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 JODY MACGREGOR talks to JUSTIN HEAZLEWOOD, the man behind THE BEDROOM PHILOSOPHER, who is appropriately enough calling from his Melbourne bedroom and sounding slightly hungover.
Justin Heazlewood sounds surprisingly like one of the characters from his own songs. You can imagine him sitting on the 86 tram, angsting over the dilemma that’s troubling him right now, a dilemma every comedian/musician has probably worried about at some point. Woke up this morning, got the comedy-musician blues / You can be funny or you can be musical, but you gotta choose. Only if he wrote it, it would be funnier and underpinned by beautifully violent acoustic strumming and then in the second verse he’d rhyme iPod with Tripod and we’d all have a laugh.
“If Omar [from The Wire] busts in, ‘Hey man, you got to tell me now: you a musician or a comedian?’ I would probably say musician at a pinch,” says Heazlewood. “The songs all obey music rules in that I try to make it as good as it can be and then, the lyrics – sure, they’re funny, but I just want them to be engaging and clever and actually say something about something. Watch Friday night Rage for three hours and then walk away, the next morning write down what the songs were about. You could write it on the back of a tram ticket probably.”
Does this mean that some day he might change direction? Perhaps abandoning The Bedroom Philosopher as a persona and recording more serious songs under his own name like Owen Pallett quit being Final Fantasy or Sally Seltmann retired New Buffalo? “I keep talking about how frustrated I am and how much I want to play my serious songs, which I have about 100 of. For every funny song I’ve written I have a serious one sitting awkwardly on the bench. Deep down I just want to be Josh Pyke. That’s been the case for a long time. I think it could happen somehow, but at the same time I’m aware of the true insanity of taking The Bedroom Philosopher, that I’ve spent the last eight years of my life towards succeeding in Australia and now I’ve actually got a fair sense of momentum and I’m trying to talk myself out of hijacking that.”
That momentum is carrying Heazlewood and his band, The Awkwardstra, on a national launch tour for his Songs From The 86 Tram album, which began a few nights ago with dates in Adelaide and Tasmania. “Nothing on Earth could prepare us for the Tasmanian shows,” he says with an echo of shell shock still in his voice. “No rehearsal, no schooling, no life experience could prepare you for 100-and-something highly pissed Hobartians on a Saturday night throwing frozen corn at us.” Frozen corn? Is that some kind of Tasmanian tradition? “Dude brought a bag full of frozen corn along, threw two cups full at me at some point in the show. I don’t know if I was being targeted specifically or if he was throwing them at everyone. It made a bit of a statement on the corny nature of my wordplay-based songs.”
It’s a 22-date tour that, aptly enough, ends at the Northcote Social Club – presumably to be renamed the Anti-Social Club for the night as it is in his song Northcote (So Hungover). “I’m the hardest working artist in niche musical comedy,” says Heazlewood of the lengthy tour. “Like the Midnight Oil of prog novelty music. I feel like it sends a good statement, like, ‘Hey, look, we’re actually a serious band who want to try really hard to put on a decent music show.’ I feel like we are putting on a decent music show. We talk to the audience, we look like we’re having fun, all those things rock bands are taught never to do. We’re breaking all the rules. We have more than four to five chords.”
