“It’s interesting going back and seeing stuff from 2005,” he reflects. “It’s more ‘wow… we’ve come a long way’.
Indeed, they have. The Drones have gradually earned their reputation as one of Australia’s greatest bands (if not the best), won AIR Awards (Best Independent Album for Havilah and Best Independent Artist) and an Australian Rolling Stone Award for Best Live Act, received ARIA nominations, topped many critics’ end-of-year lists and played to packed venues both locally and internationally. It’s also allowed Liddiard to re-evaluate those intangible notions of success and failure.
“Once upon a time, I was a musician who no one had ever heard of and I didn’t get paid to do what I do and now I am – you know, I’m not fucking Bono – but to me, I’ve succeeded in what I wanna do, ’cause I’m doing it,” Liddiard muses. “But I sort of feel like a survivor in the sense that there’s so many other people like me – who are either really good friends or strangers – and I’ve seen them try the same thing and it hasn’t worked out. I’ve done a lot of hard work, but it’s not like everyone else didn’t work hard as well. Everyone works hard…. I think luck’s sorted us out. I feel like I’ve just walked on the other side of some sort of no man’s land… like ‘wow, I can’t believe I survived that mad dash’.
But surely, stretching oneself to that extent is the true measure of success.
“If the people in this video in 2005 knew what was coming, they’d be pretty amazed ’cause we’ve done some pretty cool shit,” Liddiard affirms. “We’ve played with some crazy people; we’ve toured with some crazy people and played in some weird places,” he laughs. “We’ve done a lot of good stuff.”
The DVD title, A Thousand Mistakes, is a lyric taken from Gala Mill‘s I Don’t Ever Want To Change. “I think you get to a certain point, when you’re a musician, where you just start hearing everything you fucked up,” Liddiard ponders. “And there are two kinds of mistakes: there’s one which is horrendous – a line or something you can improve – and then there’s one where you’re just fumbling when you’re playing and they’re actually quite good; I don’t mind them… they’re happy accidents. Originally, one of the other [DVD title] ideas Fi had that she pulled out of the lyrics was ‘Charles Darwin’s Royals’ (a lyric from Havilah‘s Penumbra), which sounded too stuck-up, so we avoided that,” he chuckles.
The Drones’ performance of Work For Me at their Fairfield Warehouse recording session for the DVD features a mesmerising Fiona Kitschin on lead vocals. How does she manage to appear so graceful and yet so intense? “I don’t know…” says Liddiard, laughing. “She’d tell me off if I get the answer wrong. It’s funny – she’s not one to love the limelight; she usually hates it… it’s a big deal for her to sing a song.” Along with being the band’s bassist and Liddiard’s partner, Kitschin is also the decision-maker within The Drones. “Fi’s the reason a horrible sounding band like us can be relatively successful… ’cause we’re hardly Coldplay, you know what I mean.”
Following a hectic year of solo/side-projects for the members of The Drones, Liddiard states that the approach to the new Drones album next year will have to diverge significantly from prior methods. “The last three albums I’ve had to write really fast and I’m sick of that approach,” Liddiard avows. “Any approach has its pros and cons – I just need another flavour… I don’t want to rush the next album. When you rush something, you do just fall back on a lot of habits and I’m sick of those habits, musically speaking. I don’t want to do that – I want to slow it down and weed out a bunch of shit that’s a bit old-hat, say fucking blues scales… we’ve done enough of that; enough of this fucking Americana bullshit. I just want to go through and remove things that are old and then add things that are new… I’ll start writing first and then we’ll figure it out – I don’t know how.”
He must have various ideas burning within him, though? “Yeah I do – I have equal parts what to do and what not to do. It’s good ’cause usually I have ‘what to do’, which is good, but ‘what not to do’ is better. They omit rather than add or discard old traditions and that’s the better road. ‘Cause we’re living so fast, The Drones haven’t really been able to do that, so I want to catch up. I want to be 2012, not 2002.”
These days, Liddiard spends more time listening to obscure African and Arabic music. “The stuff I do listen to, I can never pronounce ’cause they’re from weird parts of the world,” Liddiard laughs. “I’m a believer in ‘a good live band is a better band than a good studio band’. Even Radiohead, I find, mind-boggling-ly good.
“Radiohead sound modern; they’re the only band that weren’t shaken up by the swiftness of change, not running and hiding in some sort of kedge, sentimental thing. Everyone wants to be fucking Parsons – there’s a propensity for people to want to try and emulate that or be that because it’s easier to deal with than the fucking madness of technology and this Armageddon shit that everyone’s talking about and the endless war… technology is travelling faster than the speed of light… and Radiohead don’t run away… they brave it. I think that’s pretty cool.”
