Speaking With Ben's SensitiveSide

Fri 25th Nov, 2005 in Features

It’s almost dinner time as Ben Corbett’s phone rings. I’m snaring one of Australia’s most charismatic frontmen just before chow-time, so I’m expecting that this might be a short, but sweet, interview about their new long-player, The Sober Light Of Day. How wrong I was. Over the next hour or so – despite a prepared repast awaiting him – the leader of Brisbane quartet Gentle Ben And His Sensitive Side shared anecdotes and theories, and generally underscored the positive reviews that follow him. 

For those who came in late, though, Ben recaps the genesis of Gentle Ben And His Sensitive Side.

“We got together I think about four years ago,” he begins. “I’m a bit dizzy on dates, but it was sort of an opportunity that arose because I was bemoaning the lack of any kind of casual dirty 3am-kind of country-tinged bands in Brisbane. And so to Nick [Naughton], our drummer, you know, I was saying that I really wanted to form one, so he said ‘Let’s form one!’ And I was like ‘Great. Who’re we going to get?’ and he said ‘We’ll, we’ll get my band,’ which was – well, it’s the other guys in The Sensitive Side [Dylan McCormack and Trevor Ludlow, as well as Naughton] who at that time were called The Skippy Showband. And they played quirky prog-pop, so I was like ‘They’re great and all, but I don’t see how that’s gonna work.’

“As it turned out, it worked too well, and ended up not being able to play covers too well as we sort of fell into our own style. It just went from there. We started writing originals and were scaring ourselves with the way it was sounding. You know, not necessarily that it was any good – we were just scaring ourselves!

“I think because we were – both me and the rest of the boys – incorporating elements into the rest of our music that we’d never really thought we would. So it came out quite nicely in the end.”

Given that the band’s 3am despair territory has previously been explored by Ben (and brother Geoff) in a Brisbane event called Sad Hour – something that, it’s been suggested, Sensitive Side gigs are a live version of – it’s worth clearing up for non-locals exactly what that event was. Ben explains:

“Sad Hour was never that popular, unfortunately. It was just me and Geoff playing songs we liked and nobody ever came. It was a great concept, but the only problem we ever had was people coming in and saying ‘That’s not sad! You’ve gotta have this song,’ We had Grant McLennan come in and say ‘You’ve got to play this!’ and we were like ‘Grant, give us a break!’ I mean, he had a good point. He was requesting Life On Mars by Bowie and we didn’t have it. But we’re not international pop stars. We don’t have big record collections. But Geoff used to always start his song by playing that [Pretenders song] I’ll Stand By You song that they have on the RSPCA ads, as it makes him think of sad monkeys. That’s sad.”

Is Gentle Ben and His Sensitive Side a live, vital variant on the Sad Hour theme? Ben agrees.

“To an extent, yeah. Definitely with this new album, we’ve branched out further in either direction from the first one did. There’s songs that’re quieter, sadder, as if you’ve been up all night and the sun is crashing down on your head as it rises. And there’s also the kind of teeth gnashing, cutting loose kind of tunes taken further up the scale. So we’ve taken it both ways. But that’s a definite sort of vibe that we go for – that music that’s sort of drifted in somewhere, that’s in the air. Lost radio’s a really good term to describe it, not least because we’re all big AM radio fans. A lot of it is shit, but you’re not going to hear Burt Bacharach or Nancy and Lee on any other stations. Most stations have their moments, but I like the lottery feel you get from turning on AM radio.”

Was it important to the singer to produce a group that was radically different for the band he was initially known for, the rocket-fuelled Sixfthick?

“Definitely. Doing something markedly different to Sixfthick was important to me. You know, it’s the kind of music I’ve been listening to for a long time, you know – influences that’ve come to the fore with The Sensitive Side. It was important to do something different, or there wasn’t a lot of point in doing it. It sort of fell into place naturally, the sound. It didn’t fall into the place that I expected, but things rarely do, and I’m kinda glad it happened that way.”

There’s also a sort of grandeur implied in the name – it brings together the heyday of crooners and the concept of a leader/gang power system.