The Bedroom Philosopher is being joined on this tour by The Boat People, a choice that backs up his statements about wanting to be taken more seriously as a band. Sure, The Boat People are a fun bunch, but they’re not comedians. “Bands always find bands quite similar to them to tour with, but I’m like, ‘Okay, who’s quite similar to us? Er, TISM were, kind of. Maybe Flight Of The Conchords. Maybe Root? But there’s none. We prefer to play with bands we like and are a good band. The Boat People are fun but they’re on a very short list of Australian bands I really like and would actively listen to for pleasure. Pretty much them and Richard In Your Mind are the two.” Nice of him to choose a Brisbane band to be his tour buddies, too. “I’ve had a lot of experience playing with Melbourne indie bands. You get a whole lot of ego walking around going, ‘We’re like David Bowie meets Arcade Fire.’ Getting some slightly patronising feedback about our stuff. I hate all that stuff cause I’m still getting my head around this music thing so I need people to play with that are gonna be well-chilled out and call me Beddy Phil like The Boat People do”
“…no life experience could prepare you for 100-and-something highly pissed Hobartians on a Saturday night throwing frozen corn…”
That preference for chilled out musicians is what kept him a solo performer rather than putting together a backing band for so long. One of his eventual bandmates had to hassle him for roughly a year just to get him to sit down and try out some of the songs with two guitars rather than one. “I was so intimidated by the thought of playing with other musicians,” he explains. “I thought I had this autistic vibe that I could only really play my own songs. I didn’t really know the names of any of the chords I was playing, I don’t know what time signatures are or how to even start or stop a song with another person in the room playing at the same time. But the bass player, Andy, he just kept hassling me, going, ‘Let’s have a jam, let’s have a jam!’ I thought a jam just meant sit around playing blues songs and doing really complicated solos and shit when what he meant was, ‘You just play your song and I’ll work out the bassline and play along.’”
Although he admits that the first shows he played with The Awkwardstra were ‘shitty gigs’ the eventual result has been his best work yet, with Songs From The 86 Tram getting glowing reviews all over and Northcote (So Hungover) becoming a radio mainstay. The problem there is that when people know the songs so well, will they still find them funny performed live?
“I like to exist in this truly baffling, ambiguous chasm between the music and comedy genres,” says Heazlewood. “In music, everyone wants to hear your old stuff. In comedy everyone wants to hear your new stuff. I figure if I combine the two, no one will be that happy with anything I do and it’ll just keep everyone on their toes. I feel like I’m cheating the system: when it suits me I put my comedy hat on and do comedy festivals. I want to put my music hat on for this and get away with playing your old stuff and even playing songs that aren’t even that funny, that are just more quirky-slash-interesting-slash-y’know. I’m not so fussed about what’s funny to people any more with this whole Bedroom Philosopher. If it’s a good song no one should care, if it’s a good show and I play the song well. I’m more interested in being a Captain of Entertainment rather than being specifically some sort of humourist or balladeer.”
THE BEDROOM PHILOSOPHER and The Boat People play The Troubadour on Saturday Aug 28 (with Pinky Beecroft & The White Russians) and The Old Museum on the afternoon Sunday Aug 29 (with Charlie Mayfair). SONGS FROM THE 86 TRAM is out now through Nan & Pop/Shock. See www.bedroomphilosopher.com for more.
Saying Something About Something
It’s easy to compare THE BEDROOM PHILOSOPHER to wordsmiths like Paul Simon or Bob Dylan with lyrics like these...
Man on a tram / Man on a tram, I am / Man on a tram / With a plan / Called Stan / From Prahan / From Prahan I am / Talking about shares / Gettin’ lots of stares / No one really cares / My voice really blares / Big tram, slow tram / Do you want to go tram / Man on a tram / Wearing bad chinos / Drinking cappuccinos / Smell like jalapenos.
MAN ON A TRAM
All I’ve had today is lemonade and a lamington / And I am going to Flemington / To buy a Lady Remington.
MIDDLE AGED MUM
Oh, Trishine / I’m the ute and you’re the diesel / Oh, Trishine / I’m the bowl, and you’re the cheezels.
TRISHINE
In my day / We ate toast from a can / From Japan! / In my day / When it was cold father would hop into bed with you and set fire to his beard.
IN MY DAY (NAN)
As we sit on the brink / Of Howl’s Moving Centrelink.
WE ARE TRAMILY
I come from a place very far away / Footscray / I moved there to escape a place of great poverty and violence / Collingwood / I like Melbourne, but I feel like I am judged by my colour / The colour of my scarf / I went with red and black but it is the same here as in my homeland / No one likes the bombers.
SUDANESE
Lyrics taken from Songs From The 86 Tram
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