“I hate musical theatre,” he says with a laugh. “It’s weird because I can dance and act and sing, but I don’t like the combination. At all. I find it really painfully false – the singing style as well. I hate the idea that everyone tries to sound the same way. I did two years of a commercial cabaret show [Velvet], we did 300 shows, and it was pretty painful. I gave it a shot. Nobody can say I didn’t give it a shot.”
Nonetheless, it’s a testament to Maclean’s seemingly boundless creative energies that despite his dislike for the genre, he’s already got an idea for a potential stage show brewing. “There’s a really good story about Captain Moonlight. He’s a famous bushranger. He was queer, he was hanged in Redfern, and then some old ladies dug him up in the ‘80s and buried him next to his boyfriend,” says Maclean.
“His name was Captain Moonlight,” Maclean says. “I’m thinking that’s the one to hang my hat on. Maybe that’s what I do when I give up on trying to get triple j to play me and I just go into musical theatre. I can write it and Marcia Hines can play everyone.”
The story’s so readymade for musical theatre the only surprising element seems to be that nobody’s put it down on paper yet, a dearth that Maclean argues can be blamed on the odd awkwardness Australians have when it comes to writing about other Australians. “We get so cringey,” Maclean says. “When’s the last time a place was said in a song as a lyric – an Australian suburb? You have to go back to people like Paul Kelly and The Whitlams. In pop especially, they still sing about being in America, or being in California. But what’s it like to live in Footscray or Marrickville? Why not write about that?”
Nonetheless, despite any Captain Moonlight: The Musical plans that may or may not be brewing away in Maclean’s head, fans need not worry – it’s unlikely that he’s going to be slinking away to the world of musical theatre anytime soon. His most recent EP, the ARIA Chart climbing Funbang1, is in many ways his most successful record yet. “Funbang did better than I thought it was going to, for sure,” Maclean says. “I didn’t expect it to chart like it did. We thought it might blip in the iTunes chart for a second. But it kicked some butt, and now we get to tour it.”
Its chart performance might’ve come out of the blue for the musician, but Maclean is singularly unconcerned with the connotations that the dreaded ‘pop’ word tends to have, and is open about his desire to make a radio-friendly record. “I knew what I wanted to do with this record, for sure – I knew I wanted to make a pop record and see if I could get some festival gigs. It was pretty calculated. It’s not to say that I don’t like the music, but this is why I’m doing the tour so differently. I’m picking all these beautiful theatres and taking the songs back to where I wrote them.”
Indeed, location is already proving key when it comes to Maclean’s upcoming dates – he specifically selected the Kew Court House over Melbourne’s staple touring venues for a number of reasons, most notably because it boasts that rarest of beasts – a real piano. “They’ve got actual instruments, so I’ll be using that rather than a digi-keyboard for once,” Maclean says. “I’m doing a song cycle, which is really interesting – it’s an absolute fraud of me to do it, because usually that’s a classical music thing.”
“I’m making a pop music song cycle,” he says. “I don’t talk in-between six of the songs – it’s in two halves – and the audience don’t clap. You get six songs, wham, right in your face. Through that I’ll explore a couple of covers, and my pop songs and the Rufus Wainwright stuff I love. People were like, ‘Why don’t you do a big show, with backing tracks and dancers?’ but I don’t really want to do that forever.”
Bastardisation of classical forms is in many ways the key to Maclean’s style, his music is about ruffling up the hair of established structures, simultaneously sullying and slotting into genres, all while singing ear-wormy songs with debauched titles like Hugs Not Drugs (Or Both). It’s one of the many ways he invests pop sounds with true power, and for Maclean, music is about transforming the lived experience into sound.
“If you don’t sound like you, why are you singing?” He says. “I don’t know where the pleasure would come from. That’s why I sing. Playing the piano and singing is something I can do by myself and it makes me so happy every day and it never gets boring. That’s why I do it.”
BY JOSEPH EARP