“That was the idea,” says Ben. “The joke name. It was a name I came up with after a Hick show, you know, one night, and was just riffing on it and thinking ‘I’m so funny’ [laughs] because of the irony of it all. Oh, the delicious irony! Yeah, it’s just one of those things that stuck and now we can’t get rid of it. It’d be nice to have one of those names that was shorter and easier to say, sometimes, but you know, I kinda don’t mind it. It gives people who’ve seen the ‘Hick the idea that it’s something different, and it gives people who’ve come along for the first time the idea that it’ll be very nice and quiet… but it can kinda turn on its heel and kick you in the face occasionally. Which is a nice thing to have up your sleeve. It’s nice to have something on the boil.

Of course, the most striking thing about Gentle Ben Corbett is the ferocity with which he throws himself into the role of frontman. Is there some kind of character that’s donned for these purposes, or is the windmilling crooner that crowds see 100% Corbett?

“It’s a question I get asked a bit, but I’m yet to come up with a reasonable answer,” says the singer. “There’s elements of theatre which is completely natural, as you’re up on a stage, but that’s not to say that you’re not bringing a lot of yourself up there as well. It is, I think, what, if I’m doing it properly, makes it work.

“You can just get up there and go through the motions, but it’s going to be fairly obvious to any kind of astute audience, and fairly obvious to yourself as well that you’re not really doing it from the right motivation. It’s not coming from the right place. It’s important. I’ve always liked singers and performers who, when they’re doing their thing, be it playing guitar or singing or bass or whatever, watching them or listening them, it’s like there’s a piece of them being torn out – like you can actually feel that this is maybe hurting them a bit to bring it out. Sometimes, I think that if it doesn’t hurt a bit, you’re not doing it right.

“People who kinda cruise through things generally don’t interest me all that much. I like the struggle. I that people don’t, generally, get it right all the time. Lately I’ve been kind of – not obsessed – but I’m interested in the idea of performers who’re considered past their prime. I’m really interested in that concept. I find that sort of struggle a lot more interesting than watching young guns go out and blaze every night.

“It’s like the whole Elvis in his final years thing. Quite a lot of – there was a real edge to a lot of what he was doing, and a lot of people didn’t recognize that edge, which made it all the more edgy. In retrospect, you can see that the guy was close to death, and if you look at those performances, it’s like ‘Yeesh!’ And people just thought it was cheesy, you know? That’s not to say that I want to go see someone that’s shit. But somehow you’ve got to find a way to have some sort of edge or you’re really not communicating properly with the audience, or being honest with yourself. There’s lots of people in the world who entertain for a paycheque, but that’s not the point for me, really. Entertainment is only a small part of what you can do when you’ve got people’s attention.”

The Corbett brothers are performers who’ve not found it hard to get the attention of punters. But how different are Sixfthick and Gentle Ben in terms of how they’re approached? Is there a fundamental difference to playing in the two? Ben explains.

“There’s a different kind of struggle going on in both of those, I suppose. With the Hick, it’s like constant ‘Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going!’ – you get it into your head that you have to get amped up to this incredible level. This is me, anyway – I don’t know about the rest of the guys. They’ve probably got to concentrate more on what they’re doing! But I kind of psych myself up to this point that’s just hyper for the whole hour or whatever we’re onstage for. It’s just ‘Go go go!’ and there’s not a lot of time for downtime. That said, there’s a lot more to the Hicks than just goin’ off, and I always like it when people recognize that, that there’s dramatic tension that goes on within the songs and performance.

“But that compared to The Sensitive Side? There’s a lot more dramatic tension in what [The Sensitive Side is] doing. We’re not so much bludgeoning people with what we’re doing – we’re trying to have them wrapped around our little finger, in the palm of our hand – all those crappy metaphors. A lot of the time, the way I know that a Sensitive Side show is working is when we do the really quiet songs and you can’t hear anyone talking. That’s when you go ‘Right, this is working.’ There’s no cheering, there’s no catcalls – everyone’s just shut up. It’s a great feeling, actually.”

It’s an approach that seems to encourage division, however. People either like the band or they hate them. This is something that doesn’t seem to phase Corbett, though.

