Shaun Micallef interview

Interview – Shaun Micallef

By his own account, Shaun Micallef is a Renaissance man, particularly when it comes to his bad teeth and appalling personal hygiene. I had a long chat with Micallef about his new comedy album His Generation, his upcoming novel, resurrecting Milo Kerrigan for a New Year’s Eve special, and about the comedy greats who have shaped his work: some of the most cerebral, subversive and silly comedy acts of the past sixty years, including Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore, the Goons, Andy Kaufman, Barry Humphries, Steve Martin and Woody Allen.

Hi Shaun, how are you?

Is that Daryl?

No, it’s Darryn actually.

Oh. I want to speak to Daryl.

I’m covering for Daryl today, Shaun.

Excellent, excellent.

How are you this morning?

Very well. I’m walking round an empty rehearsal room at the moment. A very lonely place, a rehearsal room in which rehearsals aren’t taking place. There’s something philosophical there but I can’t quite work out what it is. Something about not using a room for what it’s designed for.

I noticed this morning that the Age recently published a story that covered pretty much everything up until now.

[laughs]

So there’s not much to talk about.

No. If you’re reluctant to use anything in that story do you want to get something that hasn’t been published before?

What hasn’t been published before? Do you have a scandal for us or something like that?

Sadly I live a very boring life. I’ve spent the last 15 years in showbiz trying to make what is essentially an extraordinarily humdrum existence into something remotely interesting but I can’t manage it, you know. Good luck. Good luck with this interview.

Okay great, thanks. You’re in the middle of rehearsals for a show showcasing the work of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. I know so little of their work it’s embarrassing, so I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about what I’m missing out on.

Okay, how old are you, can I ask, Darryn?

Twenty-five.

All right, the reason you’ve missed out all Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s work is that the BBC, in its wisdom, decided to wipe the tapes. I’ll give you a potted history, is that boring?

Go ahead.

Up until 1961, revues were pretty ordinary. Sketch, song, sketch, song, sketch, song, that sort of stuff. That’s pretty much what it was. It was all very twee and bright and boring essentially. There was no such thing on stage as satire as we might come to know it now. Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett did a review at the Edinburgh Festival that pretty much changed overnight the perception of what a revue was. Every university revue that followed pretty much stole the construction of it. It also started the satire boom in England. Dudley Moore was offered a TV show and he asked Peter Cook to come along as a guest, which turned out to be a two-hander, a little bit like Fry and Laurie. Dudley, like Hugh Laurie, was probably the better actor of the two, and the weird, nonsensical, strange flights of fancy were supplied by Peter Cook, as they were with Stephen Fry.

Anyway, they finished the series and they came to Australia to work up a stage show that they could take to the West End. They toured Australia, playing weird places like the Heidelberg Town Hall. They did the tour, went back to the West End, and it went to Broadway under the new title of Good Evening. It did very well. It ran for a few years, won a Tony Award or two.

During the night hours after that show in New York they ended up doing Derek and Clive, where they’d get pissed and stoned essentially and go into a studio – I think it may have been George Harrison’s studio – and talk filth. Those tapes virally multiplied and eventually there was no stopping it. They thought, well, if everyone’s got copies we may as well release it, so that’s how Derek and Clive were born.

The thing I like about Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s work is that you look at your sketch shows today and it’s very structural and less about character, and this stuff was mainly about character. An average sketch these days would run to three minutes or something like that. Their sketches ran quite long. They weren’t quite as long as one-act plays but they were little vignettes with no punchlines. They had their foot more in the camp of drama rather than sketch comedy.

I remember a skit with John Cleese and Peter Cook from the Secret Policemen’s Ball that was a bit like a bit of absurd theatre, with Peter Cook’s character spurting out non-sequiturs.

Yeah, that was a popular thing for Peter Cook. He found really boring things quite interesting; he found really boring people quite fascinating. So a lot of his work is about incredibly boring people saying ‘interesting facts’. [Peter Cook impersonation:] “Did you know that the intestine is 33 miles long?”

And that the whale is an insect.

