bridie’s home studio,
Mt. Macedon, Phillip Island and Michael Barker’s house. Bridie
was assisted by London producer Ian Caple (Tricky and The Sugarcubes)
and he describes the album as "Eleven interlinked short stories
to music. The older you get the more confident you get and I realised
this is the kind of record that I wanted to make."
The Koran, The Ghan And A Yarn features a wooden box loop and piano and deals with Marree, a town in outback South Australia, what Bridie describes as 'a strange meeting place of cultures amongst a beautiful but desolate landscape populated by pioneering Afghan camel drivers, strange Europeans - often on the run from something - and the aborigines who had survived earlier atrocities.' Dive was originally co-written with John Phillips for Christine Anu’s Stylin’ Up album. Breath is an atmospheric multi-layered excursion. Kerosene harks back to Not Drowning Waving days. The Deserters features Bridie’s first full orchestral score. Float uses a basic track that Bridie and John Phillips had in the archives. The eerie Sad begins quietly with a morse code-like sound in the background and an unusually haunting vocal treatment. Talk Mister Nation pulses gently along with Michael Barker’s almost occasional drum track over a sparse piano and a whispered voice. The original Salt (I Don’t Want To Go No Further) is on the My Friend The Chocolate Cake's Good Luck but here Bridie only uses the chorus. The Last Great Magician slowly builds to a crescendo with a loping beat and more altered vocals.
One of the deceptive aspects of Act Of Free Choice is the apparent
simplicity which hides layers of instrumentation and meaning. To fully
reveal the album, crank the volume up and the sounds will leap out
and almost overwhelm you in their complex layers.
We begin our conversation with David Bridie discussing his recent
work on films.
Congratulations on the ARIA award. It must give you great satisfaction.
The film soundtrack work is something that I really love doing - especially
on the right project. It’s creatively challenging and it’s
good because it helps in doing something like the solo record.
Often you are working on ideas or working with sounds that you haven't
worked with before, and there's a chance to experiment with that on
a film soundtrack. Often I will grab ideas or re-use ideas that worked
out in a film soundtrack and use it on the solo record.
It's good, it's funny because I guess composing for soundtracks is
often seen as being a classical, or a 'real' musicians' domain and
there's sometimes this thing, 'Oh ,this isn't something that rock
musicians should be doing.' So it was good from that point of view.
I didn’t go to the VCA but I learnt classical piano while I was
at school, I was a bit of a mug at it. I enjoyed mucking around and
writing my own songs, but I certainly wasn't one to go onto the conservatorium
or anything.I think I’m fortunate in that regard and I certainly
think I’ve got the motivation to do it all. Certainly this solo
record and the live shows are the main things I’m concentrating
on at the moment.'
Well thinking about your musical past, it seems perfectly suited
to adaptation to film, wouldn't it, a lot of it?
Yes. I think the more textural area that I work in does blend itself
to film scores and I think the way musical technology is now too -
having the studio now down the back yard - is good. It means it's
not so much a matter of going in and having to get in a full orchestra
to come in a do a sound score. I think music technology lends itself
to that and the other great thing about that is that often with film
scores I get to work with a whole bunch of musicians who I wouldn't
always get the opportunity of working with in a band. That's great,
I really like that and, as you know, Melbourne has got quite an amazing
range of very talented musicians from all different schemes of musical
styles.
You have Ian Caple as a co-producer on your album. Why the decision
to get a co-producer in? I thought at this stage of your career you
could probably quite easily produce it yourself. Did you need that
second opinion, someone who was a little bit more objective than you?
I think with a band you use other band members to give you feedback
or to say, ‘No I don't think those vocals are as good as you
can do, or that's a lazy lyric, or how about we take it in this direction?’
Not having that with a solo record meant the idea of having a producer
to be able to be a collaborator on the record. It was something I
always wanted to do. I never thought, ‘Look I'll produce it myself.’