“I think that’s got to be a good thing. I’m all about dividing audiences. I’m quite happy for people to decide that what we do is not for them, that’s fine. I think that’s part of putting yourself out there. It’s not a performance that you can just sit back, have a few drinks and leave on in the background where you don’t have to think about it or worry about it. You can’t just go home and forget about it. At least, that’s what I hope it is. There’s not a lot of fence sitting with either of my bands, which is a great thing. I quite like that.”

Is the reaction that the band receives due to the fact that there’s a paucity of artists exploring the same areas?

“Yeah,” agrees Ben. “I don’t know of any bands in Australia who’re doing quite what we do. The Devastations are probably closest as far as being musical kindred spirits, but they’re a very different band to what we are. We’re a lot more irreverent in the way we treat our music and our influences… and we’re not as good musicians as those guys. [laughs] We’re kinda flailing around with our weird elements. Plus, Dylan, our guitarist, writes the music and I write the lyrics, and we all band it together in the practice room. He’s got this sort of musical diarrhoea, we call it. He’s constantly bringing ideas in, and you only have to watch him play live to realize that.”

The guitarist’s invention is something that is important to Corbett; he sparks up while describing his playing, his voice full of enthusiasm.

“He’ll never play a song the same way twice. He’s a great – great – improvisational player. Not in any jazz sense, but just in the way that he can come up with things that are fantastic. You ask him where it comes from, and he just stands there. It sounds so rehearsed! It’s a great thing. So he’s constantly throwing new ideas into the musical melting pot, often within the same song.

At the same time, we’re trying to write songs that’re very well structured, but not boringly structured – verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, verse, chorus, end – but we’re trying to write songs that we can be proud of as songs. We’re very influenced by great songs and great songwriters, so a lot of what we try to do with our sound is to get the idea of a two-minute epic. We’re trying to create a song that sounds like it could be played with a full orchestra, and gives you the same feeling as hearing something by Bacharach, or something that’s a Phil Spector “Wall Of Sound” production, even though it’s just guitar, bass, drums and vocals. We really have to play with dynamics within the songs to pull that off, and that’s why there’s a lot of drama, a lot of tension and release. “

The increasing role of tension in the band’s work is easily apparent on The Sober Light Of Day. What does Corbett attribute this to?

“I think we’ve really figured out where we fit in.” he says, simply. “By the time The Beginning Of The End was released, we’re become such a different band from the one on that record, because it was sitting around for six months before we released it. It was recorded over about six months, and we’re a pretty different band from then. We’ve figured out how to work around each other.

“The songs are probably written, generally, faster, than they were for Beginning Of The End. There’s also a lot of things that were put together in the studio. Summertime is a notable exception – that song’s been around for a long time. We actually tried to record it earlier but never got the version until now.  Then, we’ll have a song like Plaza De Armas, the last song of the new record, where the actual recording of that is the first time we’d ever played it. That’s not the first time we’d tried to record it – it was the first time we’d tried to play it together.

“What happened was that Dylan was in the studio when Trevor was doing some bass overdubs or something, and he was playing this riff on an acoustic guitar. I had a Dictaphone, went away and wrote some lyrics and we went ‘OK, we’ll just go in, set up a microphone, and try to do this!’ We did it first take, and you can hear fuck-ups in it. I hit wrong notes, but I really like it. Out of everything, it’s the one I can actually listen to, as I don’t like listening to my stuff. It’s because it was so spontaneous. I really enjoy the vibe it creates. I’m sure I’ll get over it.

“We added the bass and drums later, which was kind of funny – watching Trevor, and we actually had Craig Williamson, who used to play drums in Dan Brodie’s band, he happened to be there and we roped him into playing drums on it. They had to do their bits after we’d done ours, which, if anyone knows anything about how recording goes, is sort of in reverse. They both did it second take, I think. It took them two takes to get through it. When Trevor was recording the bass, he didn’t know the song – Dylan was just calling out the chords and he was playing it.  So you know, I like that kind of stuff. Apparently Bob Dylan would do that sort of thing – not let the bands rehearse, then make them record. It gives it that sort of looseness. It’s kind of a bleak, heartbroken feel to it. Vulnerable.”