Yeah, that’s right. And he’d get ‘mosquito’ mixed up with ‘mosque’ because they were next to each other in the dictionary. That sort of stuff. I like them both, but Peter Cook is a bit of a touchstone for comics particularly in England. He’s sort of the missing link between the Goon show – which any old comic will tell you is a wonderful thing you should listen to, it was recorded in the ’50s and might be a little bit hard to get your head around these days – and [Monty] Python. There’s always a connection in people’s minds between Python and the Goon Show but there’s actually 20 years between them. The missing link is actually Cook and Moore. I think you’ll find that John Cleese holds Peter Cook in very high esteem and he’s not alone in that. Anyway, there’s a potted history for you.

Thank you, very illuminating. It’s an interesting point, them being the missing link between the Goons and Python, because you regularly remind me of the volatile headmaster that John Cleese used to play, and there’s all that wordplay of yours – is there something uniquely British about your own work, do you think?

I think it’s probably a big influence. We didn’t get a television till I was about 10. Most of my time around the house was spent listening to the radio and there was a lot of British comedy on the radio and obviously because of the lack of the visual, most of it was listening to the words and the wordplay, that sort of stuff. I can see that in my own work when I look at myself, especially the early stuff I’d think, gosh, that’s too much like Cleese, or that’s too much like Eric Morecambe from Morecambe and Wise. I’d see a lot of influences there. Later on when we got a television I watched a lot of American slapstick and that sort of permeated through as well. I can do both really, I don’t know whether they sit together with the same character, but I can split off and do slightly more cerebral stuff and then turn around and put on a false nose and fall over, it seems to be just as funny.

Speaking of which, the Age article mentioned that you were going to bring back Milo Kerrigan and Roger Explosion for the New Year’s Eve show?

Roger’s going to be a DVD extra I think. It was a five-minute sketch, it was just too long. It still worked – it was very strange bringing him back after ten years. And Milo was certainly a little less destructive than he was previously. I can’t take those falls anymore.

You’ve become known for your verbal comedy, which is odd to anyone who remembers David McGahn plowing on while the room was upside down. Do you reminisce a little about the slapstick?

I did Newstopia not that long ago and I remember taking a really nice fall in that… but it’s been a couple of years, yeah. And also I’m nearly 47 now and I do hurt myself on these things. I actually took a fall on Generation in the last episode. They were chucking snowballs at me and I did slip and fracture my elbow, thanks to Josh Thomas hitting it right in my ear. It takes me a lot longer to recover now, so there’s no way I could do those tilted room sketches anymore. We used to do one take, and the director would say “Have you got another one in you?” I’d say “I reckon I could do another one in an hour.” We could never wait that long so it was always the first take we used. Have you seen the rotating cellar sketch?

That was amazing.

Yeah, it was a real feat. We spent half a day setting that up and shot it in about two minutes. Man it was difficult. I wish I was fitter when I’d done it. I wish it was someone like Frank Woodley – he would have had great fun with it.

I think you sell yourself short. It’s brilliant.

Thank you.

Just speaking of other comedians, I remember that one of the Micallef Program(me) commentary tracks was just you reading The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. I’m wondering, is there’s an Andy Kaufman lurking inside you, wanting to misdirect the audience?

[laughs] I do enjoy misdirecting the audience but I’ve learned to my cost over the years that if you misdirect them too many times they get tired and they don’t want to follow you anymore. I did a night show on Channel Nine about six years ago now. And we were constantly leading the audience down a garden path, they’d think, oh yeah, we know what we’re going to get here, and then we’d pull the rug out from under them. We did it on ABC a lot but of course ABC audiences know what they’re going to get. So that was part of the fun.

Channel Nine is the home of the tonight show. Those audiences grew up on Melbourne Tonight and The Don Lane Show and Hey! Hey! and that sort of thing. We were constantly disappointing them by not delivering what they wanted. I’d talk about the Village People – they’re fantastic, they’re appearing at Crown, everyone’s expecting me to introduce them – and they couldn’t come, so I used a $10.90 Chicken Parmigiana. We throw to a plinth that has a rotating meal on it while ‘Y.M.C.A.’ plays. It was just bamboozling for them.

I read the liner notes of the DVD the other day which compares the package to the black box recordings of an aircraft disaster.

