Jack Ladder

Mon 20th Jun, 2011 in Features

Sydney crooner Jack Ladder admits that it took him a little while to find his feet as the front-man of a band playing live. Ladder has reinvented his sound after each of his previous two records and concentrated more on song writing than touring. But with the release of his third album Hurtsville he has found his confidence on stage and a sound he wants to let reverberate a little longer.

“I sort of changed things around a lot after Love Is Gone and didn’t play anything like what the record sounded like,” Ladder explains, “Then we sort of deconstructed the band and reinvented all the songs and started playing new things and devolved into, sort of, nothing and now we’ve started again.”

“I actually do quite enjoy playing live now. I think I just had to find a format that worked for me. I think at that point [when I didn’t enjoy playing live] I hadn’t really figured out how to do it and I was just focused on writing songs. There are so many factors when you play live that can go wrong that I shied away from it.”

Hurtsville has a much more stripped-back balladeer sound than Ladder’s second album, which had its rockabilly moments. And unlike his second album when Ladder fronted a three-piece band of ex-Mercy Arms guitarist Kirin J Callinan, Pivot drummer Laurence Pike and himself on guitar, Ladder has dropped the six-string and enlisted Beau Cassidy from Starky.

“I’ve stopped playing the guitars live, so I have more freedom just to sing,” Ladder says, “which I think is much more interesting. I can focus on just singing rather than trying to deliver a song while playing guitar. I’m not a particularly strong guitar player and the music now has a particular metronome and you have to be on top of it, otherwise it all falls apart, so I’ve got other people who can just play the guitars.”

Ladder has often been described as a Nick Cave understudy and had his music compared to Joy Division by critics looking for other moody, male singer-songwriters with a deep voice to compare him to. But his sound is much more in the land of genre-benders like Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, or Reed’s former band mate in The Velvet Underground John Cale.

Ladder explains that his tastes ranged from those influences just mentioned to ‘60s girl groups like The Ronettes and Shangri-Las. His tone became most passionate, though, when talking about pre-punks Television and how the ‘70s New York scene had influenced his new sound.

“I love all that stuff that came out of ‘70s New York that wasn’t really punk,” he says. “It has got this free-jazz element to it that’s really important to what I do. It’s about open structures, in a way. The music is very structured to a point but there’s a freedom to the structures and melodically it’s quite sparse. It’s not like pop bands playing pop songs where you have to play certain notes and, melody to a certain rhythm.”

One of the reasons Ladder was not an enthusiastic live performer after the previous two albums was his focus on changing the sound, rather than playing the albums to an expecting audience. But now he has settled on a sound he is content to stick with for a while: “We’re trying to keep it as straight as possible and just play the record because I think that’s a really interesting concept that I’ve never actually attempted before. Because the record is quite complex, it’s a challenge. It’s a bad expression but it’s about creating some kind of energy; it’s about big emotions and releasing Hurtsville, you really have to be inside the music.”

By the sound of his well-chosen words, audiences can expect to be taken on a dark and emotive journey. “I think the music is about atmospheres and it’s not seven-minute song built for radio or festival singalongs, it’s, you know, we’re trying to create our own little world to climb up into.’’