Certainly, there’s a real feeling that the music and the lyrics on the album are more in sync than ever before. For this, though, Corbett is reluctant to take sole credit.

“That’s Dylan and his great talent for listening to what’s going on with the rest of the band,” he says. “He’s llistening to what’s going on vocally, and knowing as much what to play, and when. I give him credit for that, for a lot of the colour of the album.

“That’s also us getting used to each other as players. Of getting ready and knowing once again how not to overplay. And being able to much around on things a bit more. As well as just songwriting, this is probably getting conducive to putting in those elements and not having to stress about them. They kind of happen more naturally ‘cos we know what kind of music we’re trying to make.”

Given the AM-radio feel of the album, I’m intrigued to see what sort of influences Ben sees as being clear on the album. It seems, though, that an influence many people may have picked up was more an example of synchronicity than anything else.

“I’m at a bit of a loss, actually. I can pick my own influences, but I don’t really know what’s going on with the other guys,” he says.

“One of the interesting things is that with the last album, we got a lot of comparisons to Pulp. And I’d never even heard Pulp. So I was getting heaps of Jarvis Cocker comparisons, and I really didn’t know any of their stuff. I kind of knew a little of Common People, but I don’t listen to radio apart from AM, so I was lost to it.

“The guys, when we were on tour one time, they said ‘You’ve never heard This Is Hardcore?’ and they put it on in the van. I was like ‘This is so good!’ so I can understand where they’re coming from with that stuff, but I was kinda amused that I was getting compared to this singer and frontman who I’d never seen or heard. But then, I’ve seen some DVD stuff of theirs now, and they’re great. He’s a great frontman, and I can see why people pick the similarities, but it’s a funny kind of thing.”

Certainly, I offer, the sort of kitchen-sink observation that’s apparent in songs like Carpark are very similar to what bands like Pulp are examining through song.

“That’s an interesting thing,” says Ben. “I wouldn’t have picked Pulp from that particular song, but it’s great if you do. I like it when people can grasp other things that I may not have realised were there. I don’t know what I was trying to do with that song, exactly. Essentially, it’s a love song, but it’s from the point of view from a character that doesn’t know how to express himself, except in a horrifying act of violence. So I don’t really know where that one came from. But I’m quite happy how it turned out.”

The mystery that’s touched on here seems to be important to the band’s writing, however. The idea of occlusion, of hiding the truth from the listener, is something that features largely throughout the tunes on the album – most obviously in tunes such as The Shimmering Hand or Filling In The Ditch. How important is this idea to the music?

“I think it’s very important. I’m a huge fan of being able to say a lot with two or three verses, of being able to tell this whole story. A lot of that comes from being able to tell the whole story by hinting at things to say a lot. Three verses are enough, sometimes.

“Something like Filling In The Ditch is pretty personal, is a serious kind of thing, like Summertime is. I think, to me, that’s funny. A lot of the songs I write, when I first write them, I think they’re coming from humour. But it’s not to say we’re so wacky, some kind of wacky band.”

Of course, Summertime could be seen as the band’s offering in the canon of lonesome cowboy songs. It’s an idea that appeals to the singer.

“Well, that’s essentially where it’s coming from,” he says. “Lyrically, I was trying to write a Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa kind of song, and it’s got a lot of the same elements. It’s got the highway, it’s got the bar, you know. And it’s got this burnt-out sort of character. To that extent, it’s a bit of a cliché, but sometimes I enjoy working with clichés. I enjoy skewing them a little, having fun with that. That was really my attempt to write a Burt Bacharach or Hal David epic love song.

“It doesn’t get resolved. I don’t think that I necessarily have to resolve things in songs. There can be narrative in them, but it’s not necessarily a straight narrative where you say ‘Here it is, here’s the characters, here’s how it ends’. There’s a lot more that’s left open to interpretation. That’s quite deliberate. It’s quite deliberate, and it helps to add that air of tension to the music, I think.