[laughs] Yeah. But you mention Andy Kaufman, I really like Andy Kaufman – I remember when Jim Carrey’s film came out, Man on the Moon, I was asked to review it, someone from The Age sent me a whole swag of stuff, I’d never seen Andy Kaufman, and there were bits from TV shows where he actually looks like he’s drunk, or like he’s been living on the street. Anyway, it’s really uncomfortable television when he’s smashing that wrestler on the David Letterman show. Barry Humphries used to do it to a certain extent – he’d turn up on other shows as Les Patterson and be appalling – but there was always the knowledge that it was Barry Humphries dressed up as a character, so that softened it a bit, made it a bit safer.

But with Kaufman, he’s his own character, he decided to make those appearances really unsettling. I think it’s hilarious but it’s not for everybody. Sort of like a comedian’s joke rather than an audience’s joke. I think there’s a danger of self-destructing if you go down that path. But sometimes you can’t resist it. Sometimes I’d rather tell a joke for ten people instead of 1000 people.

What about the slightly similar approach that Steve Martin took? They both took their audiences out for cookies, or McDonald’s, afterwards.

Yeah, I see a great comparison between those two. Steve Martin obviously has a better commercial eye than Andy Kaufman ever had or could ever have. He was also a better writer of material than Andy Kaufman. Everything Steve Martin does – even if you watch him plugging something as atypical of his sense of humour as Pink Panther – if he turns up on Letterman or the Tonight Show to plug it, he’ll always have a bit, he’ll always have some shtick. I think that’s a really good thing. He’s a hard-working guy.

[Martin] had a strange period, I think he may have turned about 49, 50, and then he went away for a few years. He didn’t make any films, I think he wrote a book, or was just writing articles or plays or something like that, he obviously took stock of himself and came back as a family entertainer and came back in Cheaper by the Dozen, those sorts of family films rather than the films he’d been making up until then. L.A. Story for me is one of the funniest films… I’d rank it alongside Annie Hall. It’s very well-written, it’s very personal, and it’s that very difficult balance between stand-up material and film. Woody Allen does that very well – he does different sorts of films now but when he started out he was doing those sort of fantasy elements and then real-life romance in his films. Steve Martin just hit the nail on the head with L.A. Story. It’s a great film.

In terms of prose style, in the written word, the style of your work in Smithereens [Micallef’s book, a collection of pieces reprinted from the Age] is very similar to both that of Woody Allen and Steve Martin. Does your upcoming book [Pre-Incarnation, to be released in 2010] show a little bit more of that?

Yeah, I was very influenced by Woody Allen when I was 15, 16. I remember getting out Without Feathers, his anthology of stuff, and I knew that he’d been influenced by S.J. Perelman, and then I found out that S.J. Perelman had written for the Marx Brothers, so I thought, great, you know. I quite liked that because I liked the Marx Brothers as well.

So I started reading S.J. Perelman, and also James Thurber, Stephen Leacock, and all those early 1930s–1940s American writers. Steve Martin, I think, has also been influenced by either Allen or S.J. Perelman as well. That idea of exploring language and genre and that sort of thing.

The book next year is a novel actually. I don’t know how good it is but I enjoyed writing it. It’s a single story all the way through. Again, it plays with the conventions a bit – sometimes it’s a book and sometimes it’s a send-up of a book.

I was going to ask if you it was a little bit straighter than people might be expecting.

No, I think it’s probably going to appeal to a small, marginal part of the community. It’s certainly not a straight book, I don’t think I could be bothered writing a straight book. Maybe I don’t have the talent to write a straight book. It’s a bit like a sketch versus a movie, you’ve got to throw some of the absurdity out – you’ve got to have strong rails to put the story on, otherwise there’s no point telling it. Structurally it’s probably a bit straighter, but there’s some weird characters and anyone who’s interested in hearing my voice when they read something I’ve written can do that but hopefully it works on another level as well.

What inspiration did you draw on for the new record [Micallef’s new comedy album, His Generation]?

Well, I’d always been a big fan of comedy records. I used to collect them as a university student. Peter Sellers was a big influence for me. I love his voice work.

I’ve done a lot of sketch comedy over the years, but voice work isn’t as important as make-up. So I got the chance to do it on this album. I thought, why not do all the voices? I’m responding to myself and that sort of thing. So we had a bit of a play with that. Yeah it was fun. You’d never be able to do a real show like that on TV, it’d probably end up being a bit boring.