Having said that, I built up a lot of the record before Ian came along,
so a lot of the basic templates for the songs, were already set in
place. Even getting to that stage meant working with a lot of people
here: Simon Polinski, Michael Barker in building up some songs, Michael
Sheridan [guitar] as well and I worked on a couple of ideas with Helen
Mountfort.
I was quite deliberate in going out and taping the songs and not being
afraid of playing them to people and asking them what they honestly
thought. I take those discussions quite seriously and you know whose
opinion to trust and where they come from.
But Ian was fantastic. He came from having done the Tindersticks record.
I really liked the organic sound of those records - both in the way
that the songs are built up and the way the instruments are recorded.
Also having worked on the Tricky records, I think he have a very innovative
approach to hard disk recording and to sampling and to looping. Certainly
it was an area I was wanting to get into with this record - but to
do it in an innovative way and to look at them, the more texture side
of things rather than just bunging down a bunch of dance loops, which
certainly wasn't the direction I wanted the record to go.
Ian is in his early 40s so he's been through the whole English school
but he was a very very likeable personality too. When you are working
at close quarters with someone you often have chats that would lead
into politics or sport - just being able to have conversations away
from music and enjoy each other's company helped to make it comfortable
in the studio.
He also believed in it too - he listened to a whole lot of different
stuff I'd done and I never got the impression that he was taking on
this job just so he could get a trip down to Australia and pay off
his mortgage. He understood where I was coming from and respected
what I was doing and vice versa - which I think is quite a strong
point for Australian artists. Often we get stuck with a producer and
there's some point during the record you are thinking, ‘I don't
know how much this person really wants to put themselves on the line
with this record and what perspective they are approaching this record
from.’ There was certainly never any doubt with Ian and as I
said, he's a really good person and all the musicians who came up
really enjoyed working with him and liked the way that he got the
performances out of them without being a slave master.
You've had a long experience in the music business, do you find it
hard to turn over some of the responsibility to someone else?
With Ian I wanted to concentrate on being the artist on this record
and being a first solo record I took it very seriously. There was
certainly a fear of failure that I had in the back of my head that
motivated me quite strongly. So I was very much playing the role of
the creator and the artist, as opposed to overseeing the whole project
as a producer. I don't think I could self-produce. I don't think I
would want to either. Some projects I can, but certainly not for this
record, I didn't want to.
You say fear of failure, fear of failure in what sense?
I wanted to have a record at the end that I was really happy with:
that I was really proud of; that I thought was me; that makes sense;
that reflected me both musically and lyrically; that was a statement;
that reflected what I was doing and where I was at.
Putting my name on the project was a big chance for me. Whilst Not
Drowning Waving and Chocolate Cake with the producing and the film
stuff says I've been very satisfied and proud of achievements with
records and the live shows of those bands, I certainly wanted to prove
to myself that I could follow something through from beginning to
end, artistically, and for it to be strong - not just here in Australia
but overseas as well.
So I placed a lot of pressure on myself - but not in a bad way. I
think that sort of brought the best out of me. Then for the two months
leading up before Ian came, I was probably more motivated than I had
been in a long time, in terms of setting out with the demo set-up
I had and with reworking lyrics or reworking parts or looking at structures.
Not to the extent that I was over-working things, but I had written
quite a lot of songs, quite of lot of songs to choose from and there
was a fair culling process, but yes, I was highly motivated on this
one
It's a very adventurous album, in terms of what you attempted to do.
It's an album that's going to have some longevity to it - which I
would presume is another goal that you had.
Yes, I think that's a goal in all records that I make. Certainly,
my favourite records are ones which you can listen to three, four,
five years after they have come out and they can still be relevant.
I think for any artist, whether it’s a film maker or an author
or a visual artist trying to make an artistic statement it is important
that it that has some relevance that it hangs around and is fresh
and it comes off sounding fresh and it's not too locked into a fad
or a certain period of time. I guess you never know whether you have
succeeded in that until you get to the stage of being able to look
at it in retrospect.
Funnily enough after I listened to the album the first time, for
some reason I went back and got out My Life In The Bush of Ghosts
[Byrne & Eno] - not because they are musically similar but some
of the feeling reminded me of that.