“One of the reasons I ended the album on a very quiet song was that I liked the idea of people listening to an album, listening to the whole thing as a work, and then they hope that the last song will leave them with something, but it might not leave them with a feeling that everything’s finished and OK. I’d rather leave them a bit unsettled.”

Unsettling is a term that could certainly be applied to the content of many of the band’s songs. There’s a fixation on the seamy, on the downcast and fucked-up that’s pretty hard to ignore. Is it the case that this side of life is merely being examined in opposition to much of the music that’s out there, or is it a more personal examination? Corbett offers an explanation:

“I think it’s just that those are the things that interest me, when it comes down to it,” he says. “There’s drama in those things, so it makes sense to write music or lyrics about them. A lot of the songs on this one were kinda drawn from the place where I work, in the Valley. It opens very early – I get to work at 5am – so you come in and you see things from almost the wrong side of the night. You’re dead sober, and there’s all these 18 year-olds pilling or freaking out. There might be blood on the pavement out the front. And you watch all this stuff with this very sober, detached eye, which is where the album title is coming from.

“There’s actually a couple of songs that didn’t make it on to the album which kind of illustrate that stuff even better. There’s one called Bird In A Bottle and another called 5AM Zombie Hospitality Blues. Which is pretty much where that’s coming from. They may resurface in some other form. But that’s basically where a lot of the inspiration, if not for the lyrics directly, then at least the feeling of the album. And, I think, with a lot of the songs that there’s this resigned exhaustion to them, and that’s partially drawn from the sort of late, late nights doing music and early mornings doing work, and getting both things into your life.

“Also, when we recorded, we were rolling off quite a lot of work and touring, and then went straight into the studio to do 14-hour days. Not a lot of sleep. Lots of cigarettes and whiskey and whatever. Kind of locked in the one room, you know, non-stop, for quite a long time every day, with nothing else to do but listen to yourselves over and over. It’s a good thing – if forces you to buckle down, I think, or go quietly insane.”

But for all the stress in the creation and all the gloom in the tunes, there’s not a feeling of unremitting bleakness in the band’s work. It’s something they’ve worked on, says the frontman.

“I like the idea that there’s a ray of light. I actually think that The Beginning Of The End didn’t have a lot of rays of sunshine. This one has a couple. They’re tempered by circumstance, though. There’s a couple of songs that bring in elements that say that maybe you can come through the other side, maybe you can be all right. It’s just in the music – it’s not the way I’m seeing the world or anything.

“I think I realised that if you’re unrelentingly downbeat in the music all the time, it may not be quite as effective. You kind of go on this emotional journey, so it’s good to actually go somewhere.”

One thing’s immediately noticeable about the new album, though – the presence of a radically-reworked Spencer P Jones song, Execution Day, which sees the song being recast as a sort of danger-tinged spy epic. What prompted the band to include it on the disc?

“It’s just one of my favourite songs. I suggested it as a cover to the boys and we mucked around with it, and it mutated over the time we’ve been playing it – ‘cause we’ve been playing it for quite a while – and it developed,” says Ben. “It got quieter and quieter as we kept playing, and the riff kept changing more and more. I don’t think Dylan actually owns a copy of the original, so he kinda forgot how the riff went. So the chords are the same, but it’s a much different result. It just worked out that way. A lot of the Latin percussion came fairly late in the piece, which really tipped it over the edge. I’m quite happy with how it’s turned out. It’s actually Spencer’s acoustic guitar that Dylan’s playing [on the track] which is nice. He loaned it to us for recording, so it’s a nice link. I think our album was recorded on the same desk that the Beasts [of Bourbon] recorded Low Road on.. No-one can confirm it for me, but it’s nice to know.”

Despite the pressure of recording, Ben’s happy with how The Sober Light Of Day turned out.

“Very. Very!” he agrees. “It was a long and weird process, as we mixed it by mail, essentially – we ran out of time when we were down there to finish the mixing, so Loki [Lockwood, producer] would do ten mixes of one song and mail them to us, and we’d have to listen to them and send them back with notes. It went on and on and on and on and we went a bit nuts, listening to ourselves over and over, but in the end it came out beautiful. And it’s a huge credit to Loki for putting up with us through the process.