We’ve covered a lot Shaun, so I just have one final question for you. With Rove leaving the building this week, many people might be suspecting that it clears the way for another Shaun Micallef tonight show…

[laughs] Oh God. No, I think I’ve done a tonight show. I quite liked it, and you know… But I’m not sure I’d give myself that cross to bear anymore.

Shaun Micallef and Stephen Curry star in the sketches of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore at the Sydney Opera House in December.

www.sydneyoperahouse.com

Wicked - interview with Lucy Durack

It’s been 70 years since the girl in the blue and white checked gingham dress went off to find the Wizard in the MGM film The Wizard of Oz, the most recognisable version of L. Frank Baum’s classic children’s story, but there’ve been several less iconic visits to Oz over the years. Actually, the Yellow Brick Road has become more like a multi-lane highway: in addition to Baum’s original 14 books, there was the cult classic Disney semi-sequel Return To Oz; several animated television series including a long-running anime dubbed into English by HBO; an erotic graphic novel by Alan Moore; the all-African American version The Wiz (the movie version starred Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow); an Australian Rock’n’Roll road movie (with music from Daddy Cool’s Ross Wilson); a scrapped Tim Burton television project; and a text-adventure game for the Commodore 64.

None of these adaptations and retellings, however, have come as close to being as well-loved and celebrated as Wicked. Every generation gets the Oz they deserve, and this new musical is as showy as it is subversive, with the slightest hints of post-feminist discourse. It’s a double-take of The Wizard of Oz story which uncovers the secret history of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West – who turns out to be more misunderstood than wicked – with dramatic irony by the bucketful and lines like, “I’ll be so happy I could melt!”

The musical is based on a (now bestselling) 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (who brought us Pippin and Godspell, but we’ll forgive the latter) and a book by Winnie Holzman (whose television credits include My So-Called Life). The show had its premiere at the Gershwin Theatre on Broadway in October 2003. Not all critics were charmed by the production (“Wicked does not, alas, speak hopefully for the future of the Broadway musical” – New York Times), but audiences were blown away like a Kansas cottage in a freak tornado.

Wicked finally touches down in Sydney’s Capitol Theatre this month after a marathon year at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre. Actress Lucy Durack, who plays wand-toting Glinda the Good Witch, hasn’t been sick even once. Until, that is, the day I call her for a chat about the show. “I’ve been very lucky until now!” says Durack in a voice far from the squeaky tones she’s cultivated for her role. “Normally I’m extremely healthy.”

Hopefully it wasn’t the taxing nature of our chat that pushed over the edge, but Durack did in fact miss a couple of shows after our interview. The only surprise is that she’s managed to avoid illness this long: a run as long as Wicked’s is a feat of endurance for the cast and crew, especially by Australian theatre standards. She and Amanda Harrison (the Wicked Witch) are particularly hard done by, traipsing around the stage in 15-kilo dresses and, in Durack’s case, high-heels, for five night performances and three matinees a week. “By the end of the eight shows in a week, my feet are killing me.”

But despite the physical punishment, performing in Wicked is still as magical as ever for Durack. “It’s been so delightful. Occasionally I’m a bit tired, but I just have to remind myself of how fantastic it is to have a role I’ve wanted for years. To be actually doing it is so marvellous. And I really haven’t gotten sick of it at all. Glinda has so many facets to her character, and challenges and nuances to work out: emotionally and vocally. There’s also quite a lot of comedic moments too. There’s not a lot of time to get bored or tired!”

One look at blonde and bubbly Durack and you know she was born to play the character – she admits to having had ‘Glinda moments’ all her life – and it turns out that she fell in love with the part long before she donned the frilly dress for the first time. “I had the soundtrack,” she says, “and I always thought if ever that show came to Australia I would love to be in it… I spent many hours dreaming of what it’d be like to play Glinda…”

Lucy Durack

When the Australian production was announced, Durack attended audition workshops for the role with 17 other aspiring Good Witches, and after coming out with Glinda’s crown, she was whisked away to see productions of the show on Broadway and London’s West End (featuring Glinda played by Australian actress Helen Dallimore)

“The first time I saw it was at the Apollo Theatre in London,” Durack says. “I’d been listening to the soundtrack for years. I was so excited. The whole theatre was cheering and I got a little bit teary… Some people from the ensemble haven’t seen it, and I know they know it’s a very special show, but you just can’t grasp the magic of it until you actually see it for yourself. It was just so magical. I walked out feeling like I was floating.”

