Gareth Liddiard is about as far from pretension as you can humanly imagine. As lead singer, guitarist and songwriter with The Drones, and in his solo guise, Liddiard is a compelling, and charismatic performer.
Gareth Liddiard is about as far from pretension as you can humanly imagine. As lead singer, guitarist and songwriter with The Drones, and in his solo guise, Liddiard is a compelling, and charismatic performer. Asked to explain the science of his song-writing, however, and the man is non-plussed. “There’s so much to write about, you can write about just about anything,” Liddiard figures. “Sometimes I think people who say they’ve got writer’s block, they’re only prepared to write about certain things, and they’ve run out of ideas about those things. Fuck styles or tastes – write about anything. Step in poo and write about that. My writing style is to bite off more than I can chew, and then chew like crazy, and turn something that shouldn’t be in a song into a song.”
With The Drones on a rare break from touring and recording, Liddiard has released his first solo album, Strange Tourist. According to Liddiard, there’s nothing especially unique in his solo material compared to his Drones output. “A Drones song is the same, except with more instruments,” he chuckles. “There’s two ways to make a solo record: the first is to write a bunch of songs and then get a bunch of people to play them with you, and the second is just to do it yourself. I’ve been the doing the former for yonks, so I figured I’d do the latter for once.”
Liddiard’s aptitude for a good story is evident throughout The Drones’ material; on Strange Tourist Liddiard’s stories are in full flight. Tightrope walkers, winnebago sellers and intriguing country residents come together as part of Liddiard’s kaleidoscopic vision. “The Drones stuff all starts off sounding like me solo to begin with, so The Drones stuff is going to have instruments and instrumental bits,” he explains.
“But with my solo stuff, any instrumental bits would just be me doodling away on an acoustic guitar, which would probably be a bit dull. So I just leaned heavier on the whole vocals side. And because I’m not the greatest singer in the world, I was leaning heavy on the story side. So it naturally became lyrical, I guess,” he muses.
So what inspires him to write a song – is there a particular strain or style of literature that he’s attracted to for inspiration? “It doesn’t have to be literature – it can be anything written down,” Liddiard replies. “I generally find weird shit interesting. That [Niagara Falls tightrope walker Charles] Blondin thing is weird, so I stuck that in there (on Blondin Makes An Omlette). And I thought selling winnebago’s is weird, so I stuck that in there (on the title track). I just go for the strange – the ‘what the fuck’ sort of thing,” he states.
“Most of the stuff that’s going on in the songs is usually true but it’s kind of out of context. But the winnebago thing is bullshit. I had a gap to fill,” he laughs. “I had a couple of dots to join, and I needed something like that in there – a vocation. Yonks ago I remember hearing an Elvis Costello song about these sleazy dudes selling speedboats in Vegas, which I thought was cool.”
Once an idea has been hatched, the resultant story gradually appears. “More often than not the story evolves as I’m writing it,” Liddiard says. “You just throw a bunch of ideas into a bucket and then eventually a picture will emerge, like a thread or some sort of meaning. And when you’ve got that then you can start arranging things, connecting meanings and joining dots. Then you finish the song, and it’s about blah blah. Sometimes I know what I’m going to write about, but the hardest thing is to find something to write about first of all. I generally don’t wait for that, I just fucking get started and see what happens.”
The title of Liddiard’s solo record, Strange Tourist, sits well with his itinerant lifestyle as a member of a regularly touring band. Touring still provides Liddiard with plenty of inspiration for song-writing. “When you’re touring with a band, you get to see parts of the country you wouldn’t see if you were just a normal tourist,” Liddiard explains. “A touring band will generally have a better idea about the country they’re touring than a tourist who’s just taking photos. We see tons of really weird shit – you just see the real thing. There’s countless weirdness out there,” Liddiard says dryly.
Despite his perpetual fascination with ‘weird shit’, and constant search for song-writing material, Liddiard isn’t the type of artist who carries a pen and paper with him to record his thoughts. “I tried to, but it’s usually crap. I find that things that stick in your mind are the things that you use, and are the things that have usefulness,” he reflects.
“The things that you write down, I dunno, they don’t always work, and you forget what the original meaning was anyway. You’re pulling it out of the context of your mind and sticking it on paper, and six months down the track you can’t remember where your head was at, and it doesn’t have any meaning anyway.”
For the recording of Strange Tourist, Liddiard and partner (and Drones bass player) Fiona Kitchin ventured north to a 19th century mansion in Yass where producer Burke Reid was staying. “Sonically the mansion was pretty amazing – the mansion is pre-Federation, 1890s, four stories, nine bedrooms – it’s this out of control, Gone With The Wind staircases,” Liddiard recalls. “It was easy to get a vibe out of that – if anything, it made us enthused. It’s like when you’re on holiday – you’re generally a lot more exuberant then. So being up there just energised the whole process, rather than bringing in some conceptual element.”
Having now lived in northern Victoria for a few years, Liddiard confesses to using his country neighbours for occasional lyrical inspiration. Given Liddiard’s avowedly unpretentious style, it’s not surprising he’s happy to draw from his immediate circle of friends and acquaintances. “You can find a way to write about anything. As long as you don’t try and write to order or a particular agenda, then things will crop up,” he notes.
“The most sordid details or intimate details about you or whoever … I dunno, I never try to prescribe the process. There’s tons of stuff about my neighbours on the new album – it’s all in there. If they look in there, they’ll probably see themselves in there.”
GARETH LIDDIARD’s amazing new solo album Strange Tourist is out now through Shock. He launches it at The Thornbury Theatre with two shows across Friday November 5 and Saturday November 6 – tickets from thethornburytheatre.com, Polyester, Greville and Basement Discs. He also plays The Queenscliff Music Festival which runs over November 26-28 – tickets and info from qmf.net.au.