“It’s a lot closer to the dynamic we achieve live. I think – there’s overdubs on there – that it’s generally more of a live sounding record than our last, so I’m quite happy about that. There’s nothing on it that we can’t pull off, live.”

The live aspect of the band is, of course, its most vital component, so I ask which tunes in the new batch are the best when delivered from a beer-stained focal point.

“I quite like Carpark when it’s working,” says the singer “because those are the hardest ones to do, the quiet, the fragile ones. But when it works, it’s a great kind of feeling. It’s very intimate – you have to draw yourself and the audience in. I quite enjoy that one. Punishment – that’s really fun. Because it just lollops along, and when it gets to the chorus, it’s got this weird descending thing that the vocals do, then it runs back up, then it descends again. It jumps all over the place. I really do enjoy all of it, which sounds like a wank, but I really do.

Given the Pulp references that crop up regularly when the band’s mentioned, it’s hardly surprising that the band are looking towards foreign markets.

“I know there’s been good reviews for the last album overseas, and I know [record label] Spooky’s got some good hook-ups overseas, with bands like Digger & The Pussycats and The Blacklist going over,” says Ben. “It’s a huge plus. I’d love to get something going in Europe. Lots of people have said they’d like what we’re doing, and I’m keen to have a look there. I’ve never been to Europe, either, so it’d be nice. But as far as ambition goes, our ambition is to keep making music in whatever form it falls into. I’ll gladly go to the end of the earth to play to people, as it’s what I want to do.”

Ben was – on a recent trip to Tasmania – subjected to some of the same pugilistic power that infects his songs. What happened there?

“It was just me being an idiot and not being able to walk down the street,” he begins.

“It was one of those situations where you’re walking down the street, and you see guys walking, and you think ‘These guys look like trouble,’ and then they say something to you, just as you’re walking past them. And I turned around and I spat at them. I think I was just a bit overtired, a bit burnt out, and I knew as I was doing it that it was a mistake. So I got punched out, basically.”

Punched out and thrown through a window, it seems.

“I’m not really sure of how that happened. I didn’t actually realise at the time. I got punched square in the nose first time, and went down pissing blood. I got up, and was kinda looking at this guy, thinking I should really try and do something about it, but my brain wasn’t really computing and he punched me in the jaw and I went down again. I thought ‘Right, I’m leaving!’ and walked off down the street.

“Meanwhile, Nick had jumped in and tried to help, and the guys had clocked him a couple of times. Then, we were down the street a little way, and I was pouring blood onto the footpath, and this guy ran up from a Thai takeaway that it’d happened outside of, and told us to come inside as he’d called the police. When we got inside, I saw the front window was broken, and asked him how it happened, and he said I’d gone through it. I didn’t go crashing through it, Hollywood-style – the bottom section was smashed. I didn’t get cut, but I had quite a swollen face for a while. Two black eyes, but I didn’t break my nose, so that’s good. It’s just bent, not broken.”

You can hear Ben smiling down the phone. I ask him if it felt like he was a character in one of his own tunes.

“Very much so,” he laughs. “It was Help Me Make It Down The Street. And I wasn’t even drunk. We were on our way to the show – that was the worst part. I felt like such a fool, as if I’d kept my mouth shut and kept walking, we could’ve played the show. You’ve got to think – what’s more important? Mouthing off to fuckwits or playing rock and roll? So yeah, didn’t get to play the show as I was in the emergency room getting my brain scanned. But yeah, all good. All fun. I looked like a panda for a week or so, but I was back at work on the following Monday, and playing shows the next weekend.”

That’s dedication.

And with that, dinner will wait no longer. Ben rings off, leaving nothing but the image of a spotlight and a sharp-dressed soul in his wake.

The Beginning Of The End and The Sober Light Of Day are available now.

You can see Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side here:

Sydney November 25th Hopetoun with The Mares, El Borracho
Sydney November 26th, Pony Records Instore (arvo)
Brisbane December 17th, 4ZZZ  Market Day
Brisbane December 26th, Rics Bar
Brisbane January 20th, Troubadour w/ Spencer P. Jones (Solo)