It’s an apt choice of word, considering Durack’s grand entrance in the show: via Glinda’s magic bubble. But Glinda turns out to have more substance in Wicked than in the film, something which is certainly reflected in her singing part, which alternates between frivolous comedy numbers (the country-tinged ‘Popular’) and over-the-rainbow soprano (the boisterous opener, ‘No-One Mourns The Wicked’). “It’s exciting for me to have a character who has fun songs like ‘Popular’ and also gets to sing classical soprano. I just think that’s perfect, getting to use both sides of my training. Glinda also does a bit of a yodel on ‘Popular’, and I think there’s definitely a little room for that flavour. Which is kind of fun for me because I grew up with that kind of music around me. My dad was one of those people who – to quote the Blues Brothers – liked both kinds of music: country and western.”

Wicked just might be the most lavish production Australia has ever seen, replete with gravity-defying stunts (including those flying monkeys and the aforementioned bubble), a spectacular ‘time dragon’, and 30 tonnes’ worth of scenery, lighting equipment and sound equipment to bump in. But none of this would make much impact if the energy of the cast wasn’t there to meet it. “I think that’s the joy of performance. The excitement of being in a high school production never really goes away. It’s a real joy.

“The cast is all very comfortable now. We’ve come together through adversity: the passing of Rob Guest [originally in the cast as the Wizard – the role was later taken up by Bert Newton] was really difficult. But it’s very lively. And it’s such a family atmosphere, because we’ve got young dancers, people like myself in their 20s, people in their 30s and people who are in their 60s and 70s. It’s a family atmosphere.” Wicked fun for all ages, it seems – whether you’re onstage or off.

The Jezabels at the Annandale, Friday 10 July

Annandale Hotel, Sydney
Friday 10 July

The Jezabels have been obediently trotting around Australia in their tour boots supporting Josh Pyke, but vocalist Hayley M’s reflections about the dark and dirty corners of Sydney belong in a venue like the Annandale Hotel. It’s not exactly the throbbing heart of the city’s Friday nightlife – more like the tip of one of its tentacles – but you get the sense that these punters know exactly what Hayley’s talking about when she riffs on chemical romances and cryptic crosses of guys and girls.

Hayley took to the stage in a loose-fitting Phantom of the Opera production T-shirt and pranced about like a talent quest panto act, but we forgive her that. The girl’s a natural at the mic, simple as that, swooping and soaring above typical soprano range with grace and flair, or channelling Nick Cave in the devil-may-care melodies of ‘Noah’s Ark’. She can life the roof on the word ‘urinals’ (on ‘Old Little Girls’) and not sound ridiculous, and you can’t say fairer than that.

It’s not the comparison I would’ve expected to make, but the live setting brought out some of the inner Brandon Flowers in the song-writing: the marching band gait of the coda on ‘Be A Star’ and the punch-the-air choruses of ‘Disco Biscuit Love’ making more of an impact than on the Man Is Dead EP. It’s moments like that especially when you can see the sticky red carpet to success unfurling before the Jezabels.

Heather S (keys) and Sam L (guitar) served the tracks well (less so when forced to become surrogate bassists) but, as with the EP, it’s the volatile presence of Nik K on drums that really took the Jezabels into exciting territory. His ballistic rhythms are the antithesis to Hayley’s classic pop sensibilities, and while it may have occasionally sounded like a battle of wills on record, it worked a charm on stage. A big comfy doona on a bed of nails.

The Jezabels have been sharpening their claws on Sydney stages for a couple of years now, and Hayley herself still reckons that they’re primarily a live act. She’s probably right about that at the moment, but once the band works out how to wrestle the energy of their live show onto record – look out.

Sarah Blasko - As Day Follows Night

As Day Follows Night

Sarah Blasko

Dew Process/Universal

My seat at the 2007 ARIA Awards was so high up and so far from the action that I had to be guided to it by a sherpa, but even from there I could tell that Sarah Blasko was a little bemused as she accepted her ARIA for Best Pop Release of 2007. “I always thought my music was pop,” she joked, her gentle sarcasm echoing around the infernal chasm of the Acer Arena.

