Interviews... The Drones and Jamie Cullum

These stories are ones I wrote for SMH Metro, thanks to Alex, who is practically sponsoring me at the moment.
The first one is with Gareth from The Drones, a psychadelic alt-blues outfit that recently won the first-ever Australian Music Prize (a band that music know-it-all Matt Reekie was onto years ago). He told us so.
The second one is Jamie Cullum, an English jazz musician, who is probably my mum's idea of the perfect man.

They're kinda long and I won't be offended if you don't read them...

THE DRONES
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Gareth Liddiard, the Drones’ front man/guitarist is bemused by all the attention his band has received since winning the inaugural Australian Music Prize (AMP) earlier this month.

“There’s some weird shit going on,” he says. “Like, we did Good Morning Australia, actually I think it was the Today show. That was pretty weird; we got interviewed by Richard Wilkins. And our guitar player is doing an interview with Andrew G. Dealing with people like that is a bit strange. I don’t know about Andrew, but I mean Richard Wilkins was nice enough.”

But wait, there’s an appearance on Rove, too.

“We’ve never ever ever expected or wanted or anything like that. It’s not really our bag; you know what I mean? It’s like you’re throwing shit at a wall and seeing if it sticks, you know, or if it’s the wrong wall.”

The Drones, whose sound Liddiard describes as “a by-product of punk with country music underneath everything and some blues… with a kind of weird psychedelic lazy edge” are worlds away from the pop-drenched charts. The biggest gig that the album-of-the-year winners have played in Sydney to date has been the Annandale Hotel, which can squeeze in about 400 at best.

“It’s very different to the Melbourne thing. I mean down here, they just kind of soak it all up. Whether they get it or not is a different story. Our biggest crowds are in Melbourne but it’s kinda weird, you look down in the front row and see a 17-year-old girl in a Quiksilver T-shirt just bopping away. Some 40-year-old alcoholic maniac, that’s more of the norm for us. So we’ll have to wait and see what happens in old Sydney town this time round.”

Their winning album, Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By, was actually recorded over three years ago now but some label hassles meant the band had to save up to buy it back off their record company. Their new album is already finished and is due out later this year. After their national tour in April, the band are heading back over to Europe where they’ve just spent the last six months touring. Liddiard says that the $25,000 cash injection from the AMP came just at the right time.

“The last four shows before we won that AMP thing, the shows would end because our guitars would break down. And it was you know, out with the soldering irons and fix them up then out for another gig and you know, that gig would end because the guitars would break down again.

“It’s a fucking good thing [the AMP], because it gives you the one thing every band wants, which is money. We’re running a small business. If you were running a newsagent or a record store or anything like that, you’d want the same thing; you’d want money, you wouldn’t want some bloody perspex little thing or statue you know, like the ARIAs.”

Now all Liddiard needs, he reckons, is for his voice to hold out on tour.
“I didn’t have a single problem with it when we’re away and someone asked me about it after about four months in, ‘How does your voice cope?’ and I was like, ‘Fuck I haven’t really thought about that’. It’s got me how it hasn’t packed up and just completely died. If there was a house fire, the only thing left… if I was burnt to death you’d probably find my Adam’s apple somewhere among the ashes. Everything else would be gone.”

Liddiard isn’t too precious about his voice. He smokes, drinks, and doesn’t believe in warming up before gigs, either.
“The reason I don’t do them [vocal exercises]” he says, “is that it can really kill the vibe in a dressing room. I was playing with Dan Kelly and the Alpha Males once and we were playing with The Whitlams. Tim Freedman was doing all that shit backstage, while we were all smoking and drinking. And it has a strange effect on people who take less care of their body. It makes you feel bad.”

ENDS

JAMIE CULLUM
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UK singer-pianist Jamie Cullum’s been called many things since his album, Twentysomething, a collection of jazz standards and cool covers, made him a household name. The British press refer to him as the Beckham of Jazz”, an allusion to the one-million-pound record contract he signed with Universal Jazz in 2003 (remarkably high for a virtually unheard of jazz musician just out of uni). Then there’s the catchy “Sinatra in Sneakers”, a tag that spread worldwide along with his record sales (he’s known as Sinatra de Ténis* in Brazil). Lately, Cullum’s been referred to the “Jazz Hobbit”, a seemingly unkind slur at his five-foot-five stature but one he laughs off because he says any resemblance he bears to Lord of the Rings’ Elijah Wood can only be taken as a compliment.

