Gareth Liddiard

Tue 2nd Nov, 2010 in Features

The Drones’ Twitter account lists a solitary comment: ‘myspace is stupid, facebook is worse, but twitter is truly retarded’ and the image of Gareth Liddiard’s hand with a finger extended like Johnny Cash’s at San Quentin Prison. “Our management got that for us’, Liddiard scoffs. “I’m busy doing other things. A plumber doesn’t twitter ‘just fixed Marge’s dunny, can’t wait to fix her plumbing out the back’. Who gives a fuck? He’s busy working. It’s all a bit suspect… when you’ve just gotta tell cunts what you’re doing that’s a borderline personality disorder.”

It’s promotional time for Liddiard’s debut solo album and he’s at the end of a long day of telling cunts what he’s been doing. On a strangely warm mid-week night, he sits with a nearly emptied beer sitting beside a crumpled packed of chips, a pack of loose tobacco and rolling papers in front of him in the back corner of a beer garden crammed with punters. Friends drift over to chat and strangers ask for lights.

Perhaps it’s the night, or the venue, or the beer, but Liddiard is patiently talkative, explaining at length the influences behind his debut solo album The Strange Tourist; his limitations as a singer and writer; why he’s a fan of ‘weird’; the differences between working solo and with the Drones; the closure of the Tote; why he doesn’t want to curate All Tomorrows Parties; and what’s next for him and the band. Perhaps Twitter simply doesn’t work because it’s impossible to limit Liddiard to a mere 140 characters.

The night before he’d opened proceedings at a book reading by the bad-boy of the Booker, Vernon God Little author DBC Pierre. It seems to beg the question – does Liddiard, the author of epic narrative songs, see a future as a novelist? “I write tunes, rhymes and things like that,” he dismissively explains, quashing the idea that he could usurp Nick Cave on the mantle as Australia’s rock muso turned poet/novelist. “It’s a different thing, it’s so different… You can not separate the music from the words. I’m not a poet or a writer or anything. I write songs that’s all there is,” he protests. Surely The Radicalisation of D, which stretches to 16 minutes and nearly 1300 words veers towards short story territory? “Yeah, but it rhymes,” Liddiard deadpans, “It’s not prose by any long shot.”

The epic Radicalisation comes from a similar place to The Drones’ song Jezebel, recounting an apocalyptic tale of “living in a nightmare you can’t bribe your way out of”. “No one else seems to write about anything like that. Even though there’s all this bullshit, terrorism, things like David Hicks,” an exasperated Liddiard declares, “The shit’s everywhere, but why does nobody take it up apart from journalism. It’s fucking bizarre… I just think that its fucken weird that no one else does it. So this is kind of like ‘hello! What are you fucking doing’.”

The album may only feature eight tracks, but it stretches to a generous 64 minutes, which explains the decision to release Blondin Makes an Omlette, the only song from his solo album to the road tested on his solo tour in April, as the lead track. Liddiard can’t remember where he stumbled across the story of the 19th century, daredevil who crossed the Niagra Falls gorge several times in increasingly bizarre fashion (blindfolded; in a sack; carrying his manager; and even sitting down midway to cook and eat an omelette) – “there might have been something in a magazine a little blurb. But it piqued my interest. Just funny, a guy doing that. It’s gutsy. It’s also a weird thing to write a song about.”

Not all of the material is inspired by political chaos or historical oddities, some of the songs, such as High Plains Mailman came from closer to home. “We live in the high plains, me and Fi [Fiona Kitschin, The Drones bassist], and we go up on the mountains – in summer you can go there and there’s no snow and you can spend the day just hiking around and it’s amazing. Near us, Mt Buffalo is like a mountain with a plateau on top like a vast island in the sky. It’s completely different from anything a kilometre down it’s like being in a different country or a different planet”

It may sound romantic and idealistic, but far from staking any pretensions to poetry, Liddiard takes a much more workman like approach to his writing; something that’s no doubt reinforced by his high county neighbours. “My neighbour thinks it’s all a bunch of bullshit. He’s a farmer so he’s interested in the whole behind the scenes kinda stuff in the studio when we’re recording. He’s so down the line and the coolest guy in the world he just goes ‘Oh, it’s great isn’t it, you’re doing this and then you get that, and you write the words’… he listened to Gala Mill and he goes ‘Ah. It’s a bit weird, there’s a lot of bullshit in here’. That’s true, but bullshit can be interesting. Bullshit can be entertaining.”