It would seem that Blasko has had quite enough of being misunderstood. Her third album, As Day Follows Night, immediately sets itself apart from 2004’s The Overture & the Underscore and 2006’s What The Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have. Where both of those albums kicked in with a haze of murky vocals, synth and TR-606 beats, the new opener ‘Down On Love’ unravels like an old standard, all dainty piano flourishes and understated strings. It’s Blasko as we’ve never heard her before.

Actually this whole record is Blasko as we’ve never heard her before. There’s a laid-back jazz club vibe throughout, with plenty of brushed snares, meandering double bass and Blasko bending notes like only Billie Holiday’s business – without the whole thing becoming a self-conscious throwback to burnin’ blue soul a la Duffy’s Rockferry.

The record makes the most of these three main elements – voice, bass and drums –without resorting to electric instruments at all. It’s hard not to miss the prog-rock sensibility and Jonny Greenwood textures of What The Sea Wants, but there are new pleasures to be discovered in Bjorn Yttling’s keep-it-real production: little things, like the immaculate crispness of the nylon strings on ‘All I Want’, and the attack of the piano on ‘Lost & Defeated’… but mostly Blasko’s voice, which has a chance to shine in these spacious arrangements and is in its finest form yet.

There are a few more surprises in store too: the flamenco stylings of ‘Is My Baby Yours’; a Tin Pan Alley vaudeville number in ‘Hold On My Heart’ (not a cover of the Genesis track, obviously); the bouncy ‘Lost & Defeated’, with strings shivering away in demi-semiquavers as if from the chilly Scandinavian winter; and, even if Blasko refuses to say so herself, echoes of the Wild West in ‘All I Want’ (rattlesnake shakers, clippety-clop percussion and singing saw coyote howls).

It also makes a difference that Blasko, who has tended to be willfully obscure in her lyrics, lays it all bare here, with refreshingly direct lines like “I never knew it would hurt like this / to let someone go against my wishes…” Lines like these, together with music like this, are tantamount to throwing on the house lights after a little bit too much flickering candlelight. It’s stirring stuff – and we all knew Blasko had it in her.

SPOILERS ALERT!

My name is Danny Mintz. I am not your father. I’m not secretly dead, my own wife’s killer or a product of someone else’s split personality. I am not Keyser Soze, I don’t have a snow-sled named ‘Rosebud’ and I’m definitely not going to turn out to be someone of the opposite sex. And no, before you ask, this isn’t going to turn out to be just a dream.

Phew. Isn’t it awful when someone tells you too much? When they divulge information you just don’t want to know, like the return of a character in next week’s episode, or the plot of a book you’ve just bought, or the twist of a movie you want to see? Personally, I can’t stand even knowing the running time of a film, or knowing how much of a book is left to read.

In fact I’d go one step further than that. I hate when spoilers happen in daily life.

Just the other day I was on the bus when an insignificant little man clambered aboard and addressed the driver. “Does this bus go down Parramatta Road?” he asked.

“DON’T SAY IT!” I yelled out to the bus driver. “Spoilers alert!” I ran to the back of the bus, out of earshot, shouting warnings to the other passengers as I went. “He’s about to say something about the bus route! Spoilers alert!”

Fortunately, I eventually made it to the doctor’s, bus trip unspoiled. “Mr. Mintz,” said Dr. Brown, a severe look on his face. He was inspecting my hefty medical file and what must have been my test results as I entered his office. “Please, take a seat.”

I did as he said. “Are those the results?” I asked him, suspiciously.

Brown nodded gravely. “Indeed. The results are back, and –”

“Don’t tell me!” I cried out, holding my hands tightly over my ears.

Brown blinked. “But, Mr. Mintz, I think you’ll find –”

“No!” I said. “I want to find out for myself, don’t ruin it for me!”

“Mr. Mintz, the twist in your uterine artery is –”

“DON’T TELL ME ABOUT THE TWIST! I DON’T EVEN WANT TO KNOW THAT THERE’S A TWIST!”

“But –”

“La la la, la la la,” I sang, now plugging my fingers firmly into my ears and keeping my eyes shut as I strolled out of the doctor’s office.