But it’s the Beckham of Jazz tag he’s been unable to shake. It’s a name, the 26-year-old says, “I never understood in the first place. I never really got to the root of that one and I find myself having to laugh at that one on the basis that I’m not really sure how to respond to it. But you know, these things that start off at the beginning of your career really do… wherever you go and whatever you do… You know I could go off and assassinate some crazy terrorist and I’d still get called the Beckham of Jazz.”

If Cullum could some himself up in a neat little phrase, how would he do it then?
“It’s the same thing that it’s always been for me and that’s music nerd. I am a music nerd,” he says firmly. “I’m not a Sinatra head, I’m not a Nirvana head, I listen to everything. I mean in the sense that I listen to more than what’s going on the charts. I listen to the most bizarre, underground nose-blowing music. I listen to so much different music. Music does give you the chance to experience so many different feelings. I think that music nerd so much covers it for me.”

Last August, the music nerd released his fourth album (or perhaps more tellingly, his second major label one), Catching Tales, an album that for the most part ditched the covers and comprises of original songs that he wrote along with his brother, Ben Cullum, (“my most favourite person in the world”), Ed Harcourt, Dan the Automator and label mate Robbie Williams’s songwriter, Guy Chambers. Since August, he’s been touring and is currently in the US, before making his way to the Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival as well as a couple of solo dates, including Sydney’s State Theatre.

When we speak over the phone, Jamie’s sitting on his tour bus, going through a pile of knick-knacks he’s accumulated during his US tour.

“I’ve got about 50 CDs, an Uma Thurman Kill Bill doll that speaks, books, magazines, pictures, pieces of art that people’ve drawn me, I mean all sorts of things,” he says.

He describes himself as “unfashionably grateful” for all the success he’s had and this thankfulness comes through in everything he says: he’s polite, pleasant, witty and thoroughly, well… English. Of his current tour, he says it’s been, “like a bizarre gentle breeze. It’s [touring] just kind of a pleasant kind of monotony in some ways. Going through all this stuff [memorabilia] is great fun; it reminds you of all the great things you’ve left behind you. There’s been so many crazy parts to it,” he says, laughing. “It’s been an inimitable experience, if I can put it in that way.”

Inimitable is a great word, I say, and it’s a word you suspect Cullum aspires to musically. Cullum’s style is best described as crossover jazz, which draws equal criticism from the jazz purists as it does from the cool kids for being well, uncool (despite his gorgeous covers of songs like (Radiohead’s “High and Dry” and Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary”).

Despite his critics, Cullum is undeniably popular. Twentysomething sold about a million copies in the UK (the highest selling jazz album ever), topped the jazz charts in the US and made it to number two on the ARIA charts here in Australia.

Live, Cullum is as likely to leap over his piano or stand on top of it than to actually sit at it and sing. He never uses a set list, and says that’s how he and his rat pack, bass player Geoff Gascoyne and drummer Sebastiaan de Krom, keep their shows fresh.

“That’s why jazz is the best kind of music for me, because you can reinvent tunes rather than trying to play them the same way you did the night before. That’s why it keeps it fantastically interesting for me to do it. Most of the time I play pop and rock and things like that but essentially you know I’m working with brilliant jazz musicians and jazz doesn’t have an off switch, so I’m always thinking after I write something, “Alright, how we can possibly change this?”

On tour, the things he misses most are friends and family and says “Domestic life takes on this new kind of glamour; you know, the thought of washing your own clothes and cooking your own food things like that. But apart from that, just friends and family, going down the pub and having a pint.”

I ask if he’s still with his girlfriend, Isabella, a 27-year-old Brazilian lawyer, who Cullum has been dating for three years.

“By complete miracle, I actually am,” he says sounding surprised. So how do the couple cope with Cullum being on the road all year?

“Just by lots of honesty and lots of patience really,” Cullum says. “I’ve had a couple of crises where I’ve thought, you meet someone somewhere and you think ‘Oh, I don’t want to be doing this; I want to be doing that’ and things like that to a certain degree but when you meet someone [like Isabella] and she’s quite a unique person and I don’t think I’ll ever meet anyone like that in my lifetime… I consider myself a lucky boy. She’s quite special, really.”

So she’s the one, yes. Can we expect wedding bells anytime soon?
“No, definitely no plans for that at all; it’s as far from my mind as you could imagine,” he says with mock horror. “But don’t tell her that. I hope you can communicate that nicely in your inimitable manner.”

I laugh, thanking him for using the word “inimitable” twice in the same interview. “That’s alright, sweetheart,” he says, “I knew you liked it the first time.”

ENDS