It's a great record.
It's incredibly influential and when you listen back to it now, so
far ahead of its time.
What I really liked about My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts is, I realised,
the balance between the layers of rhythms. They were all very simple
rhythms layered up - which is what I think Byrne and Eno were doing,
not just on that record but often on Remain In Light [Talking Heads].
On top of that those rhythmic layers, those atmospheres and textures
as well as the spoken word stuff is probably an obvious linking point
between my record and that one.
They were certainly to me part of the templates of the songs - quite
simple songs where the chords were carefully constructed - but they
were fairly simple melodies with more complex layers of rhythms and
sounds.
Some non-musical sounds created this bed of textures that it could
all sit around. I like the way the Talk Talk records do that, I think
Quasimodo's Dream by The Reels does that as well - though obviously
in a more analogue electronic way. But they were some of the frames
of reference to the record and My Life In The Bush of Ghosts was certainly
one of them.
Well, similar to that, you have got a lot happening in this album
that takes a while to digest. There's a lot going on there underneath
the surface.
It's quite multi-layered and I love records where when you listen
to it for the eighth time it's like listening to something new. That
is certainly something I was trying to do.
Some of them were things I had used in film soundtracks before. There
is quite a bit of the In A Savage Land - the orchestra from The Deserters
certainly comes from that and there's all those little bleeping noises
in Sad - stuff that I had recorded whilst I was up in the Trobriand
Islands. Not that they were a Trobriand Island sounds, they were sounds
that I just recorded off short wave radio. It was just that I was
up there and had the inclination to record that stuff. But I guess
that layering was going up, being able to delve into sounds that I
had there and saying, that will work quite well with that lyric, or
that will work quite well with that instrumentation.
You've certainly got a vast array of talent of musicians, but interestingly
enough they come from a variety of musical backgrounds. They are not
always musicians that you might have worked with in the past are they?
I think one of the dangers and one of the fears I had about a solo
record was I didn't want it to sound like me and a group of session
musicians. So certainly the people that I chose were people who were
used in the heart and soul of the record and in some cases it was
using those musicians in a different way. Kerri Simpson really enjoyed
working on this because I was getting her to sing in ways she doesn't
normally sing and asking her to do things quite different, whether
it be the blues stuff or the voodoo stuff that she has been doing.
I am a big fan of Kerri - I think she's a fantastic song writer and
a very underrated one.
Phil Wales as well I think is a really underrated guitarist. And Michael
Sheridan is obviously someone whom I had never worked with before
but had always wanted to. So getting him to play on a few tracks was
great, and being able to use different musicians for different tracks
where their styles suited.
I was just careful so it didn't sound too disjointed but I think it
was obviously enough of me in all the songs to create that constant
thread. But it was like horses for courses in a lot of ways.
Three of the tracks on the album were co-written with John Phillips
who lives in France now?
Yes, John bought this most fantastic house in the Dordogne region
in the south of France. John moving overseas has quite changed a lot
of stuff for me because we worked so closely together, certainly on
film soundtracks and stuff and with a lot of production jobs that
I have been doing. I was very reliant on him technically. All the
gear that we had was always around at Johnny's place, so him going
overseas meant that it put a rocket under my bum in some ways and
I had to go out and buy a whole lot of the gear myself.
I also to start collaborating with different people a lot more and
those new relationships and having to approach the gear from a different
perspective was a really good thing for me. I found it a really liberating
experience and helped me feel that I was on top of what I was doing
a bit more.
Well I suppose with the internet these days, you can collaborate
with someone no matter where they live.
That is what was great with John's part. He knew the songs, he knew
Dive and Float because we had written them together and with Talk
Mister Nation it was just a matter of sending him over a CD and he
sent me over an audio file back with these three great guitar parts,
which pretty much exist as is on the track. The sound quality was
brilliant so that was kind of a new thing to do.
Rhythms Magazine Interview
http://www.rhythms.com.au/backissues/issue00_12/feature.html
Copyright © 2000 Rhythms Magazine. All rights reserved.
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