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 After the completion of recent impromptu gigs and even more recent domestic duties, JOHN ‘JC’ COLLINS of POWDERFINGER delivers some timeless advice to MITCH ALEXANDER.
The bigger the machine, the harder it becomes to move and adapt to situations. Every new development makes it slightly harder to change direction until you have a lumbering mono-directional beast on your hands. It happens with cars, it happens with governments, and if you’ve ever lined up at McDonalds you know it happens to people. It happens with bands too. With success comes expectation, a sense of responsibility that can make it nigh on impossible to adapt to new scenarios, so you go with reliable choices that have wielded positive results in the past. The law of diminishing returns implies that this will work up to a point, but cultural irrelevance is never too far away. Which may be why Brisbane’s musical monoliths Powderfinger are so keen to move with the times in any way they can.
“I hope we’re not the last Australian band to put out seven records, please, it’s really important that bands continue to grow and become great,” pleads John Collins (or JC to his bandmates, to avoid confusion with drummer Jon Coghill) when pondering the average lifespan of bands nowadays. I did promise that I wouldn’t make him sound like a grumpy old man with the comment, so don’t take it that way. “Like U2, Midnight Oil, The Rolling Stones, all those bands that have a … body of work instead of having one YouTube hit.”
Last Thursday saw the band launch their seventh album, Golden Rule, with a live webcast from deep within their rehearsal space. Acknowledging that word-of-mouth rarely occurs with actual mouths but digital equivalents these days, our Brissie lads are keen to engage with a new generation of Matrix-connected fans by any means necessary. Like Malcolm X without getting shot. Hence the so-called guerilla gigs in October, the locations kept very hush-hush until all of a sudden BAM! Powderfinger, four acoustic guitars (one of them bass if we’re being pedantic) and a skeleton drum kit in the middle of Post Office Square. Hopping on a plane moments after to play similar shows in Sydney and Melbourne, JC quickly realized how hard it is to keep a ‘secret’ these days.
“We were in Byron, the eve before Splendour and we were in the studio,” explains John of the origin of these gigs. “Someone said ‘there’s shitloads of people around, we’ve got this new record, why don’t we go and busk?’”
“Like U2, Midnight Oil, The Rolling Stones, all those bands that have a … body of work instead of having one YouTube hit.”
“We grabbed our acoustics, set up on the corner of the Great Northern, played for about 20 minutes and really enjoyed it. We weren’t doing it for any reason apart from playing the songs and having fun. And then the idea came that we could do it nationally. The original idea was to do one a week but then my idea – which was the first good idea I’ve had for a long time – was to do it all in one day.
“I didn’t want it to feel really contrived, you do it one place and one week and the secret’s gone. When we got to Melbourne, the people in Federation Square had been expecting us, they had a stage ready to go so that was pretty cool. If we did it once a week it would have got a bit long winded … a bit wanky.”
Some are already labeling Golden Rule as a return to their rock roots – which is, if you recall, what they said about Vulture Street because Odyssey #5 was saturated in anthems and ballads – but this paints too simple a picture. The album begins with the short symphonic flourish of El Camino De La Muerte and is just one of the many curveballs you wouldn’t expect from the new millennium’s pub covers band standard. Along the way there are disco beats, unforeseen synths and charming fingerpicking, all overseen by longtime producer Nick DiDia. It’s possible that the poor reception for Dream Days At The Hotel Existence (seriously guys, you need to spend more time on your album names) took a lot of the pressure off the band. It may have also had a lot to do with the location of recording. Whereas Dream Days… was constructed amidst the road rage and flashing lights of Los Angeles, Studio 301 in Byron Bay was chosen for its much mellower moods.
“This one felt like we just sat down in a room and said ‘ok, whadya got? Where do we start?’” he says. “I want to record every record in Byron Bay now, I think every band should … but if everyone did you’d never get a go.
“I played golf with Nick once or twice a week, the guys were surfing … I know it sounds like a dream, but I don’t know why we haven’t done every record there. But because we were so close to Brisbane, you weren’t shitting everyone off when you weren’t needed. And the work got done.”
In case you haven’t been paying attention so far, or for those who flick through a story and start reading at random paragraphs, Powderfinger’s seventh album is called Golden Rule and it’s out now and it’s pretty darn good. Everyone’s got their own golden rule, something that propels you through the day on a wave of conviction. For rock & roll excess, you couldn’t have a much more perfect rule than Spinal Tap’s immortal ‘have a good time, all the time’ phrase. But sometimes it’s easy to forget that Powderfinger are still five genuinely nice and supremely Australian blokes – JC tells me that he did the mowing yesterday because it looked like it was going to rain – who prefer much more cautionary and helpful advice.
“Don’t smoke in bed … I don’t even smoke but don’t do it,” he shoots back with deadpan timing. “I should probably sit down and work some others out … ‘love thy neighbour’…?
There’s a brief moment of pondering…
“Nah, I like ‘don’t smoke in bed’. It won’t get you anywhere.”
POWDERFINGER will play Brisbane’s Q150 concert to mark Proclamation Day at The Riverstage on Thursday Dec 10 and also the national Big Day Out tour, which hits Gold Coast Parklands on Jan 17, 2010. GOLDEN RULE is out now through Universal.
      
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