Sitting in the courtyard of a Lygon St Cellar, I recently caught up with Glenn Richards to talk about his new record. For his string of achievements, Richards is humble and far more softly spoken than you’d expect. We talked about the working process, unhinging difficult themes on the new record and why the last Augie March album was the one that slipped through the cracks.
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How are you feeling about the new album?
Excited. The new record won’t be a huge surprise to people when they hear it. They’ll hear the different musicianship. It’s certainly a lot rougher than the Augie records, we did it as quickly as we possibly could. There’s some days when you do what you gotta do, but some days when you deviate. Melbourne winters, they sometimes get you down. I have my moods, but I’ve been doing it for quite a while.
Could you call yourself a veteran then?
When I was in Augie, I got called a veteran seven years in. Another five years into that, do I qualify as an old man?
Was this record always on the back of your mind?
My brother Chris and I always talked about doing something, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything like that without including Dan (Luscombe). And of course we’ve done lots of things musically together but never actually made a record. He’s got a strong mind. He’s incredibly creative and an incredibly adept person, so he was the number one on my list. And Mike Noga; although he’s a drummer it’s such a small branch of the other things he does. He’s another really talented, really self effacing sort of person. I love those guys. I couldn’t think of a better group.
Do you think this record could have been different, had you released it earlier?
Thats always a hard one, you never really realise how exhausted you are after the last touring cycle, again you could have a good day and decide, now’s the time to start. But if you’re going to write anything real, you can’t expect that you’ve filtered everything that’s happened for the last three years until it’s ready.
If you work hard, the songs will come. But you’ve gotta live as well. Touring is not really living.
You mentioned you recorded in a warehouse the ‘size of a skating rink’? Where do you find these kind of places?
It’s not too far from here, it’s in Fairfield. My sisters former husband, a good friend of my brother and I went to see this place a couple of years ago and we couldn’t believe our eyes. Its immense. You walk into this massive room, and beyond it is another room that’s half the width but the same length. It used to be a clothing manufacturing warehouse and so many of these places have moved offshore that these places are virtually empty. So he saw a lot of potential in it and signed a three year lease. It was a good old fashioned way to make a record.
Tell me about the song ‘Barfly Prometheus’ on the record.
I was just thinking about how Prometheus stole fire from Hades and gave it to human beings, a power to help them and make them closer to the gods. For that he was punished by being chained to a cliff top and everyday a vulture would come down and eat his liver. In the morning he’d be born again with his liver intact and have to go through this whole thing for eternity.
But it made me think of heavy drinking. People who are chained to addiction and you know, every morning it starts again.
Have people close to you gone through that?
Plenty of people. And it’s something cautionary as well, I’ve had plenty of people like that in extended family. And I think if you look far enough into any family.
But I figured its a light metaphor of touching on the subject. There are lots of songs about addiction of the sort, I thought I’d make it more…ethical.
Do the other songs on the record go down that literary path?
Probably out of all the songs on that record, that’s the only one that’s that way. And if you do too many of them you run the risk of people thinking…you’re a wanker.
Name of the album?
It’s either Glim Jack or Torpor and Spleen.
What’s Torpor and Spleen?
Torpor is closely related to ennui, tedium, a body and moral slowness. I guess with that song I was thinking about what’s happening to a lot of kids the last couple of generations, this increase of violence for the sake of violence and fun. And spleen – being our way to express ourselves and our anger.
I also related to that, between records you do experience a malaise of sorts. When you have a lot of free time away from the road, you can develop all sorts of bad habits and thinking. You get angry about a lot of things you shouldn’t. So on my side of things, torpor and spleen are two things you need to battle I guess.
Your wikipedia bio says you hate cats.
What? Don’t read that, someone else wrote that.
It says you ‘dislike cats, photos of cats, and all versions of reality in which cats exist’.
I adore cats. I had a dream about cats a few nights ago. We lost a cat we had for 13 years, that was heartbreaking.
Hear that story on the news about ‘cat dumper’?
It’s apparently not a crime! British Police said they can’t charge her with anything.
There was a bit of a mixed reaction with the last Augie record. How did you respond to that?
It doesn’t worry me if it’s genuine criticism, but when people say I hate cats, that worries me.
If it’s coming from respective sources, then I’ll always listen to it. But with that one I think I agree to an extent of a lot of what was written. it was a very streamline process, it wasn’t a music making process. Two entities met at the wrong time. We were all pretty zonked at that time and didn’t have the fortitude to go ‘alright, this is not going well, but should we do something else?’
At the same time I do think that lot of bands would have been happy to have made a record like that. It’s just the one that slipped through the cracks. Production wise I think it was most the most contemporary sounding one. Not what we would have liked, but I think it was the one the record company was hoping for, a slicker version, which is always dangerous talk. So I’m glad that with this new record we’ve been able to address that there.
Have you seen any major changes in the industry?
I’ve seen cycles in terms of what works for people musically. What is popular changes quite rapidly.
Do you think it’s harder to release something today when everyone has such short attention spans?
I prefer the riding out on a bike…with old cassette tapes. But it’s something you gotta do…it’s just not as enjoyable.
And the involvement factor?
It’s a bit of a worry (new media)… it takes quite a lot of fun out of things. A lot of things were left to chance when I was first starting out, and there was mystery about bands. Whereas now you gotta have everything on the table, and people know everything about you. And the thing is, that if you don’t do these things, you fall behind.
Do you think that’s why bands don’t have as much longetivity these days?
Absolutely. It’s why you cant pay too much attention to what’s going on at the time. You gotta just release your own record.
You said in an interview with M&N last year that you were growing ‘bored and tired’ with Augie.
Everyone’s dissatisfaction stemmed from my own to an extent. I should have done this kind of thing prior to the last record instead of going through with one more. I mean everybody’s got their own thing to say about that. Maybe theres a bit of residual anger there but I’d hope theres another record or two left in us.
Speaking of persistence, what was it like pushing a giant boulder around in the Cold Acre vid?
Going up the hill? That’s the one that destroyed us. This thing, given any momentum coming down would go crazy. Pushing it up was really heavy, coz it’s picking up rocks and sand so our hands are getting grazed. There’s this one shot at the end where Kiernan’s bending over, and it was just after he’s thrown up after sheer exhaustion. He had a glass of water and just went ‘bluuurghhhh’…
So you could say music is as much of a physical toil as much as an emotional one?
Absolutely. Ask anyone to push a boulder up a hill. Or even do a headline set, and not come off sweating. It’s probably the only kind of physical activity I do…
Are you going to go on the road with the new record?
Yep, we’ll have a few shows this year but next year we’ll do some proper touring.
It’s good you’ve all been going for such a long time, well you…
– yeah, just a cranky old dude. Maybe that’s cool now…
He’s still kickin.
If you have success early, being able to follow it up is the hard one. It’s easy to go, ‘well, it’s fun while it lasted!’
But the reality is, you gotta keep working really, really hard.
It takes a lot of persistence to keep going.
Yeah, and no guarantees.
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The album is expected to be released in November.
Glenn Richards will be playing at the Who The Hell/Sony party with Georgia Fair tomorrow night as part of BIG SOUND 2010.
September 7, 2010 6:33 pm
Good interview. I hate cats, just in case you were interested.