Though primarily a drummer, it wasn’t until De Backer was 16 that his parents relented and bought him a drum kit. “I was always hitting things when I was young,” he chuckles. “Not other kids… but, you know, playing with pots and pans and drumming on the side of the car. My folks were very tolerant in the three or four years when I practiced drums as a teenager regularly. That’s a fair commitment from anyone’s parents, to endure that every day.”
When Downstares broke up, the drummer struggled to create music by himself. It was luck that being given the record collection coincided with the band’s break-up. Despite digging sample-based music by DJ Shadow, Massive Attack and The Avalanches, De Backer was hesitant about creating his own. “I wasn’t really sure how to go about recording new music myself and giving it a go,” he explains. “My mate Andy was a fair inspiration. He said ‘dude, you should give it a go. Give it a go now – you know how to use a computer’.”
De Backer confides that it sounded terrible at first. But, with some persistence, he finished a track that he was semi-happy with. The main discovery though, was his enjoyment of the sampling process.
“It felt really exciting, like a new window onto a way of composing that was very self-directed and self-sufficient and that I found a lot of fun,” he says. “I like sticking bits and pieces from all over the shop and collaging it together on the computer and hearing what happens when you let your brain make some of those decisions, rather than your hands or your performance ability.”
Once he worked out that he enjoyed this self-directed approach, he needed a name. The Belgian born De Backer’s birth name is Wouter, or Gaultier in French, which his mother used to sometimes call him. When choosing a name for his new project, De Backer turned to his roots and, with some creatively random spelling, decided on Gotye.
Roughly a decade later, De Backer has established a career that has seen him release three studio albums, win an ARIA award for Best Male Artist and, most recently, sell out an entire Australian tour and break ARIA chart records.
His current album, Making Mirrors, released in August this year, has seen Gotye take a different approach to his previously sample-based music. Although he admits that drums and percussion are perhaps the most difficult instruments to record well, he decided to give it a go with the aim of developing his production and engineering chops. He also admits that in the past, he didn’t have much recording equipment. But, recent success has enabled him to invest in more gear.
It was his second album, Like Drawing Blood, which first garnered attention. Featured by triple j in 2006, it was voted by listeners to be the best album released that year and two songs off the album were included in the Hottest 100. The awesomely uplifting Learnalilgivinanlovin scraped in at number 94 while the more orchestral Heart’s A Mess reached number eight. The album was also nominated for the Best Independent Release ARIA award. It has since sold 35,000 copies and was voted by triple j listeners as the eleventh best Australian album of all time earlier this year.
Despite the success of Like Drawing Blood, De Backer describes this period as challenging. “Things kind of kept exceeding my expectations, which was all exciting,” he says.
But, the limited success of his equally important band, The Basics, during this time meant that De Backer was struggling to balance his two projects. “It was a little bit of a hot and cold experience,” he says. “I was tyring to take opportunities and understand what was going on with the success of my own record but then also struggling a bit and trying to push through with The Basics and meeting a few more barriers to that. That has been kind of a weird leveller over the years.”
When speaking to De Backer, it’s inevitable that his band, The Basics, will pop up in conversation as frequently as Gotye. Established in 2002, the three-piece have recorded four albums yet have struggled to reach the same level of popularity as Gotye, which disappoints De Backer.
Although the band has enjoyed intermittent success with some tracks selected for film clips and ads, it’s only their 2009 album, Keep Your Friends Close, which has been supported by triple j. “Sometimes over the years it felt like juggling The Basics and Gotye was sort of like being a headless chook,” De Backer recalls. “I was just running around a lot and basically being a workaholic all the time. I was going from one tour to a recording to another recording to a tour to a promotion thing to a tour to something else… I think sometimes that was a detriment to both acts.”
In 2008, as a result of an Australian government grant, the band toured remote areas of outback Northern Territory and Queensland. They targeted rural school kids and indigenous communities, performing alongside local acts and holding master classes while raising money for Lifeline. It was then that De Backer discovered the Winton ‘Musical Fence’.
Winton, where Banjo Patterson wrote Waltzing Matilda, is a small town bang in the middle of Queensland. In 2002, two violinists travelled around Australia playing important fences like the Rabbit Proof Fence and the Dingo Fence (I’m not kidding…). Inspired by their journey, Melbourne percussionist and instrument builder Graeme Leak purposely designed a wire fence that can be plucked and bowed like a giant string instrument.
With some spare time on his hands between shows, De Backer found the fence and gave it a crack, recording the sounds on a small recorder. These samples can be found in the first single from Making Mirrors, Eyes Wide Open. “It’s bloody awesome,” says De Backer of the fence. “It makes really cool sounds. I’ve had some fans that have said they’ve gone and visited it actually, which is cool.”
Making Mirrors, De Backer’s third album, comes after a four-year break for Gotye. However, it’s his most popular album yet, achieving Gold status by selling 35,000 copies in its first week. Debuting at number one on the ARIA charts, Gotye became the first Australian act since Silverchair in 2007 to simultaneously top both the album chart and single chart.
De Backer is modest about his success. He only committed to music full-time around the time that Like Drawing Blood was released. “I didn’t really envision anything like this,” he says. “I was more kind of going ‘phew, well, my parents can just cover me and I can stay at their house for a few months and maybe I can give this full time music thing a go’.”
Yet, he recognises that some things are more difficult the more popular his music gets. For example, De Backer’s ideal gig would be small and intimate; possibly like the Kings Of Convenience gig in South England that he says was one of his favourites to watch.
“A good gig would be something where there would be a combination of people sitting down and standing up if they wanted to,” he explains. “It would be quite small and you could do something fun with the space like do part of the performance in the crowd but still be very close to the stage, a stage that’s probably not too raised. I reckon I’d like to do some kind of combo of stuff that’s quite intimate and performance based but audio-visually immersive for both the band and the audience. I’ve never really done anything like that but that would be my ideal gig. Although, it’s kind of getting more unlikely to be able to do that, considering how big my stuff is getting at the moment.”
One of the smallest gigs he’s played was with The Basics. The band was playing Q Bar in Smith Street to an audience of zero. Even the barman went downstairs at one point, De Backer recalls. “That’s persistence,” he laughs. “We played a gig for zero people and we kept going.”
But, with The Basics as with Gotye, those days are over. Particularly with Gotye, there’s more preparation that goes into a gig and less “off-cuffness” as De Backer describes it, to enable any more situations like that.
Gotye has just sold out an entire Australian tour and some of his European dates. Beginning with four shows at The Forum (incidentally where he saw his other favourite gig – DJ Shadow in 2003), he’ll be travelling around Australia until mid-October when he’ll head overseas. Planning to work hard for the next two years while The Basics take a break, he’s not sure if he’ll take the plunge and move abroad.
Either way, Gotye will persevere.
De Backer knows that he has persistence and patience above the average person, which he attributes for getting him this far. And what will he do once he’s super famous? “I dunno…” he muses for a moment. “Buy a Maserati?”