Some people just don’t understand that they suck all the pleasure out of an experience by telling you what to expect.

My wife Megan has always been one of those people. It’s been a problem from the beginning of our relationship, as a matter of fact. She’s always telling me stuff I don’t want to know. I remember the evening we consummated our love: her pounding the headboard with her fists and screaming, “I’m going to come! I’m going to come!”

“DON’T TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS!” I retorted sternly. “I DON’T WANT TO KNOW!”

It’s been much like that ever since.

Sure enough, when I got home from the doctor’s (it took almost three hours since I refused to be told where each bus was going), Megan had just gotten off the phone, her cheeks wet with tears, clearly desperate to spoil something else for me.

“Danny,” she said at once. “It’s my mother.”

“La la la la la…”

“Jesus, Danny! Please! I need you right now!”

“La la la laaaaa…”

“DANNY!” Megan threw a plate at me. I dodged it and started singing Manfred Mann. “Why do you always DO THIS?”

“There she was just a-walkin’ down the street, singin’ ‘Do wah diddy –’”

“ARGH!” Megan stormed out of the house and slammed the door. I stopped my impromptu rendition of Do Wah Diddy only when she was well out of the driveway.
I spent a few days at home alone, not answering phone calls and preparing meals I didn’t eat (I prefer the anticipation), but not more than a week passed before a time machine landed in my front yard and my future self turned up on doorstep. “Danny,” my future self said, with what I detected to be considerable urgency. “Danny, I’ve come from the future. I have something very important to tell you! It concerns your whole future! No, don’t shut the door!”

I bolted the door shut and put on my headphones.

Sarah Blasko interview

In wine-tasting circles, the third sip is the telltale sip, wherein the nuances and subtleties of the wine reveal themselves. We spoke to Sarah Blasko about being more generous in her lyrics, recording in Stockholm with Björn Yttling from Peter, Bjorn and John, and what flavours to expect from her third album, As Day Follows Night.

I read that there was a time in Sweden when you wondered what the heck you were doing there. Can you tell us about that?

Well, I just came all the way there on my own. I'd gone from the hottest day you can possibly imagine in Sydney and now it was minus 10. It was snowing and I was on my own. It was great that a lot of the time people would speak English, but every now and then they were joking in Swedish and I was standing there like a loser and I just thought, what the hell…!
It's really hard to get over there and really trust somebody who’s got all their buddies around them – you're just a little bit scared that you're not going to be heard. It's just a natural instinct to be confronted by that. I get Björn more now, but at that time, it's really hard to put your faith in somebody when you’ve spent a good year of your life working hard on your songs, and to put your trust in a complete stranger to understand them the correct way. So I really had to let go a bit.

I want to talk about not using electronic instruments – seems like a pretty major decision to make.

Yeah, it was something that I decided really early on. It really felt like the songs that I was writing were suited to a more natural approach and I was also just tired of electric guitars and fiddling around with sounds. I wanted something that was very tangible, something you could change the sound of, but in a more natural way – for example, with a piano, if you play it really aggressively it's got a different sound to it if you play it delicately, but it's essentially got its own character already.

My prerequisite was that all the instruments had ‘air’ in them. Piano, acoustic guitar, percussion, double bass and all that stuff. It just sounds right to me. I just couldn't be bothered with all that other stuff this time. I just wanted it to be simple.

You fell in love with a particular piano, didn’t you?

There was this whole room, and three or four big pianos, and it was like love at first sight: you look past all these other people in the room, and you see the gorgeous one in the corner, and for me it was this little piano that Björn had, literally about a quarter of the size of all the other pianos, but it just had so much personality so that was what we decided to use for the whole record.

And what about the decision to employ that most underrated of instruments, the musical saw?

We knew we wanted a string quartet, and when Björn said that the cellist played musical saw, I said, oh yes, we definitely need that. It just seemed like it'd be too good to pass up really.

Maybe it’s something to do with the film clip, but I definitely get a western soundtrack vibe on ‘All I Want’

I wasn't thinking about the Wild West but, I don't know, it just made sense. To me that song sounds more like a 1940s jazz song, but I guess that saw does evoke a desert feel or something, which suits the loneliness, the wilderness.

I want to talk about that jazz/soul sound, because it really seems to infuse this record. Is it a reflection of what you were listening to at the time?

I was listening to all kinds of things. I was listening to modern stuff that was a bit bluesy, like M Ward, but I guess we were listening to a lot of old stuff when we were recording like Nina Simone, Alice Coltrane, Billie Holiday, all kinds of things really. And also things like Paul Simon and Talking Heads. The great thing about working with Björn is that he has a really broad taste in music and I really do as well. He’s not the kind of person that just likes what they like. Sometimes indie musicians can be a bit narrow with what they like so it was nice to work with someone who was broad-minded and liked all styles of music from all over the world.

A couple of tracks, I’m thinking particularly of ‘We Won’t Run’, almost have a Carole King anthemic quality to them, and your voice works very well with that sound. You originally thought of yourself as a singer, first and foremost, didn’t you?

I didn't actually know I wanted to do it until I was 17 or something, but yeah, I started off singing. I didn't really play an instrument – I’m still a terrible musician – and I didn't really start writing my own stuff till I was 19 or 20. I struggle to call myself a musician. I'm a singer and a writer and I've got ideas but I don't sort of feel comfortable considering myself a musician. Even though I do write it on the boarding card when i go on overseas flights.

Would you agree that your lyrics are a lot more stripped back and open on this record?

Well, that was my intention. I felt it was important to be honest and just write from the heart. I didn't want to be complicated. I just wanted to write what I felt. I suppose that's why blues and jazz seemed to appeal to me at that time, because that music is very much about that: it's quite simple-themed, it's all to a uniform structure, and they're just good classic songs. With my last record, I don't think it's the most complicated music obviously, but I think there was a sense of obscuring meaning a little bit. With this one I wanted to be really free and not try to hide behind anything, I wanted to be generous and relatable.

What was it about Björn’s work that you thought could work with your own sound?

To me it sounds like an undefinable mish-mash of different styles and things that kind of work in a fresh way. That's what really got me in. That's what I wanted to do, make a record that you felt was from another era, but not a retro record that sounds like the sixties – a record that you didn't quite know what era it was from. I could definitely hear that in the stuff that he's worked on. I also liked his string arrangements on Camera Obscura and Taken By Trees – just very simple and beautifully enhanced songs. That was a big thing for me too.

You definitely go for some new sounds on this album: what stands out is the flamenco on ‘Over & Over’, and ‘Hold On My Heart’, which sounds to me on a first listen like vaudeville…

Yes. I take that as a big compliment!

So did you feel that working with Björn allowed you to explore new musical horizons?

That's all stuff I've wanted to do for ages. I really love musical theatre and I love pop music and for me it's just putting all those things together. It was really freeing, because he didn't want to know too much about what I'd done before. We just decided to be adventurous with the music. And I knew I wanted it to have some variety and some playfulness. I think, particularly, because these songs – well, some of the songs – are a bit sad, I didn't want them to sound sad, I wanted them to sound alive.

I’m drawn to talk about ‘Sleeper Awake’, because I think it’s your longest track on record, but it’s based on a quite simple, hypnotic string melody.

I wanted that song to shift the perspective for the second half. It's about awakening and realising your own strengths, or things that you've ignored about yourself. It was both mine and Björn's favourite song to record because I think we’ve both always wanted to record a long, hypnotic song like that. Most of the instruments on the record come in and go out. It’s like you're watching a jazz band improvising. I think for me it was wonderful to do a song that was so instrumental. In the past I felt that, instrumentally, the music sometimes was a bit ‘background’, or that the instruments were too blended in with each other. On this record, I wanted you to really hear the instruments and for it to have that character.

You’ve talked a lot about comfort zones, and thriving on leaving them. Do you think it shows on the album?

Yeah I think it shows on the album. It's a very different record but I think it's important to do that. It's just so important to change yourself. And it was really important for me to work with someone who didn't want to even know my old stuff and just focus on what he was hearing, and from what I was telling him. Because who wants to keep doing the same stuff? You want to be put in a situation where you're growing, and it's really difficult because you have to swallow your pride, but it's rewarding.

SMH's impeccable picture selection

Picture caption: Myles defecated in hotel corridor.

Story here.